Would you choose to start your own business again?

[Fallinleaves]

If you run your own business, with employees, would you choose to do it again, knowing what you know now?

I say with employees, because I think this creates additional legal requirements and stress, which doesn’t occur if you’re a one-person business.

Currently working my way through financial issues, new insurance requirements and other external requirements, which, whilst I recognise the importance of dealing with them, takes me away from what I enjoy doing. Feeling a bit overwhelmed to be honest and I’ve been doing this for 12 years. Sometimes I wish I’d stayed employed and not have the responsibility.

YABU - I love running my own business

YANBU - I wouldn’t start my own business again

HMRC are killers too 20% VAT on all sales. Can hardly claim any back as our rent doesn't include VAT and we buy fresh produce so no VAT to claim. But once you cook it HMRC want 20%. This was our down fall. Just couldn't pay it with everything else.

70 hours per week is not fully flexible.

@MistressoftheDarkSide My friend had to close her independent shoe shop for that reason.

People were coming in to measure their feet, and then they would order shoes online, often in front of her

online retail

Oh gosh, it's not just me then? 11 years down the line here. Employ 30 staff. It's a NIGHTMARE. I have the exact same problems as everybody else here - whilst they are on point in their roles, they can be very entitled and some earn more than I do some months. My industry has constant ongoing changes and updates, the red tape is awful and all the HMRC want is their pound of flesh. 80 hour week, I work through the night sometimes - and although yes, I do live a good life, it should be better considering the amount of work I put into it

Is the lifestyle really worth it if he is away so many hours (although perhaps for him if it is his passion)? I would think the advantage of your own business is freedom and flexibility and basically someone else doing all the work while you make the profit.

I think that’s a myth that we expect when we start a business, but it isn’t reality. There are always too many fires to be fought. It’s like a bad marriage, you tell yourself “Just keep your head down and get over this hump, and then it will be okay” but there’s always something else that comes up. It’s relentless.

I can’t imagine that we’d ever have reached a point where we’d have found someone external to take over the running of the business for us. We’d have needed at least three very high level staff to do the 160 hours that DH and I worked each week between us. We couldn’t have afforded that while we couldn’t even pay ourselves NMW. Our admin staff earned more than we did! But at the same time, we could never let staff be aware of that because they’d (rightly) have been worried about their job security. So some no doubt thought that we were just rich, greedy bastards who were denying them another pay rise.

In our case, we were lucky in that we made a lot of money when we sold, so now we do have lots of freedom and flexibility. But we sacrificed a decade of our lives for it, and our children sacrificed a lot too.