Entrepreneurship is a sexy beast. It seems like everyone and their mamas is talking about starting a business. You see these guys nowadays with their million dollar mansions, sports cars and private jets.

Influencers is what they call them on social media and that’s exactly what they do. They influence us into thinking that starting a business is the next best thing since sliced bread because of course look at all the stuff it got them.

What do they say? Break free from your 9 to 5 and fire your boss. I know you’ve heard it before. Hell, maybe you’ve even experienced getting recruited by an MLM at a Starbucks being sold that dream. But the hard truth is, it ain’t that easy.

Some of these people are really only trying to play you and take your money. However, a good portion of them did build a legitimate business and actually have something of worth to sell you. And because they have something of worth to sell, it has resulted in the mansion, the sports car and the private jet.

You are seeing the fruits of their labor. You are seeing the results of the time, energy, blood sweat and tears that they put into that business to make it what it is today. I mean Apple started in a freakin garage and look what it is today.

But what does it take to actually make it? Is starting a business really the solution for you and your family? And what will you have to sacrifice to make it successful?

Let’s find out as we explore the ugly truth of starting a business.

You at some point have either thought of, attempted to, or have started your own business. And it’s possible that the reason why you’ve wanted to start one is that you’ve been sold on that entrepreneurship lifestyle of living life on your own terms.

While I understand the appeal and even I myself have fallen for certain aspects of that dream in an earlier part of my life. I want to give you guys an honest pros and cons list surrounding starting a business.

1. You Always Have A Boss

One of the biggest reasons people sell you on starting a business is that you can fire your own boss. That you will no longer have to work for somebody else.

In some circles they might even say “you no longer have to work for The Man.” Whatever reason you’ve heard, I’m here to tell you that it’s all bullshit.

You will always have a boss, even if you own your own business. Actually, if your own business, you’ll have multiple bosses. The only difference is that you won’t call them bosses, you’ll call them clients. And your job as a business owner is to keep those clients happy by providing them with a great product, service and experience.

Have you ever been to a restaurant that had good food, but their service sucked. The staff isn’t friendly, they get your order wrong every time, and the restrooms are dirty and tagged up. You’ve been there where you go in to take a piss and you see the toilet seat all tagged up. I’ve never understood why you would tag up a toilet seat at a public restroom. Make that make sense to me please.

Anyways, when you have this experience as a client, even if the food is good, you’re more inclined to not go back to that restaurant. That place loses business because what are you gonna do when your friends ask you if that place is good. You’re gonna say no. You are that restaurant’s boss.

You give the orders and they follow them. If they don’t follow your orders, you fire them.
So when you’re the business owner, you gotta keep your clients/bosses happy or they will fire you.

Don’t get sold on the idea that you’ll never have a boss again after starting your own business.

2. No Real Time Off

When you’re an entrepreneur it is extremely hard to shut off your brain. It’s really hard to disconnect from the business and take a vacation because you are constantly thinking about it.

You are constantly thinking about solutions to problems. Whether it’s problems in your own business that you need to solve like how to get more leads. How to market your product or service. How to improve the quality of your product or service. Or if you’re like me, you can’t stop thinking about the next 3 businesses you wanna start.

It’s hard to turn it off sometimes. In most cases when you’re first starting off, you’re wearing a lot of hats and have to acquire a lot of skills. Not only do you have to learn how to run the business, but you gotta learn how to sell, advertise, copywriting, web design, lead generation, CRMs…etc. The list goes on.

If you’re starting a business while working a full time job which is what I’ve done. The trade off is that when you’re not working your day job, you’re working on your dream one. So yes you’re gonna have some sleepless nights. You’re gonna have those moments where people are gonna hit you up to go out and hang out, and you’re gonna have to make a choice. The choice between going out and having fun or putting in work on what you’re trying to build.

Most people are not willing to make that trade.

3. No Guarantees

There’s not really any real guarantee in anything you do in life really. There’s no guarantee that your job will be there tomorrow. There’s no guarantee that you will be successful in life. We have no guarantee in business either.

