Starting a Small Business Is the Best Thing You Can Do for Yourself

Everybody wants to talk about the money. Be your own boss, set your own hours, fire your terrible manager. You’ve heard the pitch a hundred times, usually from somebody selling a course.

I’ve been doing this for over sixteen years. The money is real, on a good year. But it’s not the reason I’d tell you to start something. Not even close.

You stop waiting for somebody to pick you

This is the one nobody warns you about, because it sounds small until it happens to you.

When you work for somebody else, there’s always a person between you and the thing you want. A manager who has to approve it. A committee that has to review it. A raise you have to go ask for, with a folder of evidence, like a kid asking for a later curfew.

When it’s yours, that person is gone. You want to try something? Try it Tuesday. You think the pricing is wrong? Change it tonight. Nobody’s coming to give you permission, which is terrifying for about a month and then becomes the best feeling you’ll ever have at work.

You find out what you’re actually worth

A salary is a story somebody else wrote about your value. It’s usually based on what you made at your last job, which was based on what you made at the job before that, which was based on almost nothing.

Running your own thing rips that up. You quote a price. Somebody says yes, or they say no, or they say “that seems high.” You’ll learn more about your actual market value in six months of quoting than in a decade of annual reviews.

The first time somebody pays you real money for something you made with your own hands and your own head, something rearranges in you. I still remember mine. It wasn’t a lot. It didn’t matter.

The hard part, honestly

I’m not going to sell you a fantasy. Here’s the part the course-sellers leave out.

• The money is uneven. Some months are great. Some months you’re doing math at the kitchen table at 11pm. Every business owner you admire has had that night.
• You are the whole company. Sales, the work, invoicing, the upset customer, the taxes. All you. There’s no department to hand it to.
• Nobody claps. No performance review, no promotion, no pat on the back. The only feedback is whether people pay you again.
• It follows you home. Because there’s no home and away anymore. That’s the real cost, and it’s worth being honest about before you start.

I went through a stretch of genuine hardship in my own life. It taught me what a dollar is actually worth, and it’s the reason this company gives ten percent of its profits to families in the Birmingham area. I don’t bring that up for sympathy. I bring it up because the hard seasons are where you find out what you’re made of, and that’s not a thing you can buy.

Small is not a consolation prize

There’s this idea that a small business is what you run while you’re trying to build a big one. That the goal is always more employees, more offices, more.

Nope. Small is a strategy.

Small means you can answer your own phone. It means when somebody in Vestavia Hills or Hoover calls, they get the person who will actually do the work, not a fifth account manager reading off a script. It means your overhead is low enough that you can charge a fair price and still eat.

The businesses I respect most around the 205 aren’t the biggest ones. They’re the ones where the owner knows your name, the work is good, and it’s been that way for twenty years.

You only need one customer to start

Not a business plan. Not a logo. Not an LLC, a brand guide, and a five-year projection.

One person who needs the thing you can do, and who will pay you to do it. Everything else is scaffolding you can build later, and most of it you’ll build differently than you imagined anyway.

The people who never start are almost never the people who lacked talent. They’re the people who kept waiting for the conditions to be right. The conditions are never right. Start with what’s in front of you.

If you’re somewhere in the middle of it

Maybe you already started. Maybe it’s a year in, it’s harder than you thought, and you’re wondering if you made a mistake.

You probably didn’t. The middle is just genuinely unglamorous. It’s the part where the newness has worn off and the success hasn’t shown up yet, and the only thing to do is keep serving the customers you have, better than anybody else would.

That’s the whole secret, as far as I can tell after sixteen years. Do good work. Charge a fair price. Answer the phone. Do it again tomorrow.

Everything else is noise.

Tired of the runaround? Let’s talk real numbers. Call (205) 236-2239 or email [email protected]. No twenty-part forms, we promise.