5 Reasons To Not Start A Business
From someone who owns one, here is why I don’t buy into the hype.
Be your own boss. Make your own hours. Answer to no one. There is no ceiling to the amount of money you could make. Profit.
Many advocates for starting up businesses will sell what I commonly call “the dream”. Like a speaker at a network marketing event, the same people who encourage people to start up a business are not so different from those wrapped up in network marketing and encourage people to join their MLM.
The only real difference is the fact network marketing is a total scam, while the same can’t be said for starting a new business from scratch.
No doubt at the turn of this year, some of us are going to be particularly motivated to starting up a business. Tired of the daily grind, their annoying boss, obnoxious co-workers, or something else, the start of a new year is a time to jump into something new, start up a business or side hustle, and see where it takes you.
Or maybe don’t.
Even though I do run a business and I’d be the ideal candidate to sell the idea of getting into business (and I have in the past), I’ve changed a lot since then. My experience with entrepreneurship and self-help has slowly made me realize a lot of things about how connected those industries are and some of the dangers surrounding it.
For so long, there are articles after articles talking about how grand it is to start a business and it feels like the objective is to have the vast majority of people (if not everyone) “be their own boss” or at least have a running and effective side hustle.
And that would be a terrible idea. Here is why.
We Still Need Workers
Hustle culture has conditioned us for decades that being an employee sucks a lot. They convey that idea through various quotes, straight up telling us, or sharing some of the horror stories of terrible bosses, bad work environments and everything else to paint this idea that being your own boss is great.
It’s an opportunity to escape all that while “being your own boss” and making a lot of money. After all, if you’re not building your dreams, someone else will pay you to build theirs.
And you don’t want that, right?
But the reality is that we do need workers and the past years labour strikes through the writer’s strike and with auto workers makes it pretty clear they are essential. Ultimately these strikes sent business owners a pretty clear message:
Pay us, or else you won’t have a business any longer.
The thing with so many businesses today is that business owners have been primed and conditioned for decades to think that employees are a nuisance. As wealth is collectively pooled more and more at the top, the more people believe that those at the top earned that wealth and are deserving of it when all they did was cut jobs, increase their own pay gradually, and hoodwinked us all that what they actually did was walk around the block a few times, played tennis, and had a balanced breakfast.
Workers are essential and society would struggle to function if every single person or the vast majority of the population quit their job and started their own solo-business.
The Risks Can Often Be More Brutal Than Described
Those taking the middle of the road approach will only hint at some of the struggles you’ll go through when starting a business. They might talk about failure here and there and brush it off as no big deal.
Others will say you need to devote a lot of time to it.
But they’re not always giving the full picture. Especially those who encourage you to give the bird to your boss as you leave the front door to start your own business.
The reality with a business is that when you are starting one you are:
- Either leaving a stable job or giving up your personal time when you’re not working to instead do more work (often more than what you do at your day job).
- Take on all kinds of risks with some being obvious while others appearing suddenly as you progress.
- Face a whole lot of uncertainty which often makes us paranoid and weary about our decisions in the moment.
- Have that uncertainty further reinforced with the threat of failure in a way you can’t predict.
And what is the pay off for it?
Possibly absolutely nothing.
Now of course that’s not always going to be the case. Businesses all had to start somewhere and the ones that are firmly established today had to take on some level of risk in their early stages a long time ago.
But even with a great team and a lot of resources, there is still going to be that chance that things won’t turn out the way you expect them to.
That isn’t to say it’s not worth trying, but I see so many people who encourage others to start a business brush over those details until someone is knee-deep into it.
It reminds me of network marketing schemes where everyone will highlight the good things and perks and products and not tell you that the products are usually more expensive than what you find in stores and that you have to buy a certain amount in order to “qualify” to get any money.
You’re Still Likely To Work For Someone
Entrepreneurship promises people freedom but these days there is very little of it. Unless you’re getting a small loan of a million dollars from a relative, you’re likely going to deal with some kind of middle man in order to do whatever it is you want to do.
Want to sell any kind of product? You’ll likely be dealing with Shopify, Etsy, or Amazon as your venue to set up and sell stuff.
