Funny Insights on Entrepreneurship…you have my empathy!

A friend was admiring my great skill and courage in founding and running my own business, and so I mused to myself at how often outsiders see entrepreneurs as great role models and even pinnacles of leadership.

  If you run a small business, you may chuckle at such remarks yourself, because much the job is anything BUT glamorous or exciting (I say this, prior to mopping the floor here at Tenato). So I thought I would provide a bit of modest enlightenment pertaining to “What your entrepreneurial friends didn’t tell you…”

• Entrepreneur is a fancy word for salesman, but without the base salary.
• Entrepreneurship means you are now taxed at 75%. Of nothing.
• Entrepreneurship means your spouse thinks you should also handle most of the child care, cooking, and cleaning.
• Entrepreneurship means your kids, depending on their age, are either a) cheap labour or b) your most demanding clients…regardless of their ability to pay.
• Entrepreneurship means that all the things you said you would never do, you now do willingly and desperately, with the self-loathing that you were so stupid to have not mastered that skill earlier.
• Entrepreneurship means EI stands for Employees’ Insurance – you don’t get any of it yourself.
• Entrepreneurship means taking the fun out of faking a sick day, because now you’re paying for it.
• Entrepreneurship means that the banks often see you as a bad credit risk, now that you’ve finally gotten a job you will hold.
• Entrepreneurship means that, in time, you will stop seeing competitors as enemies, and probably start to feel an eerie empathy for them.
• Entrepreneurship is the other woman (or man) who keeps you up all night…in fantasyland well past 2:00am.  Luckily, those late night flings often pay off.
• Entrepreneurship means you get to sit back and watch all your neighbours drive fancy cars, get their wrinkles Botoxed, and sleep in until 7:00am. While you go out disheveled in your pickup truck, with no time to even get a hair cut.
• Entrepreneurship means tax time is all year round.
• Entrepreneurship means your exotic vacations are at the ice cream shop around the corner.
• Entrepreneurship means someday you might become a Walt Disney, Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. But up until then you make a great Willy Loman.

Hey, I’d love to hear your entrepreneurship stories!  Shoot them over – and I’ll post them here!  😉