See a lot of home run threads and getting started/new idea threads, but I’m wondering how many entrepreneurs have “sort of” made it here?
I’ve been building a small business marketing agency for around a decade. We’ll prob do around 600k this year but no real profit (long story, working on it). I get paid 6-7k as a salary kind of like a normal job I guess.
Started doing some additional consulting work last year to make more money while we restructure the agency business model and now make about 6-7k/mo there as well.
I’m healthy, good marriage, generally doing well. But work is a lot, battling burnout, have a few regrets, etc. Not perfect but not terrible either.
Anyone else feel like their business aspirations have led to a life that kind of plays out more like you have a normal job give or take, vs the big fail / multimillion dollar exit dichotomy that is usually presented?
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that your business is scaled and works independently of you then that does mean you are more sellable. If you’re saying that you’re paying significantly more than the market to individuals that are necessary for delivering your business without getting business value out of them then you might have shot your gross margins and those are looked at very closely while selling. Of course if you had Google like gross margins to begin with it wouldn’t matter.
There is a moral and a business argument and I’m not saying the moral is not valid but rather that you need to be honest with yourself on what is moral and what is business.
We always paid employees well and the goal was that money is not something on which we’ll lose talent. We had a 4.8 on Glassdoor and a platinum rank on Officevibe. But we didn’t put someone in such a position that they thought their job was irreplaceable and they stopped taking risks and created a lot of growth opportunities for them, with many of them completely changing career trajectories.
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