Are You Self-Employed or a Small Business Owner?
What If You Get Hit by a Beer Track Tomorrow?
This question may seem silly to you because you may think that any self-employed individual is also a small business owner. Technically this might be true but the difference in mindset between someone who is self-employed and someone who owns a small business is BIG. So what’s the difference between these two?
Leverage.
If you are self-employed you do everything for your business by yourself. You produce the product, make the sales, handle the accounting and finance, ship out the packages, and handle all the customer service issues. You are the company and the company is you. If you get hit by a beer truck tomorrow then your company goes down the toilet. It’s a bad scenario.
Small business owners, on the other hand, don’t do everything in the business by themselves. They leverage the efforts of other people in multiple ways.
Small Business Owners:
- hire employees
- outsource tasks like accounting, payroll, marketing, and order fulfillment
- partner with other compatible businesses to share marketing and promotional expenses
- leverage investment funds from business partners and/or banks
- hire managers to handle daily administration
In other words, small business owners are like general contractors: they pull together the resources necessary to operate the business but don’t necessarily spend a lot of hands-on time in the business. If an employee becomes unable to work or an outsourcing company fails to fulfill their contract, the business doesn’t die overnight. Other employees can be hired and work can be outsourced to a different company. Best of all, the business can continue to generate revenue and profit for you, the small business owner, on a continuous basis.
Have you taken a look at the way you run your business lately? Are you operating from the self-employment model or the small business owner model? The self-employment model means you are a slave to your business and can never leave to go on vacation. Being a small business owner means you can come and go as you please, depending on the extent to which you have leveraged other resources to run your business on a daily basis.
MLM as Leverage
One way some people have chosen to move away from self-employment and into small business ownership is to leverage the power of MLM, or network marketing. With MLM, the parent company handles product production, order fulfillment, accounting and finance, and often even worldwide promotion. As a business partner you only handle direct marketing and sales, using marketing methods of your choice, and get a check for your efforts. MLM is a very inexpensive way to move into small business ownership because you can leverage the power of a very large parent company for a small investment.
Having said all of that, I have to insert a word of caution here: it’s still possible to run an MLM business from the self-employment model. If you try to handle all the sales and marketing yourself you will still be self-employed. Unless and until you bring in new business partners underneath you in your network who will also do sales and marketing, you haven’t created the maximum leverage in your business. Think about it. If you handle all the marketing by yourself and you get hit by a beer truck tomorrow, your income still goes down the toilet. On the other hand, if you get hit by a beer truck but your business partners are still out there marketing, you still get a check. Again, it’s all about how much you can leverage the efforts of others for your small business.
Photo credit: I Love Hitachino Nest Beer
