Tag: Boss

Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Set Up Your Own Business

Stuck in a mind-numbing career, recently redundant or ready to work after study or childbirth? You might be leery of the job market but worried that setting up a business is beyond you. Perhaps you don’t think you’ll be able to raise enough capital. But did you know that most things you need to run a business are now available in monthly installments on the internet? Accountants, project management, web hosting, even entire call centres (thanks to web hosted telephony and dialler systems that can be run remotely) – so you might not need as much cash up front as you think. And there’s always Kickstarter…

Anyway, if you’re stuck on the fence, see if our reasons can’t give you a little shove…

1. It’s better than being unemployed. Many people are facing – or have already endured – redundancy over the past few years of economic uncertainty. And they weren’t the first ones. Going to the Jobcentre, relying on state (or, indeed, anyone else’s) handouts for your income (which equals safety, food and well-being, when it boils down to it) is depressing. Money for nothing sounds all very well but you don’t get much of it, and not actually earning it is not great for self-esteem.

2. It gives you a more personal sense of security. This may seem counterintuitive, since you’ll be fending for yourself. But you’ll be relying on you. Not the whims of shareholders or the narrow confines of an employer’s market. If work dries up in one area, you can go and find a new motherlode somewhere else. You will have to save up an emergency fund that can tide you over if times get tough, but otherwise you’ll be free to develop yourself and your business in whatever direction feels most rewarding – financially and personally.

3. You get to make the decisions – creatively & financially. Sure, you might make the WRONG decisions sometimes, but that is pretty much a core mechanic to actually learning anything, ever. Wrong decisions teach you how to rebound, adapt, and try again. But imagine working for someone else who frequently makes bad decisions and you have barely any control over that – over the decisions themselves, or how they’re dealt with afterwards. That’s pretty frustrating. Running your own business puts you in control.

4. You learn a lot. There’ll be all that research you do to make sure you know what you’re doing, and the people you speak to will all have something to teach you, if you’re observant. And those decisions – the ones that don’t work out and the ones that give you satisfying glow – will all stack up in your “experience and insights” hopper for retrieval next time you’re weighing something up.

5. Bragging rights – or more importantly, self-confidence. When you take all those lessons you’ve learnt, make some good decisions and things go well, you’ll receive several valuable assets: a strong indicator of what you should do more of, in order to keep succeeding; a blend of security and gratitude for proving to yourself that you’ve got your own back; and far better Facebook updates than “look what I had for lunch again”.

6. You may get to create jobs for people. If you can expand enough to become an employer, you can provide work and income for someone else. This feels really, really good.

7. It’s liberating. Becoming self-employed makes the world look like one big opportunity – to meet people, have new ideas and explore emerging trends. Reading newspapers, looking out of train windows – they all become opportunities for Having Creative Thoughts, which is a nice sensation and may lead to the next stage of your career.

Good luck!

December 21, 2012
Guest Post: 7 Reasons Meetings Make You Homicidal

Saturday dawns as Saturday always does with a new guest post. This week the we welcome Juliet James to the 7 Reasons sofa. Most of the time Juliet is a writer for Print Express, a UK printing company that features booklet printing and business card design. Juliet has worked for many years as a writer and blogger. Over the years she has become quite adept at avoiding meetings for the safety of her co-workers. Here she is:

The two most dreaded words in business are definitely “You’re Fired” but if you ask me, the second worst words to hear at work are “Staff Meeting”. Almost every working schmuck has had the “pleasure” of sitting through at least a few meetings. Everyone has their own pet peeves when it comes to corporate convocations. But most people have probably wanted to kill someone in a meeting for at least one of these seven reasons.

1. The Boss. I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid seeing the boss. I know he uses the east entrance, so I use the west one. He takes lunch at noon, so I eat mine at 13:30. My schedule is a finely tuned instrument of circumvention. And meetings blow it all to hell. Not only do I have to face him, it’s almost impossible to escape one of the boss’s meetings without extra work, a policy change or a self-esteem deficit. And if we’re really lucky we’ll get all three. That’s a trifecta.

2. Stupid People. Everyone works with a moron. You know the one. It’s person that complains that the coffee maker is “overly complicated”. Normally you only interact with them for entertainment purposes. But in meetings, somehow, you always manage to wind up seated next to the dumbass. Perfect. They’ll either whisper stupid questions to you, or invite the entire room into their idiotic inquests. Either ways it reminds you why it’s unfortunate that bitch-slapping violates company policy.

3. Suck Ups. There’s always one guy in the room who’s just WAY too happy to be there. He’s taking notes, nodding emphatically and looking a lot like a dog about to go on a car ride. These are the suck ups, and they all come out of the woodwork in meetings. “What’s that boss, you think we should re-direct the Christmas bonuses to a mandatory sexual harassment seminar? Fantastic! You wanna do it over Labor Day weekend? Brilliant!” But on the plus side, at least you can spend most of the meeting fantasizing about flattening the sycophant’s head in the Xerox machine.

4. Wasting Two Hours of Your Life to Get Nowhere. Does anyone ever really accomplish anything in a meeting? In my experience it’s a gratuitous exercise in going in circles. It starts with a simple discussion of a problem. Then we have to dissect all of the complications surrounding the original problem. By the time we’re finished we haven’t solved anything but we’ve raised half a dozen other issues and someone went home with a migraine. Most office think tanks fail to engender progress and dissolve into pointless bitch sessions. Can’t we find a more efficient, less annoying way to get nothing done? Cause I have plenty of ideas about much more entertaining ways to accomplish nothing.

