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THE REAL TRUTH OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

By Jacqueline Drew
START Marketing Inc.

I was having a chat recently with a friend of mine who admiring my great skill and courage in founding and running my own business, and so I mused to myself at how often outsiders see entrepreneurs as great role models and even pinnacles of leadership.

But of course I had to laugh because so much of running a business is anything but glamourous or exciting. So I thought I would provide a bit of modest enlightenment with 13 lucky points pertaining to "What your entrepreneur friends didn't tell you..."

• Entrepreneur is a fancy word for salesman, but without the base salary.
• Entrepreneurship means you are now taxed at 75%. Of nothing.
• Entrepreneurship means your spouse thinks you should also handle most of the child care, cooking, and cleaning.
• Entrepreneurship means your kids, depending on their age, are either a) cheap labour or b) your biggest most demanding clients...regardless of their ability to ³pay²
• Entrepreneurship means that all the things you said you would never do, you now do willingly and desperately, with the self-loathing that you were so stupid to have not mastered that skill before!
• Entrepreneurship means EI stands for Employees' Insurance - you don't get any of it yourself!
• Entrepreneurship means taking the fun out of faking a sick day,because now you're paying for it.
• Entrepreneurship means that the banks often see you as a bad credit risk, now that you've finally gotten a job you will hold!
• Entrepreneurship means that in time you will stop seeing competitors as enemies, and probably start to feel an eerie empathy for them.
• Entrepreneurship means you get to sit back and watch all your neighbours drive fancy cars, get their eyes lasered, and sleep in until 7:00am. While you terrorize them with your noisy old deisel engine during the hours between midnight and 6:00 am.
• Entrepreneurship means tax time is all year round.
• Entrepreneurship means your exotic vacations are at the ice cream shop around the corner.
• Entrepreneurship means someday you might become a Walt Disney, George Eastman or Bill Gates. But up until then you make a great Willy Loman.

But all fun aside, what entrepreneur would ever go back to being an employee? Not one that I know! (And if you've got another couple of minutes, read the column on "Behind Every Entrepreneur is a Bad Employment Story" and you're bound to see why!)