Self Employed

Hi! Is anyone still here? I am a freelance translator. Mainly do French to English at the moment. I have always wanted to work for myself and after finally managing to do it I find it trying at times. Workload, clients and admin, it can all get a bit much sometimes. Trying to figure out how to manage it all.

i make jewelry, sell beads and yarn, and also embroidery things.. all from home and at SCA and other events (conventions).
of course the economy isnt helping.

i am doing a craft show at a local (ish) mall starting Sunday, which i hope will do well....

Hello all!

I am Dana and my husband and I own two tractor dealerships. One in Alabama, one in Tennessee. I take care of the bookkeeping, which can get overewhelming at times.

The hardest part is .... employees and my husband's lack of communication skills. He doesn't like confrontation and I end up doing some of the dirty work, ha....

We've only been at our second location for three years, the other for ten years.

At times, it is rewarding, but most of the time it's over rated..make sense?

I can say that there are two things overrated in this world... natural childbirth and owning a business!!!

God bless.

Hello,

Currently being something of a freelance translator of legal stuff, with an occasional law job. Strictly speaking neither employed nor self-employed, just contracts. I've considered starting a business or a partnership with one or more of my friends who are in the same line of work, but with the law here that means the loss of a comfy 50% flat costs deduction for selling copyrights (which means both lower tax and a lower bracket), plus, above a certain quota of earnings, there's VAT to pay. That'd be like losing one third of my wage to tax with not enough to gain in return to make it worthy, so it's probably going to have to wait... If at all, because right now I'm looking for the best return on time invested, as time's a scarce commodity when you're finalising a degree and need to write a dissertation for it and every additional year of study costs a boatload of cash.

Hello all-
I am a licensed massage therapist with my own practice, Calm Seas Therapeutic Massage in South Burlington, VT. Nice to meet everyone here. Looking forward to some good discussions.
Candace
www.calmseasmassage.com

Yeah, I agree about the pre-packaged techniques. I don't even train the sales I have like that. I think people have to sell within their own personality rather than trying to everyone into clones. Thanks for all the good advice and encouragement. I'll pray for our continued success. Feel free to pray for me!!

Barzillai, with this current venture on what I manufacture, it was essentially the same as you, I was already running the company I worked for, for years, and starting it back up in my name, was in a way, recreating my old job, so I didn't really need much of a business plan.

You are right on the overhead, anything we can do to keep it down to the bare minimum takes a great deal of stress and pressure out of the equation while we establish the foundations to our operations. I did have a huge competitive advantage early on since I'm an expert web designer and know how to get pages on the top of the search engines, stuff like that my competition pays big bucks for outside help in that area and that is the only form of advertising I need to do these days.

Big Ro, Sales coaching seems to be where your heart is at and that itself has a great deal of potential, especially with the track record you are showing on it. The thing that bugs me too often with pre-packaged sales techniques, the people ignore the fact that they really need to know the product or service they are representing. It also sounds like you are going at it the same way I and Barzillai did, which as you can see by our example, is a good working game plan.

Wow!! Really great advice everyone. I truly appreciate it. Believe me, I have no intention of quitting my job anytime soon. I have the same trepedations that you mentioned Prodigalson about paying up-front fees to a so called established firm or group. I'm in sales so I know when I'm being sold. I'm looking at it as a very long term project. The start up costs can be very minimal for what I'm looking to do and I've indentified a couple of people that are doing what I'm thinking of doing. I may have given you the wrong impression. My goal is not to quit my job. I really love what I do and I'm currently working with a group that will create an opportunity to essentially buy the brokerage that I now run. I just think that I've got a lot of skills and a burning desire to provide guidance to young people just starting out. I've been training sales people for over ten years and more than half of my prodigies make six figures. I want to share it with a wider audience. Please keep feeding me though. I'm really glad I joined this group. Thanks and God bless.

Praise God!

Hi Prodigalson,

Thanks for the welcome.

I had been working in a law firm and had a general idea of what we needed to do, so our business plan was to keep on keeping on. Looking back, we should have spent less money in overhead, but we have done better overall than we had expected.

The biggest surprise has been the freedom being self employed has given my wife and I to live a much more spiritual life in the Catholic faith.