5. Being Stuck Sucks. Leaving in the middle of a meeting is always awkward and uncomfortable. So whether you have to pee, smoke or eat, you just hold it, because out of a meeting only seems to draw inquisitive looks and silent admonishment from others. It’s like there’s some kind of unspoken agreement among the inmates that everyone will “Stick it out”, so… you get stuck. Being locked into any one place for an indefinite amount of time is annoying; I don’t care if we’re talking about being trapped in the Gumdrop forest, if you can’t leave, you’re miserable.

6. Staying Late. It would be one thing if having an all-staff meeting bought you an extension on that project that’s due by COB that day. Of course, it never does, Nope, you’re deadline didn’t move but you just lost crucial work time to discussing the pros and cons of the re-designed Time Sheets. So now you get to stay an extra hour tonight to tie up loose ends. On deadline days the announcement of a meeting literally drops a bomb on your to-do list. You spend the entire gathering twitching anxiously watching the minutes tick past. Slowly, your hopes and dreams of making it home in time for dinner slip away. You already know it’s going to be another night of ordering take out at your desk. So by the time the meeting breaks you’re ready to trample anyone who gets between you and your desk

7. Here Comes The Bus. A lot of times meetings get called to address an “issue”. Of course that tends to be code for “Bob screwed up and now we all have to get together to talk about his mistake.” Or, even better, the meeting itself is a trap to catch a culprit. And the suck-ups just love those meetings because they’re dying to drive the bus right over the guilty party. So you just slouch down in your chair praying you’re not the guy who winds up under the wheels. Half the time if a meeting isn’t an announcement, it’s an indictment. Going in you never really know which one it’s going to be, and that’s always fun.

Meetings have all sorts of different functions, but usually by the time they’re over you’re pretty much ready to slaughter someone. But I think it’s healthy. Just keep your weapons at home and your murderous urges off of Facebook and you’ll probably be fine. But if you absolutely can’t resist exacting punishment, I hear Ex-lax makes excellent chocolate. And nobody can resist cookies during a meeting right?

July 23, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons You Should Tell Your Boss To “Stuff It” And Set Up An Office At Home

Guess what? It’s Saturday. And as is commonplace for such a day, it’s time for Marc and I to hand over the reins again. This week we leave the sofa in the capable hands of French resident Lloyd Burrell. (It’s okay, he’s actually British). In what is a first experience for the 7 Reasons sofa, Lloyd has put it straight behind his desk. You can find out why here. We welcome that. And we welcome Lloyd. Over to him.

If you are like me then working from home has always been one of those big untouchable dreams. But with the advent of the internet, working freelance or going the whole hog and setting up your own business has never been more attainable. Funnily enough my passport to freedom was my office desk. I created an office desk review website where I review home office computer desks and similar office furniture equipment.

If you are thinking of saying “up yours mate” to your boss, but you are having doubts as to whether you should or not, here are 7 reasons you should

1. It beats crack cocaine by long shot. Yes, it will be just the best feeling in the world. You can just let rip, big-time. This is best done in full view of rest of the office so your colleagues can also enjoy the moment, which will actually serve to amplify your pleasure even more. Just think of all those times he’s totally cheesed you off, well now its payback time.

2. To see the look on his face. I could have grouped this in point number one, but I think this one deserves it’s own special mention. You see because you are setting up your own stall, you can go the whole hog. You don’t need a reference from him for another job. You can just drop your load, gloat and enjoy the moment and then its hasta la vista, you never have to set eyes on him again.

3. Slavery is dead. He called it micro-managing. Assigning you tasks to do each day, as if you couldn’t do that yourself based on the assigned priorities, even though he had no idea how long those tasks would take to complete. All that is finito. The ridiculous deadlines, the impossible workload. He’s just going to have to find some other schmuck to prey on.

4. Office politics. Because chucking your job in is actually a double whammy, not only do you get never to see your boss again, this will also be the last time you have to set eyes on your co “worker”. I use the term lightly. You know, the one that has to have her nose in everything you do. The one that only pipes up when people are around so that they can see what a wonderful worker she is. The one that, most of the time, doesn’t know a thing about what she is trying to do but she is very good at looking ‘important’ and making you look like a complete dumb nuts. She will also be history.

5. You won’t have to fake “busy-ness” ever again. You are not the most hard working person that was ever put on God’s earth, so what the hell? Now you can do meaningful things in your work time like surfing the internet, using the telephone for personal calls, going to the toilet for 15 minutes five times in a row, and taking long lunch breaks on a regular basis.

6. Connectedness. Because you are sure that, be it on an intellectual, an emotional or a spiritual level you will connect better with your four legged friend than you would with that ignorant, pathetic, short tempered, foul mouthed, physically repugnant, socially inept, intellectually challenged person/skiver you used to call your boss.

7. Bureacracy. All those procedures and policies that are supposed to make things terribly efficient, make the company more productive and make you more money when in fact it’s just the opposite. It’s all just a sham. You being so passionate and damn good at what you do, all day long you are saying to yourself, “I can’t believe that I work for this (dis)organisation”. Well you don’t have to believe it anymore, because you don’t.

This piece was written from the point of view that your boss is a man, but if it’s a woman – and it’s very possible she could be because there are some real “bossy knickers/bitchy types” out there – these exact same 7 reasons still apply.

September 25, 2010