WHY YOU SHOULDN’T SACK YOUR BOSS YET

So, I sat down listening to the lecture of this woman who had served in the banking sector for as much as 15 years, she served in a very high capacity as a bank manager of a major branch before she finally resigned. According to her, she resigned because she signed up for a multi-level marketing opportunity, managed it alongside her job for your years and decided it was time to focus on it entirely. Guess what? It came to a point where she said: “I decided to sack my boss and become my boss.” It thrilled the crowd.

You must have heard it a lot of times but is it truly worth it? Do you have to sack your boss? Is there anything as sacking your boss? Maybe yes, it would be another word for resignation, or perhaps it means telling your boss “to hell with your salary!”. Most times people encourage us not to work for someone but rather startup our businesses. I think there is a problem with this school of thought because even as we start up our businesses, we are working for people, we are meant to serve people.

You will hardly see any opinion out there encouraging people to serve as employees before delving into a more independent business. We see many reasons why people should be entrepreneurs, we see many reasons why people should start up their businesses but we hardly see why people shouldn’t be in a rush, why they should take time to learn certain skills by being employed for some time or perhaps by serving either in NGOs or other areas of interest that would affect their dreams positively. As great as starting your own business is, it is also not an abomination to serve or be an employee, at least for some time.

First, let me make it very clear that I am not discouraging people from starting their businesses and I am not saying you have to spend all your life depending on salaries alone. But let’s be fair, you shouldn’t come to people and suddenly encourage them to quit their job just because you had to quit yours after a long time of gaining the benefits. The woman I just told her story worked for 15 years in the bank and achieved a feat with her career! Will it be appropriate to encourage someone else who is yet to make any significant achievement as an employee to quit their jobs? I don’t think that counsel is for everybody and I don’t also think it should be sent into the airwaves irresponsibly because a lot of people would make mistakes harkening to it.

I will be getting straight to the point.

You may need to be employed to gather certain experiences that would help you in running your own business. An entrepreneur shouldn’t just be defined as someone who runs an independent business, it should be a person who provides a solution whether independently or as an employee. There are certain skills you would gain as an employee that may take you longer years to gain independently.

For some people who are just starting, wanting to run your own business may be the same as wanting to run into the wild without any plan. Beyond what you have learnt in books and even schools, you may need certain kinds of internship and this is part of what I feel serving another person’s business necessitates. To be employed is to serve and by serving we are paving our way to greatness. It is true that people may gather some kind of expertise without being employed but discouraging those who are employed is another way of denying them the opportunities of learning the business field.

You must have heard those quotes like “a salary is a tool of slavery.” Oh, spare me that crap! Whoever is selling that to you doesn’t love you! Salary may be all you need to build your dreams, not that the salary in itself is your dream but it is going to serve as capital for some people to run their dreams when they have gained certain skills. So many startups fold up in a few months or years simply because they weren’t able to build certain degrees of capacity. What you may not afford to learn in the business school, you may learn it in the work field and it wouldn’t be nice if you throw in your dreams into the lab for some risky experiment. Your employers have built capacity that can strongly influence you while you serve them.

To start up any business without building capacity for it is a big uncalculated risk. In the words of Jesus, He said: “a wise man counts the cost before building.” It is in the place of service that you may see the cost of running a business! Does this mean every business owner who never served another person would fail? Some will fail and some will learn in ten years what they would have learnt in a few months.

Serving others helps you to know what people want and you wouldn’t make the mistake of having a great website, social media handlers but poor products. Products become irrelevant when it is not what people want regardless of how rich it is. Because many startups just fly off in enthusiasm without any tangible and concise knowledge, they begin with as much as zero experience in the work field.

We indeed learn from our failures but when we are trained in service, we make fewer mistakes and grow even faster. You will fail less when you have served in the particular field you are about venturing into. Your employers usually turn out to become your mentors and coaches in the business world. Note down these few benefits of being employed for some time:

· It helps you know what to sell

· It helps you know how to sell

· It helps you develop a good sense of planning

· It helps you know the true cost of running a business

· It helps you take your time to know what you want

· It offers you a wide range of market knowledge

· It reveals your place of strength

· It helps you develop certain administrative skills quickly

· It helps you save up for your business

· It helps you become much more self-controlled

· Etc

A lot of people want to be a boss just because they want to make the rules and do what they want but if this is your case, you are heading to failure with lightning speed. A young girl told me she wants to run her own business so that she wouldn’t be waking up early and rushing to work but if you haven’t developed that sense of accountability and responsibility that employees usually have, you may not run your business well. The reason why the majority of startups fail is that they didn’t develop these skills as they aren’t inborn. It would take years of trial and error before they could get there, otherwise, they hire a trained fellow if they could afford it or take time, serve and learn most of the things there is to learn.

Back to the woman’s story, yeah, the story I started with! She worked for 15 years and in fifteen years she had grown to a bank manager. While she worked as a bank manager, she added a side-job and did it for four years before resigning to start up her own business with the money she had gathered so far; not just with the money but also with her wealth of experience and skill! If you would want to adhere to her “sack your boss” counsel when you are still starting, you may only realize that you made a very costly mistake.

Statistics also has it that in America alone, 27 million Americans are running or starting a business but 70% of these businesses fail after a few months or years (Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor). The reason is simple; we are usually too quick to start our own business without having to learn a few more things from service. If you want to be a blogger, a social media influencer, a network marketer, an online vendor and so on, it is a nice idea but you might want to do it as a side job while you keep serving as an employee! The salary will also help you a lot in terms of managing business funding. For some people, they use their salaries for house upkeeps while they use the earnings of their side-jobs to make their businesses stronger! You may consider that too! At a point, it would become so big that you may now have to resign and focus on it. Until success becomes obvious with your startup, don’t quit your job, you need that salary.

Getting investors will not save you in the startup you cannot run. Don’t get me wrong here, I am not discouraging you from starting up something, I am not saying you will obviously fail as a startup but I am also trying to make you see from another perspective. Quitting your present job to join a multi-level marketing firm or starting up something may not be the best idea for everyone! Do not starve yourself to death because you want to build the business of your dreams, you will need to be alive to see it progress.

When your own business is finally up and running, would you need to employ people to join hands with you to take it to a great extent? The answer is obviously yes because you can’t do it alone! In the same way, don’t let anyone make you feel so bad as an employee, don’t let them convince you that you are into modern slavery! You may need that work experience and (or) the salary to get your dreams rolling. Sometimes, it is not always about the salary, it is also about the skills that you could gather!

Studies have shown that entrepreneurs who kept to their day jobs failed only 33% less often (Source: Academy Of Management Journal). As you work for a business on daily payments, you could gradually start running your own business too, strike a balance that won’t make you lack focus in any and know when it is time to shift. It is not such a bad thing to be an employee, don’t get scared by all those motivational mumbo jumbo and abracadabra.

However, don’t be too dependent on a job that could end tomorrow. If you have to live by salary all your life, then you have to work for all your life! While you earn a salary, invest your money into something else so that you can have a secondary stream of income. When it’s time to move, you’re sure you aren’t making a wrong decision.