Most entrepreneurs fail their way to success, meaning that they start businesses that suck. Maybe at first they show some promise like a freakin fidget spinner, but then it dies out. Or maybe you open a restaurant that you have to pay a lease for and a pandemic hits. Now all of a sudden you’re stuck paying the lease but you have half the clientele because of social distancing and all these stupid ass mandates.

You’re barely staying afloat. No one can guarantee your success when you start a business. You may start one and not make any profit for a few years, depending on what the business is. This is the reality for a lot of people.

Which brings us to the last con. Entrepreneurship…

4. It’s Not For Everyone

The reason being that it’s not an easy endeavor to take on. The influencers of our time have made it attractive, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s easy.

You have to dedicate time, energy and money into building a sustainable business. If you’re not willing to do that. If you’re not willing to acquire new skills and a growth mindset, you’re not gonna make it in the long run.

Not everyone is willing to fail 99 times without giving up. In fact, the opposite is true. Most of us wanna do things perfectly in order to avoid failure. We are programmed since grade school to believe that failure is a bad thing. When you get an F in school, they classify you as a failure and set you up to be looked down upon in society because of it.

My parents wanted me to be an A student and they would get mad at me if I got a C, D or F in any of my classes. To the point where I would get scolded or whooped simply because my grades weren’t up to the standards that they had been led to believe that I should have. Still to this day I have yet to see my parents pick up a book and read it, but they’ll watch the news though. Oh man, you gotta be informed right?

Failure is not a bad thing guys, failure is a necessary part of life because our brain is designed to learn and correct itself. When I go to the shooting range and take my first couple of shots they’re usually not on target. I don’t sit there and beat myself up telling myself that I’m such a failure and a lousy shot. I fail a few times and correct my mistake, then keep taking shots. After a few minutes I find my groove and I’m hitting my mark. But I had to be willing to fail and push past my failure.

It’s not easy because you gotta reprogram your mind to take advantage of failure. If you can’t do that, then this may not be in the cards for you.

Now…on the other side of this morbid coin we have the pros, so let’s get into those.

The first one is…

1. Autonomy

The freedom to do whatever you want. When you’re the business owner, you are indeed boss. Now it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a boss yourself like we discussed earlier those are your clients. But guess what, as the boss, you get to decide which clients you want to work with. If you’re dealing with horrible clients, you don’t necessarily have to keep working with them.

If your kid has a game on Friday, you have the freedom to make time for it because you’re in control of your business. Again, remember with great power comes great responsibility, which means since you are the boss, If you ain’t doing what you gotta do to make a profit every day, that will ultimately have consequences as well.

You gotta Be disciplined with your freedom. This is one of the largest appeals of running my own business to me. I want the failure or success on my own terms. If I fail at my business it’s on me, if I succeed, that’s also on me. Something I’ve developed in pursuit of business has been confidence in my own capabilities. So even when I fail, I’m confident that I will learn from that mistake and not repeat it again.

You can’t beat freedom, especially financial freedom, which leads into my next pro.

2. No Salary Cap

Kevin O’Leary “Mr. Wonderful” from Shark Tank himself says that, “a salary is something they give you to give up on your dreams.” Now when I first heard this, I didn’t get it at first because I always grew up being programmed to believe that you wanna strive for a high salary. Right? I mean when you get a job, you wanna get paid the most. And when you stick around for a while, you wanna get a substantial bump every year.

Most people vie this as success and they’re content with this. But what I believe good ole Mr. Wonderful was trying to say here is that when you accept a salary you’re in essence settling for a limit. You’re saying that in this job, doing this work, you are willing to cap out at whatever your figure is for the year. Your Salary Cap.

When you have your own business, you essentially don’t have a salary cap anymore. The more you sell, the more money you make. It’s as simple as that. There’s no fixed figure. I mean you can have projected earnings based on previous history, but ultimately you don’t really know what the earning potential is.

I personally think find this appealing because again it’s on me. I don’t have to settle for what some other company thinks I’m worth. I don’t wanna settle for an hourly wage. I don’t wanna be capped on how much money I wanna make. I want to make all the money I am capable of and if I hit a wall, I will seek out the necessary compounding skills that I need to give myself another raise. And it won’t be a measly 3% raise that can’t even keep up with today’s inflation.

