The Drawbacks of Starting Your Own Business

Doesn't it sound awesome to get up at the time you want, skip a long commute to work, be your own boss, and work the hours you want, from your own home?. Doesn't it sound great to have your cat sit on your desk purring because she is so happy, while you work away in your pajamas?

If it sounds too good to be true, because there are drawbacks to working at home, and here they are:

Working from home usually means working alone

You are it. You are the man or the woman who will be shouting, "Show me the money!" to the air. Unless you are making incredibly good money, you won't be able to afford to bring employees on to work for you. You are the one responsible for everything. And that means doing the billing, marketing, writing, selling, cleaning; doing all the work. You may be up all night being ill from the flu, and you may have an important business meeting in the morning you have to go to, because you can't send your co-workers, because there aren't any.

There will not be any socializing at this job.

Considering that you will be working alone, unless you are making a lot of money, there will not be any unnecessary chatter in your office. You won't be working in a small cubicle, but there will not be any Christmas parties, baby showers, happy hours, or coffee breaks with co-workers. You will not be able to share vacation stories, or favorite TV show stories. You will not have anyone to socialize with, and it might become very lonely. For people that are very outgoing, this may present a problem. Unless of course, you have clients to visit and make all of your clients your good friends.

You need to be very self-motivated.

Considering that the business is yours, and you may be the only employee, you need to be very self motivated. There will not be time to play video games, or to shop on line. You may not even have time to have lunch or take a smoking break. This may be a good thing, because you may break your bad smoking habit. And you may lose some unnecessary weight or gain weight from either forgetting to eat, while loading up on junk food.

Health care may become unaffordable.

While working for yourself sounds wonderful, and even romantic, having a health care plan suddenly becomes very expensive. A corporation with hundreds of workers can easily afford to carry an employee health care plan. A one person business,does not have the options and money to benefit from such benefits. In other words, a drawback of working from home it not having health care.

You don't have any co-workers to bounce ideas off of.

Because you are it, you will not have a staff to share ideas with. When you have a plan that needs to be fleshed out, you will have to do all of the research, work and thinking. You may have to hire an outside agency or a friend to do some of the work. Unless you are an ideas oriented, creative person, doing work from home may not be in your best interest.

The taxman cometh.

Another drawback of doing work from home is that the taxman knocks twice on your door. You must pay taxes once for yourself-the employee. And then you have to pay again as the business owner. You will be be paying at least forty percent of your earnings to the government, (in the united States). Get those tax deductions ready.

There are pluses and minuses, to working from home. Consider all of the drawbacks before jumping in and keep your job until you have started your new business. Doing work from home is often times a tougher job, than working for someone else.

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