In Canada, the US, and other countries with strongly capitalist economics you have a right that doesn’t get as much attention in the press as “freedom of speech” or “freedom from unwarranted search and seizure”. Yet it’s quite well protected and one of the few paths to wealth. The right to start a business allows you to sell goods or services with minimal government imposed barriers, to run it as you see fit, and to own the risk and profit associated with the business (minus taxes of course). In other words, you have the freedom to come up with a great idea and to capitalize on it for your own personal gain.

There is a strong myth in employee circles that starting a business is a complicated and difficult process, but a big part of what makes the above a right is minimal government imposed barriers to exercise it! Anyone capable of fulfilling some basic tax requirements and perhaps filing a few forms can be up and running as a true blue business. In Canada we have the concept of “incorporation as of right” which allows anyone who properly fills out an application, pays a reasonable fee, and meets some basic requirments, to incorporate their business. Starting a corporation in the US is similiarly simple, and in both countries it’s even easier to start a sole proprietorship.

Why virtually everyone should have some form of business, even if you plan on working for someone else for the rest of your life.

For starters it’s an amazing right to have. Never has it been easier to go from being poor to wealthy through one’s own ingenuity and hard work, rather than needing to be born or married into the right economic class. Not being wealthy no longer means that you are required to become a servant or employee, surrendering the bulk of the value of your efforts to your owner (see: Is it Wrong to be an Employee? and Steve Pavlina’s 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job). Yet that’s exactly what most people are doing, locking themsleves into being peasants of a modern feudal system!

Running a profitable business greatly reduces your risk of losing your income. It’s no secret that layoffs happen all the time and high performance or seniority are no longer enough to save you if you happen to be working for a department that is bleeding money. You can literally walk into work one day and find out that you no longer work there, as I’ve done before. Since you aren’t required to spend a certain amount of time on a business in order to own it, you can gain the income benefits of a part-time business without quitting your day job. I’m not telling you that you must jump off the cliff by quitting your job immediately and hoping that you know how to fly. You are free to build your business gradually and cut the shackles of your day job when it’s sustainable, or forever keep it as a side venture.

Starting a business provides enormous tax advantages. You are not taxed on the money spent by the business, allowing you to leverage the full power of your capital. This means that if you’re income tax is 30% a year, it will cost you $100 to buy a $70 golf club or $70 worth of stock. That same $100 can be used to buy a $100 piece of equipment for your business. Rather than having to give that $30 to the government, you’ve been able to invest it in your own venture for your own gain. Better still, business losses can often be written off against other income, dampening the hardship caused by a business that is not yet profitable.

Your talents and passions aren’t limited to what your job requires. You may even feel that your existing job doesn’t make use of your talents at all, and you certainly wouldn’t be alone. Your business allows you to profit on these talents, providing both income and an opportunity to develop yourself further in these areas. I wouldn’t know nearly as much as I know now about website development or programming if I hadn’t started businesses that allowed me to put these skills to use. I certainly wouldn’t be able to write this blog on entrepreneurship, which has allowed me to gain many insights into my own business knowledge and to develop my long-neglected writing abilities.

Finally as mentioned above, business is one of the few paths to becoming wealthy. No matter how many raises you get at the end of the day, a pay cheque has very finite growth limits. Reaching $100 000 per year is an applauded accomplishment and a mere $300 000 per year is astronimical. True money comes from ownership, which is why the real value of the money you save each year comes from the returns you receive from having it invested (and you are saving, right?). Own your own business, own real estate, own shares of a corporation. Those who do have $300 000 pay cheques are millionaires because they’ve invested the cash, not because it’s all piling in a bank account. Never has it been so easy to become an owner and to reap the tremendous rewards that come with it. A business is a powerful vehicle for getting there and the accessibility of starting one is phenomenal.

Just How Much of a Right is This Really?

Every country has its own laws, but those that have embraced free enterprise based economies necessarily need to make it possible to start a business easily. You can’t have free enterprise otherwise. Nevertheless every right can be revoked for fair or unfair reasons, and as part of this article I unsuccessfully tried to find out what kind of situations would deny a citizen from starting a (legal) business. I would be interested in any insights from readers who are more familiar with the law and government.

Disclaimer: some or all of this information may not apply for your particular situation. I’m not a lawyer, accountant, or otherwise able to provide advice to guarantee a successful or legal business. Please seek appropriate counsel in your local area. Persons acting on any information on this website do so at their own risk.

Time and time again I get comments on this blog and in person that can be summarized as:

“There’s nothing wrong with just wanting to be an employee. Not everyone wants to start their own business like you and they shouldn’t have to in order to be considered successful or to have their choices in life be valid.”

