Self-Employed Pitfalls to Avoid

• Your business takes over: learn to balance your ‘precious’ business with your family, friends and social life. Your friends will stop asking ‘How is the business?’ They’re fed up with you boring them rigid about it!

• Health: watch it, and keep fit. You will need the constitution of an elephant. Take out some health insurance.

• Survival income: check this and if the business idea does not provide it, then ask why are you bothering? You want to make money, don’t you?

• Income variations: the income graph for the self-employed can be, to put it mildly, volatile! That regular pay day vanishes and some customers will take as long as they like to pay. Will you be able to cope with this degree of uncertainty?

• Unemployable: the self-employed lifestyle can become addictive. But the more you do it, the less you may become employable by orthodox employers. In short, you will no longer fit the mould, be unable to do as others tell you, or confirm to the rules of the company ‘game’.

• Ostrich approach: burying your head in the sand and avoiding that nasty phone call, invoice or red tape. They don’t go away. Remember one of your motives for choosing self-employment was to be ‘in control of your own destiny’ – so deal with them!

• Ego: status sometimes plays a great role in choosing self-employment. You may seek a certain standing in the local business community and be tempted to buy ‘baubles’ like a fast car, posh office equipment, perhaps just to impress former work colleagues. Don’t – not until you can afford to!

• Playing at it: self-employment isn’t a game, though if you are going to be miserable doing it consider staying in the world of the employed, as the chances are that you will earn more by that route. So, have fun and get a buzz from it – but take it seriously.