What’s the hardest thing about being a small business owner in 2022?

What do most people not understand about being a business owner? Are their pros and cons to owning a small business? I’m asked questions like this pretty often, so to save time I’ve writing about it.

Most people have to appease three groups, and can do so in whichever order they choose:

1. Their self
2. Friends and family
3. Their Employer

A business owner has more groups of people to please, and they have to prioritize them a particular way:

1. Customers – if customers aren’t happy, there is no work to do, no money to be made.
2. Employees – without employees, the work can’t be done.
3. Vendors – without supplies and materials, the employees can’t work.
4. Government – Uncle Sam expects business owners to do a lot of leg work, and fines or shuts you down if you don’t.
5. Friends and family – without a life, what’s the point?

These five groups often have competing needs and interests, so it’s not possible for everyone to be happy all the time… and often, these groups don’t care about (or understand) each other. For instance, employees may ask for things that are illegal, such as requesting you don’t deduct child support from their wages. They may be upset with the owner rather than the government about it.

So, what are pros and cons about being a small business owner, in light of all this?

The major pros to being an owner are probably:

• Higher satisfaction and interest in what you’re doing for a living; you decide what to focus on, rather than someone else.
• Pay is capped only by your ability to run the company.
• Freedom to work the way you work best, rather than adhering to arbitrary workplace rules. If you like to crank Metallica at 3am while you work on marketing materials, you can do that.

Cons:

• A small business owner typically works more hours than an employee does.
• You are always on call. Employees will be late, absent, quit, etc. and issues will come up nobody else can handle (no matter how much you train, standardize, or document processes).
• YMMV here, but an owner is usually faced with many more decisions than employees. It’s a different kind of tired/exhaustion than most other people encounter or understand.