How about you offer your services as a freelancer? Well, you could do your own outreach for clients, but you might get better luck dealing with Fiverr, or Upwork. There are remote work job postings but again that means you’re working underneath someone.
Want to be creating your own videos? You’ve got Twitch for streaming and Youtube as the major players.
My point is if you’re looking to grow in any way chances are high you’re going to have to work for someone else or deal with a middle-man platform these days. There isn’t really a “flying solo” option anymore with a few exceptions like selling local goods and having no online pressence at all.
And in those cases people would ask why aren’t you going online since you would have a broader reach?
Of course, dealing with middlemen do have their own perks. I wouldn’t be as well-known if I stuck with my WordPress blog throughout my years of writing. Moving over to Medium has been a fantastic decision for me.
But that also means dealing with the bumps and changes that these platforms make.
If Medium decides to shut down tomorrow then I would lose a lot of my income and a good portion of my audience.
The same can be said for any of those platforms that I mentioned above.
My point is, that’s not exactly freedom in the way entrepreneurship generally implies. And sometimes the changes and decisions that people make make it very tough for people who depend on these platforms. It adds yet another layer of challenges and difficulties that business owners are stuck with making.
You Won’t Avoid Terrible People
When I was searching for work on Upwork, I made a point of being picky about the clients I dealt with. As a result, I didn’t have to deal with that many bad clients. But even then, some would slip through the cracks.
Some of them were asking for some mildly annoying things like asking for keywords for me to include and then asking for more keywords to be added after I submitted the article. That or they wanted an article to be a certain percentage of unique text when their tool highlighted pretty essential text that couldn’t be altered in any way.
But one that stands out to me the most was a client who, after I submitted the article, went and corrected almost every single word. They made arbitrary changes that didn’t change the nature of the message at all and criticized me for making “stylistic errors”.
The job posting suggest it was a technical essay or anything. As I recall it was just a blog post that I was to write on a particular topic.
Regardless of what industry you’re going in, you’re going to have to deal with these “stylistic errors” dudes. If your hope was to avoid dealing with terrible bosses or annoying co-workers, well, you’re going to be dealing with possibly worse people than that.
The Business Can Crumble Just Because It Exists
Failure is part of the course for a business and one thing that’s important is to learn how to deal with it. Some failures aren’t going to be too bad. Minor setbacks, lack of resources and other similar things won’t be that catastrophic.
But some can be more severe.
Competition making superior products than you, pursuing the wrong kind of products to sell in your online store, mismanagement of finances. The list goes on for what sort of failures a business can have that will result in them closing for good.
Some of those things we do have control over, but the point I want to make is that some of those things are out of your control. I set up a dropshipping store and the only reason I’m not trying to make it grow is the fact that every platform where I can advertise that store effectively demands at least a $1,000 budget.
That’s what a lot of professionals I and my marketer have spoken to have said about dropshipping t-shirts and such. After all, it’s cheap and every content creator these days is doing it.
As far as I’m concerned that store doesn’t really exist beyond me mentioning it in these articles.
But with those circumstances comes all those additional risks and pressures. I’m not as worried about my dropshipping store because I still have my writing. But it’s a bigger deal if you’re strapped for cash and setting up a dropshipping store was your single option right now.
I won’t lie that starting a business does have its perks. I can say with confidence that starting my own venture has led me to thinking critically about my decisions year after year. It’s gotten me excited about the various ideas that come to mind and that I’m excited to try out once I have more of a solid foundation.
But it’s that critical thinking that I think is most important. It’s gotten me to recognize that while starting a business could be a sound option, it could be the worst option.
Just because anyone can start a business doesn’t mean people should start one.
Because if you do resonate with the ideas of what entrepreneurship stands for then you’re better off pausing for a moment before making a rash decision.
Because you’re not really your own boss if you have to work with other platforms who serve as gatekeepers to whatever industry you’re going into. And you’re not really free if you choose to use those platforms because you still have to play by their rules.
You’re not really free from terrible people because you could still be dealing with bad clients, bad customers, or platforms making bad changes that upend your business.
And if you’re thinking you’ll make a tonne of money, well you may end up spending more for years before you start to see any profit.
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