“You don’t have to work 9 to 5″

Although this might seem to be the case to an outsider, the reality is vastly different, especially when you are starting out in small business.  When you start a small business on your own, you are doing absolutely everything.  So instead of working 9 to 5, you are probably working from 7 until midnight and thereafter.  And this will go on for some time until you reach a point when you know you need to employ somebody else.  But your hours don’t stop there.  Although you may have offloaded some of the duties to your employee, your free time then needs to be spent on other areas of your business that perhaps you had been neglecting because you were stretched so thin and did not have the time to do it.

If you think that once you employ staff you can sit back and watch the money roll in, you are sadly mistaken.  The truly successful businessperson is the one that is constantly working on their business.  When you are very passionate about your product or idea, you virtually live, breath and eat it.  I can definitely say that the business became my life.  Sure, on some days you may decide to leave the office at 4 pm to do some personal things, but by the evening, you’ll find yourself back on your laptop whether it be at the office or at home, writing new e-mail blasts, thinking of other ways of increasing traffic to your website, etc.  And this is not just for the first few months of starting your business; it could be for the first few years.

I’m not telling you this to turn off any budding entrepreneurs out there; on the contrary.  I want people to remove those rose colored glasses and see what it really takes to start up a business and successfully maintain it.