Yocum - The self-employment survival guide: proven strategies to succeed as your own boss

The Self-Employment Survival Guide

The Self-Employment Survival Guide

Proven Strategies to Succeed as Your Own Boss

Jeanne Yocum

Foreword by Rieva Lesonsky, Small Business Expert and Founder of SmallBizDaily.com

Rowman & Littlefield

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2018 by Jeanne Yocum

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yocum, Jeanne, author.

Title: The self-employment survival guide : proven strategies to succeed as your own boss / Jeanne Yocum.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017037263 (print) | LCCN 2017050924 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538108727 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781538108710 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Self-employed. | Strategic planning.

Classification: LCC HD8036 (ebook) | LCC HD8036 .Y63 2018 (print) | DDC 658/.041dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037263

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated with love to the memory of my father, J. Arthur Yocum.

From my earliest years I watched him conquer

the perils and enjoy the benefits of being his own boss.

Contents

Mission

The mission of this book is to give people who

are considering self-employment a full view of

what being your own boss entails. By learning

about the ups and downs that come

with being in charge of your own livelihood,

I hope you are well prepared to make the best

choice for you.

Foreword

You Are Not Alone

For many of you, entering the self-employment zone for the first time can feel like both the exhilarating culmination of a dream come true and the realization of your scariest nightmare. Whether you have owned a business before, come to self-employment with years of work experience, or are just starting out in the workforceyou are in for a roller coaster ride. The world of business ownership is filled with surprisesboth good and badand the key to survival is how well you negotiate those ups, downs, and hairpin curves.

None of this is meant to scare you offI just want you to be prepared. I started my own businessGrowBiz Media and SmallBizDaily.com (with two partners)a little more than nine years ago, after working for more than two decades at Entrepreneur magazine and growing up in a small business family (my father, both grandfathers, and my uncles were all either self-employed or owners of small businesses).

And as much as I learned living and covering the world of small business and entrepreneurship for all those years, I still made mistakes, trusted the wrong people, and followed bad advice. But there were upsides, toostrangers who became clients who became friends.

It may help to think of self-employment as a journey. And as with any excursion, you need a goal, a plan, and a guidebook before you head out. First, no one can determine your goal but you. Some come to self-employment because theyre between jobs and need to pay the rent. Others have worked for years for someone else and reached what used to be referred to as retirement age, but they have too many years left to retire or they need to supplement their income. Still others choose self-employment because they want the flexibility to choose when and where to work. Or they hate their jobs. Some are doing something theyre passionate about, and they want to share (and monetize) that passion. Then there are those who plan to make self-employment the first step of a longer, entrepreneurial journey, starting small and growing large.

Whatever your motivation, the choices you make, the paths in the road you choose will be driven by your goals, so make sure you are clear about where you want your self-employment journey to lead.

Once you know what you want, you need to figure out how youre going to get there. In other words, you need a plan. Im a big proponent of creating business plans, despite many today wholl tell you theyre not necessary. Even if no one but you will ever see your business plan, the very act of creating one will help you think about what youre doing, where youre heading, and how youre going to get there.

If youve never run a business before, writing a business plan will prompt you to think about things you might not have thought of otherwise. It will force you to think about pricing, marketing, sales, and competitors and come up with a game plan of how you will tackle those areas. If the idea of writing a business planeven if just for yourselfstill seems overwhelming, look into the lean business plan concept. Tim Berry and Sabrina Parsons have written a lot about the subjectso check out their insights at BPlans.com.

Now is a good time to explore self-employment. There are plenty of places to get helpgo to your local SCORE office or nearest Small Business Development Center for free advice. In addition, there are a lot of marketplaces that didnt exist two decades ago that make it a lot easier to find work, get paid, and even, in some cases, get benefits.

These marketplaces are also a great resource for you to find any help you might need. All small business owners must wear many hats. But the self-employed are particularly burdened by having numerous responsibilities while running their companiesas small as they might be. You cannot possibly know everything you need to know, or do everything that needs to get done, so consider outsourcing certain tasks to those with more expertise.

Even though my company has three employees, we are a virtual business. That means I work alone. While many of you may welcome that solitude, for me the isolation was one of the things that caught me by surprise. There are ways to get around thatschedule meetings, meet old colleagues, join a business organization, and the like (I talk to myself a lot). Jeanne Yocum addresses this concern in part IV.

Which leads to the last must-have as you set forth on this journeya guidebook. You are, more than likely, entering uncharted territoryat least for you. You wouldnt set out on a journey without a map (in the old days) or GPS to help guide your path.

Thats what Yocum set out to provide in The Self-Employment Survival Guide . Think of her as your Sherpathe person whos there to make your journey easier. This book tells you what to expect, identifies the potential pitfalls, and helps keep you on the right path. As I said above, while nothing can completely prepare you for self-employment, this book makes you aware of the possibilities of what may happen and how you can plan ahead to avoid the bad and embrace the good.