31–40 of 47 posts
The word boss has a pretty specific connotation and your clients and customers aren't that. Yes, if you work for yourself you're responsible for delivering work to your customers and they have some control over you due to that but it's incredibly different from the relationship between a salaried employee and his singular supervisor.
What people don't always remember is that having a single boss means having a single person in charge of your fate. Having 10,000 bosses/direct customers dilutes that power greatly. Individually, none of them have any power over you. Only as a unified movement can they amass the power of that single boss. There is every type of boss out there in world and I don't mean to say they are all to be feared, hated. But the…
If you and your boss respect each other well, everything can be great. Then, one does not need to distribute the power to people you know to a much lesser degree.
He makes some excellent points—that self-employed or start-up CEOs do have many stakeholders. That said, the second sentence in this statement is false: "First, if you have investors, you are working for them. They are providing the capital for your business and you have a fiduciary responsibility to return their investment with profit." Yes, you have a responsibility to investors to do everything reasonable to give…
To take a high-profile example, Chik-fil-A chooses not to open any of its stores on Sundays, because the owner believes the Sabbath should be a day off work. This may or may not maximize profits, but it's not an illegal choice even if it doesn't.
I had a franchise that I got in 1990. I remember when I called a mentor/friend in the business the first time that I got the flu. I asked him "How do I or who do I call in sick to?" . My mentor's response was - "just contact everyone you were going to do business with today", which was about 60 people. An impossible task. I went to work sick. Not the best job situation, but the reality if you are a sole operator.
It is a good opportunity to write a simple scheduling app to automate such a task if you need it.
The word boss has a pretty specific connotation and your clients and customers aren't that. Yes, if you work for yourself you're responsible for delivering work to your customers and they have some control over you due to that but it's incredibly different from the relationship between a salaried employee and his singular supervisor.
You can fire a customer, you can't fire your boss
I love having bosses. They deal with customers, go to meetings, handle negotiations, make sure deals get done and basically do everything else needed to leave me free to solve problems and hack. Why would I want to give all that up?
The word boss has a pretty specific connotation and your clients and customers aren't that. Yes, if you work for yourself you're responsible for delivering work to your customers and they have some control over you due to that but it's incredibly different from the relationship between a salaried employee and his singular supervisor.
You can fire a customer, you can't fire your boss
A single customer isn't necessarily equivalent to your boss in a job, but together they are.
I found the order of the bosses in the post to be interesting: Investors -> Employees -> Customers. Not sure if that was on purpose, but I would have put it in the opposite order if the subtext of the article was how to successfully be your own boss...
The ordering doesn't actually matter. Failing one of them is failing all of them.