The next pro is…

3. Tax Benefits

Now I’m gonna be straight up with you, I’m not a tax expert so please consult a professional for real help on this. But here’s what I know. I hate paying taxes. I think the government is like a teenage girl that wants all your money to spend it on bullshit. I’ve never seen more incompetent people handling money. Unfortunately, if you live in this country, we have to pay Uncle Sam his cut or he’ll send somebody to your home to collect.

And as a regular employee working for a company, you have been set up to pay the most taxes. Because the way that the tax structure is set up for employees is that we Earn our money, We get taxed on our money, and then we get to spend what’s left over on wonderful things like Amazon or Rent.

But as a business, guess what, because businesses provide jobs that allow Uncle Sam to tax your earnings, they get certain tax benefits. The tax structure for a business is Earn > Spend > and then get taxed on what’s left over. Which in essence means, you can earn 100k in profit, but you invest 70k back into the business, you will only get taxed on the 30k leftover.

That 70k worth of spending can include a company car, a business trip to bora bora, ad costs, business expenses, …etc. you get the point. This is the reason why a lot of business owners don’t pay a whole lot in taxes. Am I saying that this is fair, hell no, paying a shit ton of taxes ain’t fair to anyone. The worst part is that the every day hard working American gets screwed the most. But they’re only getting screwed because they don’t teach you this in school. They don’t want you to know this, because it doesn’t benefit them.

So what you gotta do is learn how to play the game and play it better than them. You can do that by starting your own business and becoming a business owner yourself. The information is out there you just gotta go out and look for it.

Which brings us to our 4th and final pro

4. The Digital Age

You are living in one of the most unique moments in time where starting a business is not as difficult as it once was. You see before, when you wanted to star a business, it was usually a brick and mortar type business. Meaning that you needed to find a location.

Maybe you were opening a store. So you got the location, but then you needed products to put in that store. Then you needed to hire people to sell those products for you. And depending on the type of products you were selling, your profit margins weren’t very high.

However, now in the digital age, we have something called the internet. Which made it possible for us to have online businesses. You can have an online store that sells t-shirts and you don’t have to buy bulk loads of shirts anymore that may or may not get sold. If you’ve ever sold physical products in a store before, what’s one of the biggest issues? The biggest issue is that you run out or you don’t have that size of shirt in stock, so you lose the sale.

With an online tshirt store, a customer goes to your site, buys your shirt, that order gets sent to a fulfillment center, they get a cut, you get your cut and they ship the shirt. It’s always in stock and you never have to buy wasteful inventory in bulk anymore. It’s an absolutely beautiful thing.

If you are going to start a business, I recommend you start with an online business. And if you want the lowest barrier of entry, meaning the lowest cost possible. You’re gonna wanna start a consulting or information based business. If you can leverage something that you’re really good at and teach others to get a similar result, you have yourself a good launch point.

Yes in an age when you can google anything, people are still paying for information. People are waking up to the fact that college is outdated. Those college textbooks can’t be written nor printed fast enough to keep up with how fast the world actually moves now.

Over the years as I’ve built my business, and even regular career, I’ve spent easily about 20k or more on books, courses, seminars, coaches. The cost of a car pretty much invested in me. That investment got me out of debt, provided me with more valuable skills and more than doubled my income in less than 8 months putting me well over the 6 figure range.

If I would’ve went to college for four years, and paid them, I’d be probably be 100k in debt right now. Still living in a small termite infested apartment with my family, going from paycheck to paycheck.

For a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time, I’ll take that any day of the week.

If you wanna learn how to get started in this type of business, I wanna share with you this free guide I put together called my 30 Days to Business Blueprint. It takes you through weekly steps you can take in order to get your business off the ground in 30 days.

Just go to alphadadconsulting.com/30days to grab your copy.

I can’t promise you that you’ll have a Bentley and a mansion next month. I like to keep things realistic, but this does have the potential to make you money. Maybe it’s $500 bucks, would that make a difference for you financially if you could have another way aside from your job to put an extra $500 bucks in your pocket each month.

And once you do 5, then you can push it to 1k, then maybe 3k, so on and so forth. The point is you gotta start somewhere.

Again, that’s alphadadconsulting.com/30days

Until next time my fellow alpha dad,
- G. Vidal