I’m Loving It
March 9th, 2010
My Open Range column from the February 2010 issue of Alberta Venture magazine:
Self-employment is disparaged as something less than a job. It shouldn’t be
“I’ll tell ya, by the end of the last semester, one-third of my MBA class had become ‘entrepreneurs,’” the young robotics genius cackled as we rode a chair-lift on a snowy day over the Christmas holidays. We had fallen into one of those unforced, candid exchanges that can happen between strangers who know they’ll never see each other again.
He had witnessed two waves of misery among young, highly educated technical and managerial workers. First while working at Oxford in the United Kingdom’s technology sector, a little-known blood-letting that preceded the financial meltdown. Then last year, in a Seattle-area MBA program where he’d gone to better his employment prospects. Entering the final term, his classmates all had six-figure jobs lined up. Within weeks, many faced graduating into self-employment. My chairlift buddy shook his head at their misfortune.
That’s the common view, isn’t it? Canada’s labour force in 2008 included 2.6 million self-employed, nearly double the 1.36 million in 1980 and representing 14% of all working Canadians. But self-employment is typically seen as, at best, a second-class professional track, a sometimes pleasant but inevitably reduced existence, materially and in societal esteem. Preferable to unemployment and indigence, but invariably less desirable than a full-time, salaried position. Only a loser chooses to work on their own. Rational people flee at the first chance for a formal job and all the great things that come with it: security, regular compensation increases, health and dental privileges for the whole family, employer-paid continuing education, fitness club privileges, long vacations, flex days, alternating Fridays off and a boss who grins when you cut out at two o’clock on a warm afternoon.
That attitude pervades media stories and you even get a whiff of it in federal employment reports. When a given month yields x thousand new jobs, the good news is typically qualified by noting that the figure includes thousands of people with self-created positions. As one recent news story on employment statistics put it: “Scotia Capital economist Derek Holt said he didn’t ‘trust’ the self-employment category because it was unlikely most jobs were voluntary….” Perhaps we shouldn’t even count these as actual legitimate jobs, merely the least-worst alternative to employment insurance. Becoming an “owner-operator” is a utilitarian move of pure necessity taken when fortune frowns – and only a freak would voluntarily stay with it.
This stereotype must seem drearily familiar to Alberta Venture readers. Many of us have been there. Yet I suspect most of you look back on it as the best thing to happen in your working life. Why the dour mainstream view of self-employment? Perhaps it’s that risk-aversion built into the Canadian psyche. (Then again, in actual fact we have a markedly higher ratio of self-employment than those swaggering buccaneers of capitalism south of the border.) Most people don’t see mere freedom and opportunity as being a fair trade for the loss of security. Or the illusion of security, anyway. For while government workers are virtually impossible to fire, with pension plans guaranteed by taxpayers at large, nearly any private-sector worker labours under the ever-present threat of layoffs – with an under-funded company pension plan transforming comfy retirement into a mirage.
Back when I freelanced full-time, I often got asked about how I coped with the insecurity. I’d reply, “While I can lose any given client on any given day, I won’t lose all my clients on the same day. But anyone with a ‘secure’ job could be laid off tomorrow, and there goes 100% of their income.” In November, a survey by Harris Interactive revealed that 61% of American workers could barely make ends meet if they lost even one biweekly paycheque. Talk about insecurity.
After 17 years of generating my own income, such an attitude is almost incomprehensible. Owner-operators quickly learn real fiscal responsibility – budgeting realistically, living well within their means and saving. On really long-term assignments for seasonal magazines, the research-to-payment cycle can be 15 months. You learn to roll with it.
I won’t belabour the clichéd benefits of self-employment – the be-your-own-boss, set-your-own-hours stuff. All of you who’ve tried it know it by heart and have probably repeated these mantras at more dinner parties and hockey intermissions than you care to remember. Yet they’re powerfully true and ever-present. There’s a lot to be said for not having to ask permission to go pick up your dry cleaning. Then again, you don’t get paid for it. Still, as far as my own working life goes, there was nothing more exhilarating or ultimately liberating than being forcibly separated from full-time employment.
Even better than being your own boss is the chance to become someone else’s. The gloomy view of self-employment ignores that thousands of owner-operators grow flourishing businesses that create full-time jobs for others. Leave aside the anomalous dirtbag-to-trillionaire stories. Hundreds of industrial and service companies across Alberta started out as one or two unshaven guys in a dingy industrial-park service bay or corrugated metal shop on an acreage or farm (and there’ve been plenty of female analogues). My own modest history includes a transition from one-man freelance shop to co-owner of a company with 20 employees and seven-figure revenues. That, too, will sound very familiar to many AV readers.
So to all those who are their own boss and have created long-term, full-time employment for others – this column’s for you.
