It’s been my experience that most people don’t realize the amount of risk and the dedication required to be a business owner. Most people think the business owner is laughing all the way to the bank while making money off the hard work of the employees. The reality is the business owner generally has everything he/she owns leveraged to either start the business or to keep it going. 100% of the liability lies on the back of that owner.
The work day doesn’t start at 8:00 and end at 5:00 and the work week doesn’t start on Monday and end on Friday. For a business owner it starts when he wakes up and ends when he falls asleep. (or passes out, whichever comes first.) You deal with regulations, employee’s personal problems, sales (or lack of), security, legal requirements and challenges, technology and the list goes on and on. And with any luck, you can find some time to actually work the job you “thought” you were getting into when you started the company. You substitute temporary distractions for relaxation, and you spend every waking moment of the day (and night) either consciously or subconsciously thinking about something that is business related.
You spend a great deal of your time doing the government’s work, such as collecting payroll taxes, withholding taxes, unemployment, SS taxes, etc., etc. If an employee hasn’t paid a student loan you become the government’s collection agency when they force you to debit the “governments share” from the employee’s pay before he/she gets it. This can result in your business losing a good employee because they can’t make it on what’s left over. And then there is the “estimated income” tax. This is where the business gets to pay the government (in advance of having made any money) an amount equal to what you expect your business will make in the coming quarter. WTF?
At the end of the year, if you were successful enough to actually make some money, you are rewarded by having to give a disproportional percentage of it to the government, while a bunch of clowns with a lesser work ethic complain that you don’t pay your “fair share”.
Owning a business is extremely difficult and quite challenging. It takes a special kind of person to accept this awkward distribution of work/reward elements, and instead of constantly hammering them with additional taxes and deterrents the government should be offering incentives and rewards to bring them to the forefront.
Aside from selling a little wood out by the driveway, you can count me out of any future business creation. Paying my “fair share” has become too difficult.