Unthinkable right, why would you do that? Starting a business is an investment, one inputs resources, money, and critically, time, lots of time. To put it into perspective, it’s like working for no wage, for a year. It’s not just like that, it probably will be literally that. Thousands of hours of unpaid work, before you can take a genuine wage.

All during this year you will be adding value to other people with what you do. You will be paying for goods and services, investing in materials and stock, spending money and supporting others. You’ll be paying the wages of other people, either those you directly employ, or those employed by the companies you purchase from.

You’ll be working harder than you probably ever have, and having to work more diversely than you ever imagined. For this hard work, this commitment to creating a commercial enterprise, you will not be paid anything.

It gets worse. It will actually cost you money. You will have to put what money you do have into the business. You will effectively be paying to work. That’s the truth and the hard reality of starting and running a business.

Think of it as a machine. It takes money to buy the parts for the machine. It takes effort to build the machine. It takes money to fuel the machine to get it started.

And once it is going, rather than making money, as you hope the machine will, it will probably take more money, because you didn’t design it quite right, or there was something you didn’t know, so you will have to put more in to modify the machine to get it to the point that one day more money comes out than you’re putting in.

It takes money, time, and continuous effort. It takes. That is the nature of a business when it starts up. It takes.

The most straightforward self-employment systems are ones where you essentially charge for time. A decorator might need to spend a few thousand on equipment, and perhaps some advertising, but then it’s a relatively simple proposition. Selling a skill by the time spent using it.

Self-employed tradespeople have the best of both worlds. They can usually have continuous work, for which they’re paid a good wage, whilst having the freedom to work where and when they want, without having huge outlays of capital, and without having to work for free to build the machine that may or may not ever work.

Building a tech company requires pouring money into development of products way before any saleable thing can ever be seen. In many instances, perhaps most, they’ll never produce a saleable product in any meaningful numbers and the machine will have the funding plug pulled. It makes you wonder why anyone would ever attempt a start-up technology company. And yet they do.

And they do it, for the most part, because they can see a thing that does not exist, and they want it to exist. It’s really as simple as that. And they so want it to exist that they’re willing to labour for no wages for that cause, for as long as is possible. That’s the passion of it, the heart of it.

Start-ups are the progeny of people with the vision to see something that exists only in their minds and the heart to try to bring it into creation. Self-employment is something to be proud of, it’s making one’s own way in the world, trying to at least, and for those involved in this most arduous and most frequently thankless task, I salute you.

May your machines fly and soar. May they bring you happiness and give back to you a thousand times and more.