Welcome aboard the good ship Freedom! Maybe you have joined this happy adventure as a willing passenger. Perhaps this cheery vessel has heaved-to, to rescue you from the lifeboat of redundancy while your previous employer sinks without trace. Or maybe you have been rescued, having being marooned on the dreary island of unemployment. For whatever reason you have decided – or been forced – to accompany us, you have just joined the finest and most fulfilling way to cruise through life.

ARE YOU PAID WHAT YOU ARE WORTH?

Following that little ramble, I am now going to have to use the word, or words, that make me cringe and those are ‘self-employment’. I desperately struggle to find a more suitable or politically correct alternative to the label that other people have decided to attach to those of us who work for ourselves. To make myself a bit clearer, let’s take those phrases to bits and examine them. ‘Self’ – that’s you or me; ‘employed’ – that’s the job we have been given to earn our living. ‘Work’ – now there’s an interesting word, and one that this book will look at a great deal, but for now, and without too much explanation, I suppose you could say ‘work’ is an activity that someone is prepared to pay you for. ‘Ourself’, of course, is you or me, which means that the revenue created by the ‘work’ belongs to you or me. Although that seems obvious, if you have a ‘proper job’ the revenue generated by your efforts will go to someone else, your employer. If you follow the advice and guidance in this book, you should be able to get paid what you are worth for your work whilst being self-employed. If your employer can get what you are worth for your work, it stands to reason that they will not give all the revenue to you – that is how they make a profit, by paying you less than you are worth.

PAID EMPLOYMENT – A NEW-FANGLED IDEA

Employment is a fairly new and short-lived idea that has probably had its day. You may feel that is a fairly outrageous comment, so let me explain.

If you go back a few hundred years, even the peasants were self-employed. The lord would give them free use of a piece of land and whatever profit the peasant made was tithed or shared with the lord by way of rent. While I am not suggesting a return to feudal agriculture, it is interesting to note that in mediaeval times no-one had invented the spine-chilling word, ‘management’.

Stop here for a moment. Do you really want or need to be managed? Maybe as a 3- or a 15-year-old people would describe you as hard or easy to manage, but that was when your life was in other peoples’ hands. However, now as a free adult, why on earth would you hand yourself over to be managed?

The feudal lord wasn’t interested in managing anything. The peasants could get up when they wanted, plant what they wanted, and work when they wanted. What the lord was interested in was outcomes not process. If after a bumper harvest you filled the lord’s tithing barn with crops, he wouldn’t walk around with a stopwatch and clipboard saying, “How did you achieve this? Did you comply with the correct procedures and processes?”

The other big feature of self-employment is the incredible level of efficiency that it produces. In a previous book (Go It Alone), I examined the best way of getting people from one place to another as fast as possible by bicycle. The first method to consider would be to take, say, one hundred people and try and construct a single cycle that all one hundred people could ride on. The problem is that as the bicycle gets bigger, its efficiency starts to fall – even a tandem, which only carries two people, can have its problems because there will always be accusations between the two partners about who pedals the hardest. As the number of people grows, it becomes even more difficult to find out who is actually pedalling – and to support the weight of one hundred people, the bike would have to be massively heavy and ungainly to the point where, as it takes on extra pedallers, its weight increases and exceeds their ability to pedal. So picture the scene: you have this huge monster of a machine with a hundred people on it – some who don’t bother to pedal at all, some who have to pedal furiously just to support their own weight, and then you have the problem of steering such an ungainly beast. Because of its bulk, the process of steering has to become a full-time job, so the people who steer it feel that they don’t have to pedal as well because steering and choosing the direction of the bike is a full-time occupation.

This is like the modern company where the board of directors believes that they have to do nothing but steer, and the people that do the pedalling, the workers, feel that their steerers or directors make bad decisions and don’t really work very hard. The other problem, of course, is that if any wrong decisions are made in steering or choice of direction and there is a crash, all one hundred pedallers are equally doomed.

So what is the correct way to do it? The self-employed equivalent is to give everybody their own bicycle. In a bicycle race, a group of racing cyclists is referred to as the peloton where they race against each other in a very efficient and swift manner. The one hundred people in the race – or at least most of them – will arrive at their destination at an astonishingly high average speed. Sure, a few will crash, but even most of those can hop back on and get started again without the drama of a one hundred-person machine crashing.

I thought about this analogy and have tried to tie it into the trouble and turmoil that we have seen in the world at the time of writing this book. I’ve realized that, rather than bicycles, perhaps a better way of looking at this would be to compare the world of work to a beehive. A beehive is not a business; the bees are not employees, they are a community. Each single bee leaves the hive and looks for wealth in the shape of pollen, which it carries back to the community. What would not work would be a four ton bee! There is no efficiency in size, it would be too big to bother with every little flower, it would be too big to cheerfully share its wealth and experience with other bees, and in truth it is probably too big to even get off the ground.

I am sure some employers will view this book as somewhat threatening and anti-social but in truth it is pro-social – all I am saying is that individuals who go and find their own value and wealth can contribute more efficiently and cheerfully to the community we live in.

I don’t intend this book to be a book on how to start a ‘business’. I have tried very hard to differentiate between the self-employed individual’s way of making their way in the world, which I will refer to throughout this book as the ‘enterprise’, and the idea of starting a ‘business’, but I cannot avoid occasionally blurring the edges. It is possible that the self-employed individual may work with another, whether that is a partner or their spouse, or may occasionally employ another person in the shape of a trainee or an apprentice, but when does that become a business? I’m not sure but I think that is up to the reader to decide. Bizarrely, banks have a very strange view of this and will describe you as a ‘business’ the moment that you are not employed by somebody else – in fact, I fought long and hard with banks to try and get them to realize that there are actually three species of money earners, not two, i.e. businesses, employed, and self-employed, and just because you are self-employed it doesn’t mean you run a business.

So, to sum up, although this book may stray into other territories, its real objective is to examine how the individual can achieve their true worth and value – both financially and emotionally – by employing themselves. After all, whoever you are, you will never find a boss to employ you who will value and treasure you as much as you will for yourself. My qualification for writing this book is that I have been self-employed for most of my working life, and for a lot of that time I have been professionally involved in helping small enterprises to succeed. Therefore, this book is based on my observations and experiences along the way. I have made most of the mistakes that I have highlighted and have also enjoyed a lot of the victories and benefits that are mentioned, so please read on and enjoy!