Just like you to make fun of a baby panda, Turd.
not you. that was for BS.
So I was right after all? lol
Weak try son, shoe doesn’t fit. Better luck next time.
BS, I see what you mean, and as I was writing this, I thought about things like plumbers and bicycle shops and legal and medical practices and figured that the failure rate on those would be lower than bars an restaurants and things.
I agree with this. I actually have a lot of friends who tried to have their own business in that way - and probably none of them had your business knowledge. Some failed. Some managed to succeed. As long as you don’t leverage your life on your business (and don’t have four kids to put through school or obligations like that) you may fail and try again.
Just remember that having your own business is a lot of work - if you want things to go well you’ll probably work more than at almost any job, at least for the first couple years. Of course its better to work hard when the profits will be reaped by you/your company, so that’s motivation as well.
You’d be lucky to make that much money, extremely lucky. Like you I know alot of young entrepenuers and even the successfull ones are lucky to crack 60K because they simply don’t have the scale to their business that allows them to earn that much, also they put in 60-80 hours a week. I think you may not have fully assessed what being a small scale enterpeneur is like, alot of people have a romantic notion about working for themselves but it takes extreme focus and the ability to happily eat ramen noodles and face constant rejection until you add scale. As for scale, well, it also takes capital.
One thing to have in mind is that the entrepreneur must be able to be very very humble. He needs to be able to satisfy (kiss as*) every single client no matter how crazy they are, and some people find that harder than “satisfying” a couple bosses.
No, you don’t have to satisfy every single client. You have to satisfy the good clients, and you have to be reasonable about what you and they should expect. In the beginning, you might need to let people lowball you just to prove yourself, but once you do, you need to get rid of lowballing clients as soon as you have enough other work to do so.
You don’t have to start something on your own. I got out of a big corporate shop and to a smaller scaleup company with great product, leadership, and culture, and couldn’t be happier (although it was disappointing that we didn’t 3-peat in the Friday flip cup tournament - at least the team we lost to in the finals had a couple hotties on it). There are things out there in between corp/starting your own shop.
Good luck bros. Life is too short to do something you hate.
Well, it really depends on the type of business, location and what not, but dissatisfied clients can deal a lot of damage to a small business. You gotta be careful on “getting rid” of clients since you may want them to go away, but you don’t want them to badmouth you or worse.
If I recall correctly, Kotler’s marketing book says something like a dissatisfied customer tells 9 people about it. Since they usually tell that with rage, that’s a pretty big issue for small diners or gyms, for instance. Also, what I’ve seen from friends who tried the entrepreneur rote is that the clients who are easily raged are often the unreasonable ones. You may not want them, but anything that might be interpreted as a “screw you” may backfire.
I understand your point, but in practice I think its sometimes hard to be reasonable enough about what they should expect. Basically, you need to underpromise and overdeliver to some extent, but to also be ready to deal with a bunch of weirdos - you may not waste money on them, but you’ll almost certainly need to sweet talk people that you may not like all that much. Not to mention that some very profitable clients can be jackasses too, just to remind the entrepreneur how finance was like.
Marketing books often use the terms satisfy and delight. Delight is for the customers you really want. Satisfy is for everyone else so they don’t go out hating on you. So even if you want to de-market it’s usually best to do it in a way that all clients still think you love them.
I don’t think there’s much room for pride when owning a business - suddenly everyone is your boss.
I like this and find it true.
I see your point, Crazyman. I was thinking about my own consulting, but for restaurants and gyms and other businesses, you are right that unsatisfied customers can do a lot of damage. I didn’t mean that it’s ok to piss off customers, but simply unreasonable requests do not always need to be honored as if you are their slave.
I did some consulting for a major IB/AM firm. When I got the job, I thought it might be a nice route to a possible full time gig there. Everything looked good. Then I started interacting with the head guy, who was definitely a DSM-IV type personality. It was pure hell, and everyone in the unit was constantly on tenterhooks with him. For me, as a consultant, it was great to be able to deal with the hell for a few weeks, knowing that - at the end - we could shake hands and I’d never have to deal with him again.
As a full-time employee, my only choices would have been to knuckle under, or quit.
I concede there’s a point you simply can’t help anymore. My friend who had the gym had a customer who got extremely angry because my friend did not hire some guy she recommended - and the candidate was not even qualified for the job (a degree was required by law for the function). You can’t really satisfy that.
So this customer would complain about the smallest craziest things, and he would just smile and tell her how grateful he was for the input and what not, but never accomodated her unreasonable wishes - he said to me that everyday he did a conscious effort to not send this lady to hell…
Shocking! Not so much. Looks like the middle class and upper class has grown in numbers substantially, as well as the lower class. The high end outliers will become further away as an economy grows. You become a lot richer, further from the median, selling widgets in America than you do Norway. Let’s compare living with the median income in 1965 to today anyway. Your life is much better today in comparison. Entertainment at your finger tips. Health care much better, Transportation options abundant. Name it.
“Their piece of the pie is shrinking.” Ah, no. Everyone’s has grown. Try again.
this was a nice trip down memory lane. yo BS, you ever make the jump to go out on your own? I recently did. I’m a one man shop with no revenue as of yet and chasing a bunch of opportunities. life is great!
I’m sympathetic to the arguments, but I didn’t think the data presented offered much support for it (it didn’t contradict the argument either - it just wasn’t obviously relevant).
The median income and the interquartile income (and/or wealth) range is a the way to illustrate the point, and I didn’t see it while skimming the article (I did spend some time trying to make sense of the initial graphics, then just skimmed to see if they made any more sense further down).
The crux of the issue seems to be if the hedonic improvements in things like TVs and Netflix balances out the fact that incomes haven’t changed much, and that raising a family now requires two incomes and a nanny. It’s likely that a median income job is able to buy more junk from China and a thinner TV, but one is more likley to suffer long-term bouts of unemployment and so income volatility is likely higher. Does this mean that the productivity improvements that accrue to corporations and shareholders vs the labor force are the right price to pay for more plastic s#!t from China?
Joseph Stiglitz is a commie and America is a land of opportunity for some, for other not.
wasn’t sure what thread to post this in so i simply chose the first one. this article has an easy to interpret chart showing that after-tax, after-transfer incomes are rising for the bottom 10% and currently sit at an all-time high. this is a Canadian stat. i have yet to find a stat to support my point wrt to U.S. households that the bottom part of the population is much better off, in economic terms, not just “better stuff” terms versus virtually all of history. i will continue to attempt to stumble upon a chart showing after-tax, after-transfer income for U.S. low income households but i do think the trend in low incomes in Canada are representative of what is happening across the Western world, mostly under the radar, yet the general population thinks times couldn’t be worse because nominal wages are declining without considering much high transfer payments. this is a problem of perception one one hand, as things are actually getting better for low income households, and a work in progress toward a defining and transferring “living wage” to low income households on the other.
Igor needs a new title.
King of the Bump.
Stiglitz demonstrating basic thinking skills (rare these days). 
The GDP chart going “up and to the right” doesn’t mean anything; you can have massive corporate profits, with increasing income inequality, and you get…America! What does that lead to? Trump!!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-09-19/stiglitz-unemployment-in-u-s-more-like-9-12