As I write this, my team is busy onboarding our 17th employee — and the process is happening entirely without me! When I realized that, it hit me that I've let a big life milestone go by uncelebrated. Somewhere between our first employee and our 17th, I graduated from being "self-employed" to truly and officially "owning a small business."
There's a nuanced but important difference between the two categories. The way I see it, if you're self-employed you've simply created a job for yourself. Most self-employed companies are one-person operations. Maybe you have a personal assistant, but that's about it — you do all of the heavy liftings and handle the other day-to-day stuff that you didn't really sign up for, like marketing, sales, customer service, updating your website, managing your social media, billing, collecting, and more.
Don't get me wrong; some people LOVE being self-employed. They're all about the hustle and the grind. They love controlling every single detail of the way their company runs. But for me, it sucked, because I hated being a prisoner to my business.
Self-employed people have very little freedom. When I was running Rust Belt Business Law myself, not only did I do the marketing, sales, etc. on top of being a lawyer, I could never take a real vacation with my family. I always ended up answering phone calls and responding to emails because the firm couldn't operate without me.
Being a small business owner is different. I'm not a one, two, or three-person operation anymore. An entire team of people has my back! Of course, there are pros and cons to this, too — my worry-free vacations come at a cost.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it: Graduating to the title of "small business owner" was emotionally challenging for me. I had to let go of some longtime team members who the firm outgrew and give up the idea of controlling every aspect of my business. It has also been tough to explain to my friends, partners, and clients that even though I built a law firm from the sweat of my brow and carried it all on my back for years, I'm not a full-time lawyer anymore. These days, I spend my time working almost exclusively as CEO of the business and spend very little time on cases.
Ultimately, owning a small business is awesome for me — and it's also a good deal for you! Because our firm has an entire team managing our email inboxes and phone lines, we're able to offer better service and faster responses when issues come up.
Our work is also higher quality because we're not spread thin and wearing a dozen hats. Our lawyers can focus on being excellent lawyers and our paralegals can focus on being top-notch paralegals. This specialization lets us dig deeper into every case. Even better, having a team has freed me and Jackie up to think big and launch new services like Pennywise Tax Strategies, a company designed to help Rust Belt Business Law clients save money on their taxes. With a bigger team, we can also help more people!
To me, these insane benefits outweigh the emotional costs. I'll take the freedom of running a small business over the "hustle" of being self-employed every day of the week. So many people who are self-employed have done nothing more than create a really crappy job for themselves, and I'm done living that life!
If you haven't made the transition from self-employed to small business owner because you'd rather stick with the devil you know than the devil you don't, consider this a wake-up call. I'm here to tell you from the other side: The devil you don't is the better bargain.
–Adam Williams
P.S. – Not sure whether you're self-employed or a small business owner? Check out our free questionnaire at https://rustbelt.legal/myplungeblog. Along with your results, you'll score valuable insights on improving your business.
