e of shock, sat down and buried your head in your hands. It was all over. How were you going to keep up the payments on everything? Your wife was sure to leave you and the house would have to be sold.

You had lost everything.

Wait a minute. Had you really lost everything? Not yet you hadn’t.

You get yourself together, call up a few friends and acquaintances and start finding out what the job situation is like on the outside. You make a chance call to someone who is in business for themselves and they suggest that you try working for yourself.

That night, after you explained everything to your wife and she still didn’t leave you, you felt po

The question of whether to work for a company or run your own business is a difficult one to answer. It's a dilemma that many people face in the course of their lives. Sometimes it happens right at the start, as soon as they leave school. Sometimes the question crops up after years of working for a company. For so many people the time will come when such a decision has to be made. We take a look at some of the factors that create this dilemma and some of the solutions that can be found.

Working for yourself in your own business can be hugely rewarding if you manage that business correctly. If you don’t, it can be a disaster. You can lose everything; your house, your family and your friends. That’s why the majority of people work for a company or in someone else’s business. It safer and more secure without the headaches that come with all the paperwork and organising that running the business entails. But is it really always so secure and rewarding to work for someone else?

The scenario goes something like this:

You left school and got a good job with a decent company. After a few years, you got married and had kids. You bought a house with a mortgage, a nice car and all the usual household paraphernalia. The usual things in life that most of us take for granted. Life was good, you liked your job and so you and stayed with the same company for twenty years. You rose up through the ranks but slowly and never attained the position you thought you deserved, but you were happy in that it was stable, secure and you didn’t have to worry about anything.

Then the company started to make cut-backs and started laying people off. You stayed because you believed your job was secure and you'd been there for so long it was a way of life to you. Your work schedule became more and more overloaded and stressful as more people left and you were filling the gaps. Before long you were doing the job of three people for the same pay. You found you were being put upon to work longer hours and even some weekends for overtime pay but getting no thanks for it.

In the end, it got so much your health began to deteriorate. You were never home so your family life also began to deteriorate. Your kids had grown up but were still at home and costing you a fortune. You were at the stage where you had to keep on working to pay the bills and keep the roof over your head but at the same time you were working so much it was destroying your life. You were in the classic no-win situation and there didn’t seem to be a way out.

Then it came like a thunderclap out of the blue. You’re boss made you redundant and paid you off. You went home in a state of shock, sat down and buried your head in your hands. It was all over. How were you going to keep up the payments on everything? Your wife was sure to leave you and the house would have to be sold.

You had lost everything.

Wait a minute. Had you really lost everything? Not yet you hadn’t.

You get yourself together, call up a few friends and acquaintances and start finding out what the job situation is like on the outside. You make a chance call to someone who is in business for themselves and they suggest that you try working for yourself.

That night, after you explained everything to your wife and she still didn’t leave you, you felt po

se, your family and your friends. That’s why the majority of people work for a company or in someone else’s business. It safer and more secure without the headaches that come with all the paperwork and organising that running the business entails. But is it really always so secure and rewarding to work for someone else?

The scenario goes something like this:

You left school and got a good job with a decent company. After a few years, you got married and had kids. You bought a house with a mortgage, a nice car and all the usual household paraphernalia. The usual things in life that most of us take for granted. Life was good, you liked your job and so you and stayed with the same company for twenty years. You rose up through the ranks but slowly and never attained the position you thought you deserved, but you were happy in that it was stable, secure and you didn’t have to worry about anything.

Then the company started to make cut-backs and started laying people off. You stayed because you believed your job was secure and you'd been there for so long it was a way of life to you. Your work schedule became more and more overloaded and stressful as more people left and you were filling the gaps. Before long you were doing the job of three people for the same pay. You found you were being put upon to work longer hours and even some weekends for overtime pay but getting no thanks for it.

In the end, it got so much your health began to deteriorate. You were never home so your family life also began to deteriorate. Your kids had grown up but were still at home and costing you a fortune. You were at the stage where you had to keep on working to pay the bills and keep the roof over your head but at the same time you were working so much it was destroying your life. You were in the classic no-win situation and there didn’t seem to be a way out.

