41–50 of 126 posts
As far as I'm concerned, the point where making more money doesn't increase your quality of life but reduces it is where it needs to stop and you look well past it. The point of self employment is not having to justify your life style, including vacations.
If I were you I'd look for a different employer or rework my business and split my time between a number of them.
Useful heuristic: if you can't afford the risk of a vacation and the time to find another gig, you are self enslaved, and not self employed.
For a Christian, the same situation could simply be trusting in Divine Providence and not in ourselves or others for security (which so often fails us anyway). In that case, it would be a virtue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
200-300 tasks is a lot. Do you work only for one company or for a bunch of companies. Can you drop one of the companies and keep all the others?
one company, multiple projects (but basically two main ones and under them subprojects), each has many tasks (some of them smaller doable in minutes, some of them bigger taking hours) I could drop one project I really don't like, because how unprofessional they are, so I started to get quite bitchy about it and also refused recently task and voiced my objections about their workflow/mismanagement. I would not mind at…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If OP has only one customer they do not work for themselves, they work for that customer and have a job - regardless of what they like to tell themselves.
I'm not sure this logic follows. I generally take on one client at a time, sometimes for many months (even years, on occasion). I've ended gigs that I was unhappy with, and I've stayed on contracts for extended periods of time. I still make my own hours and have relative freedom to operate how I please, despite only having one client at a time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If OP has only one customer they do not work for themselves, they work for that customer and have a job - regardless of what they like to tell themselves.
That's nonsense. I know plenty of 20K / month consultants that work as contractors, one project for one customer, a couple of months later for another. The shortage of qualified people at that level is such that they have the jobs for the picking. They are self employed in every way that matters, to the tax office, their customers and their bookkeepers.
Working as a contractor for a single company for very long periods of time (say 1+ years), is a very different type of relationship, even if the mechanics are similar. I suspect that's the type of relationship that was being referred to.
Useful heuristic: if you can't afford the risk of a vacation and the time to find another gig, you are self enslaved, and not self employed.
For a Christian, the same situation could simply be trusting in Divine Providence and not in ourselves or others for security (which so often fails us anyway). In that case, it would be a virtue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's nonsense. I know plenty of 20K / month consultants that work as contractors, one project for one customer, a couple of months later for another. The shortage of qualified people at that level is such that they have the jobs for the picking. They are self employed in every way that matters, to the tax office, their customers and their bookkeepers.
But in those cases they do have multiple customers, serially. That is still regular market dipped into where pricing can be tweaked. Working as a contractor for a single company for very long periods of time (say 1+ years), is a very different type of relationship, even if the mechanics are similar. I suspect that's the type of relationship that was being referred to.
It's easy to piss on those that manage their one person business over multiple years from the comfort of an actual employed situation, and it is equally easy to piss on them from the position of the manager or early hire of a business with a lot of employees and a lot of customers.
But the amount of responsibility that typically lands on the shoulders of these one man operations tends to be disproportional and they deal with those responsibilities in a much better way than many of those large companies. The main reason that they stay in business in the first place is because they tend to be good at what they do, and reputation damage being what it is in that world the first job you fuck up may well be your last.
Obviously, you need to discuss this with your employer (I call them 'employer' because they are your only gig and full-time). I doubt they expect you to never take any time off, so it shouldn't come as a surprise and they should respond rationally if you approach it with no immediate deadline. For example: "sometime in the next few months I'd like to schedule some time off and I want to work with you to ensure minimal disruption to the business." If you are willing and it would be helpful to them, you can offer to check email once a day while on vacation for any urgent blocking issues.
You mentioned being worried about competition usurping your work if you take time off. It's unclear if you're doing work where there are instant drop-in identical replacements to you readily available. Since you're wall-to-wall busy with work it seems that your role is important and you mentioned that you'd take less money for less work, so you're pretty well-paid. I guess I don't understand because roles for which there are instant drop-in identical replacements aren't usually high earning. If what you do is so mission-critical that they'll have to replace you with another contractor if you're unavailable for a scheduled-in-advance week, then it's likely you have job-specific knowledge and skills that can't be easily replaced by a new contractor in a week. Which is why they should be willing to work with you to coordinate your vacation and minimize disruption.
There is a hierarchy of ways that you can provide value to a client. I call it the TKPV ladder. Each letter represents what you provide in return for compensation.
T stands for time. At this level, your client pays you by the hour, day, week, or even minute. Your value is measured by the time you put in. This is the lowest rung of the ladder. While you have some control over your allocation of time (as opposed to with an actual job) this is not really much different in principle than working at Walmart or Starbucks. You are a wage slave.
The next step up on the ladder is K, which stands for knowledge. If you can promote your relationship with your clients to this rung, your value becomes the knowledge, experience and ability you bring to the table, which is measured by its value to the company, not by the number of minutes you've slaved at a task.
The next rung on the ladder is P, which stands for product. At this stage, you transition from selling knowledge and talent to selling a specific product or service that wraps up the knowledge and talent that you and your team have acquired into something you can sell to a customer, hopefully without too much customization. And then sell to another customer, and so on. If you reach this stage, you have productized your value in such a way that you can produce and sell it at scale.
The final rung in the ladder is V, for vision. At this level, you take your vision for future products and services to people who are in a position to provide you capital and support to expand and scale your reach to its maximum potential.
In my Consulting business, when I deal with clients, I try to keep this hierarchy, TKPV in mind, with the goal of moving up the ladder at every opportunity.