We hear about all the young people making a big deal of their successes in their early years. Twenty-something tech gurus or entrepreneurs that make their fortune early.
Who here is past 45-50 and maybe made a switch or restarted and found success and a modicum of happiness in their new position?
Buy your boss a tropical island vacation
The side effect of running your own business, but not being large enough to hire a bunch of people yet – if you take a holiday, the business just stops for that period. We can’t do that, so no holidays. On call 24/7 essentially (although more realistically, I average about 60 hours per week.)
There are chicken and egg problems involved in getting that holiday. We need an employee to cover the shop, but the income needs to be high enough to afford their salary (they need to be a technical specialist like me). So I need to get to about an 60-80 hour work week to justify the employee and then find someone with the same super niche skills, and then spend a bunch of time on knowledge transfer. Ideally, they want to buy in so they’re becoming part owner, but that makes it even harder to find an employee.
So, hopefully I’ll get a vacation within a year or two…