This is of course 100% true, and I agree with it! Unfortunately since I am both a very strong advocate of entrepreneurship and very vocal about employment disadvantages, some people automatically attribute to me that I think it’s somehow fundamentally wrong for someone to be an employee.

Business isn’t right for everyone. I can tell you this as a fact because I know people who are very happy with being employees, find their work fulfilling, and would be miserable in a business ownership situation. However it’s also true that there many people who are either stuck in jobs they hate or who aren’t suited to be employees at all. This group isn’t some dysfunctional minority, it’s an entire culture of cubicle misery. Dilbert and Office Space are so insanely popular because it’s based on very real frustrations of the traditional corporate workplace, a theme that an amazing amount of people can identify with.

Employment is a Choice

Much of the unhappy workforce doesn’t consciously realize this fact. People get trapped in job situations they are unhappy in because they see no other alternative. In a previous article I named four of the major perceived “Barriers to Starting Your Own Business, but in hindsight I could have named it “The Barriers to Doing What You Really Want to Do”.

You can choose to be an employee in a field that you enjoy, working for a company whose values and employee treatment are in line with your expectations. This can be an extremely rewarding experience, allowing you to achieve that seemingly mythical “getting paid to do what you love” life. That life that people in magazine interviews have, but that doesn’t happen to normal everyday common people. All without the stress of being a tycoon or a celebrity.

You can also choose to start your own business, a relatively common employment alternative, perhaps due to the appeal of “being your own boss”. With hard work, willingness to learn, a competent team, and a great product you can become a millionaire “doing what you love”. That life that people in magazine interviews have, but that doesn’t happen to normal everyday common people. All without the fear of being laid off or having to rely on your boss for a pay cheque.

But these aren’t the only choices. You can be a rock star, author, scuba diving instructor, world-reknowed scientist, art collector, consultant, baseball player, farmer, and thousands of other “careers”. Most of these are actually some combination of employee and business owner. An athlete for example works for a sports team, but is also his/her own brand and company. This has led me to recently conclude that “employee” and “business owner” are really just legal terms and not two absolutely opposite concepts. It’s not employment that I’m bitterly against, it’s the mental enslavement of a person perpetrated by educators and employers. The prison of working to put bread on the table rather than to further one’s own talents and growth.

Unhappy people in all walks of life need to wake-up and break free of the notion that work must be difficult, doing what you love is a dream for “someday”, and that making money is why we work. Buying into this philosphy is a matter of confidence, which must be rebuilt after years or decades of being consciously and accidentally trained by those around you to be a drone.

This author is dedicated to the path of business ownership and entrepreneurship. My blog exists for those currently running a business or having aspirations to do so. If entrepreneurship isn’t your cup of tea then this particular blog may not be for you, but resources for your chosen field exist. Just be aware that whatever your true calling, there is absolutely no need for you to:

• Perform meaningless and unfulfilling work.
• Put up with a terrible boss.
• Constantly have others take credit for your work and ideas.
• Live in constant fear of being laid off due to downsizing or speaking your mind.
• Sit in a sea of grey cubicles.

Unless of course you enjoy the above. Then by all means…

Reading is key to having new ideas to fuel the expansion of your business. I currently have 30+ unread business books that I’m slogging through, many of which have provided me terrific ideas to utilize in my business. Sometimes I come across a book that I feel is worth mentioning on this blog, and having read Bag the Elephant by Steve Kaplan I can happily say that this is one of those books.

The book is all about the dream of many small business owners - bagging that large corporate customer that will provide steady revenue and skyrocket the growth of the company. Through 200 well-written pages Kaplan presents a practical plan for doing just that. He demystifies the process involved from start to finish in a blueprint that any small business owner can follow, spelling out the big and small points of interacting with a giant company and its bureaucracy.

What really sold me on this book and the techniques inside is the practical approach it takes. Kaplan has bagged his own elephants, with the first ever being Proctor & Gamble. He draws on this experience heavily within the book, with the Proctor and Gamble account being the focal example as Kaplan lays out his plan. In addition to the usual high level business recipes that business books love to provide, he shares indispensible tricks that he picked up along the way such as the time he got his status upgraded from supplier to contractor to get his own security badge (allowing him to setup and attend meetings far more easily than the competition).

It goes without saying that a truly large contract is a breakthrough for a company and properly managed it is the start of a truly booming business. This plan provides an amazing playbook to draw from to accomplish this and to do so without collapsing the company along the way. Kaplan makes sure to cover how to manage the relationship and the critical mistakes people make that could cause the deal to destroy them. Everything within the book is highly readable too, making it one of the scarce non-fiction books that are hard to put down.

I highly recommend picking this title up as I can’t imagine any business owner not being able to learn a significant amount from it, whether you are eyeing your first elephant or are looking to expand your impressive client list.