U-Turn Ahead

The Disadvantages of Being an Employee or the CEO

Okay, we’ve looked at the advantages of being an employee and being the boss. Now let’s look at the disadvantages of employment and self-employment. Of course, since you are reading this article, you probably already have a mental list of disadvantages for being employed. Let’s see how your list compares to these downsides of employment.

Employee Cons

• Your work assignments, and ultimately your employment, are determined by someone else.

• In differences of opinion, your boss, not you, gets to have the final say.

• Your work environment is determined by the company.

• Your wages and benefits are determined by the company.

• The company’s profits are not yours.

With that list, it seems that no independent thinking individual would ever want to work for someone else. And when your run the company, you make the decisions and earn all the profit (minus taxes, of course). So why not work for yourself? Are there problems with self-employment. Of course, and here are just some of them.

CEO Cons

• You have no paid vacations, holidays or sick days.

• You are directly responsible to your customers.

• You must do any work you can’t afford to hire someone to do.

• Your income is fully dependent on success of company, and less than half of new businesses survive four years.

• You are responsible for every aspect of the business.

Basically, when you own the business, everything is on your shoulders. You can hire others to do work for you, but their performance is still your responsibility. There is no passing the buck when you are the CEO.

The decision to work for yourself or someone else is about the type of person you are. Do you take risks? How do you handle failure/success? In what work environment are you most happy? In a few days we will look at some assessment tools for helping determine the answer to some of these questions.