The Search: Weighing the Risk and Freedom of Self-Employment
June 22, 2010 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
SITTING in their cubicles, rolling their eyes over the latest bureaucratic slowdown or marveling at the near-incompetence of higher-ups, some employees are thinking: If only I were my own boss, I wouldn’t have these problems.
Sean Kelly
No, they wouldn’t. They’d have a host of different problems. Still, some people make the leap to self-employment and find it was worth the risk.
How can a salaried employee with some savings tell if the idea of becoming self-employed is a viable option and not just an escape fantasy? And how can a recently laid-off employee with some severance pay determine whether this is the right time to pursue her dream of being an entrepreneur?
First, you must be highly motivated to sell a specific product or service that your research has found to be marketable. And your business idea should be based on expertise that you already have, said Susan Urquhart-Brown, author of “The Accidental Entrepreneur” and a career coach. Learning how to run a business is hard enough without also learning a new skill from scratch, she said.
Some soon-to-be entrepreneurs come up with a solution to a business problem and find their company is unwilling to pursue it, said William A. Sahlman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School with a focus on entrepreneurship…
Read the original article at NYTimes
