The Self-Employed See-Saw by Brad Sugars

This week I wanted to share with you something from Brad Sugars founder of ActionCOACH.

As a self-employed person, your business life will feel just like a seesaw. While it’s often true that the self-employed can make more per hour than they ever could as employees, the challenge comes down to how many hours are actually used in the background, working ON the business and how many hours are spent in the foreground, working IN it?

When you’re self-employed, you’ll spend half your life chasing the work, doing marketing, sales, and administration.  It’s a lot of work, especially when all of the production and planning has to come from you… In fact, you’ll have so much work to do that every day will be a conveyor belt of non-stop activity… you’ll feel like you never get anything “done” because there’s always so much to do.

So why do we call this a see-saw? Doing the day-to-day work is one side of the seesaw and sales and marketing is the other and if you’re self-employed, one side must be up while the other is down… and vice versa.

Does this sound familiar? Chase the work, do the work, chase the work, do the work, chase the work, do the work… and so on. If it does, you know what it’s like to be self-employed.

It’s this seesaw that stops a self-employed entrepreneur from ever really getting ahead. It’s simple, you may not have a “job” but you’re still in a situation where there’s no real leverage. You still need to do the work or it won’t get done.

It’s this seesaw that gets self-employed people to make one of two decisions. To either give it up and go back and get a job, or to take the plunge and jump in the deep end of business and make the decision to grow, to move up the ladder.

This means becoming a business owner who creates systems and hires employees to do the work IN the business while the owner works ON it.

If you are interested in learning more from Brad. Check out his free monthly webinars at