Then it came like a thunderclap out of the blue. You’re boss made you redundant and paid you off. You went home in a state of shock, sat down and buried your head in your hands. It was all over. How were you going to keep up the payments on everything? Your wife was sure to leave you and the house would have to be sold.

You had lost everything.

Wait a minute. Had you really lost everything? Not yet you hadn’t.

You get yourself together, call up a few friends and acquaintances and start finding out what the job situation is like on the outside. You make a chance call to someone who is in business for themselves and they suggest that you try working for yourself.

That night, after you explained everything to your wife and she still didn’t leave you, you felt po

u and stayed with the same company for twenty years. You rose up through the ranks but slowly and never attained the position you thought you deserved, but you were happy in that it was stable, secure and you didn’t have to worry about anything.

Then the company started to make cut-backs and started laying people off. You stayed because you believed your job was secure and you'd been there for so long it was a way of life to you. Your work schedule became more and more overloaded and stressful as more people left and you were filling the gaps. Before long you were doing the job of three people for the same pay. You found you were being put upon to work longer hours and even some weekends for overtime pay but getting no thanks for it.

In the end, it got so much your health began to deteriorate. You were never home so your family life also began to deteriorate. Your kids had grown up but were still at home and costing you a fortune. You were at the stage where you had to keep on working to pay the bills and keep the roof over your head but at the same time you were working so much it was destroying your life. You were in the classic no-win situation and there didn’t seem to be a way out.

Then it came like a thunderclap out of the blue. You’re boss made you redundant and paid you off. You went home in a state of shock, sat down and buried your head in your hands. It was all over. How were you going to keep up the payments on everything? Your wife was sure to leave you and the house would have to be sold.

You had lost everything.

Wait a minute. Had you really lost everything? Not yet you hadn’t.

You get yourself together, call up a few friends and acquaintances and start finding out what the job situation is like on the outside. You make a chance call to someone who is in business for themselves and they suggest that you try working for yourself.

That night, after you explained everything to your wife and she still didn’t leave you, you felt po

r hours and even some weekends for overtime pay but getting no thanks for it.

In the end, it got so much your health began to deteriorate. You were never home so your family life also began to deteriorate. Your kids had grown up but were still at home and costing you a fortune. You were at the stage where you had to keep on working to pay the bills and keep the roof over your head but at the same time you were working so much it was destroying your life. You were in the classic no-win situation and there didn’t seem to be a way out.

Then it came like a thunderclap out of the blue. You’re boss made you redundant and paid you off. You went home in a state of shock, sat down and buried your head in your hands. It was all over. How were you going to keep up the payments on everything? Your wife was sure to leave you and the house would have to be sold.

You had lost everything.

Wait a minute. Had you really lost everything? Not yet you hadn’t.

You get yourself together, call up a few friends and acquaintances and start finding out what the job situation is like on the outside. You make a chance call to someone who is in business for themselves and they suggest that you try working for yourself.

That night, after you explained everything to your wife and she still didn’t leave you, you felt po

e of shock, sat down and buried your head in your hands. It was all over. How were you going to keep up the payments on everything? Your wife was sure to leave you and the house would have to be sold.

You had lost everything.

Wait a minute. Had you really lost everything? Not yet you hadn’t.

You get yourself together, call up a few friends and acquaintances and start finding out what the job situation is like on the outside. You make a chance call to someone who is in business for themselves and they suggest that you try working for yourself.

That night, after you explained everything to your wife and she still didn’t leave you, you felt positive and even excited. You couldn’t sleep for thinking about all the possibilities.

The next day, you formed your action plan. You knew that you had absolutely no idea how to go about starting your own business, but you had friends who did. You set up meetings with them and sought advice. You hit upon a great idea that your friends backed you with and got things started. You had money in the bank from you job payoff, so you knew you could survive the first year of so until your own business started to show a profit.

The rest, as they say, is history.

That was a fairly generic failure to success story which is actually more common than many people think. It doesn’t come quite as easily as was just outlined because everyone will do things differently. Some will succeed and some will fail. Some will have to work extremely hard to make it work. Those are the successful ones. Others will sit back and wait for the money truck to pull up outside their door. They are the ones who will fail and blame everybody else for their failure.

Whatever the level of your success, assuming you have worked hard to achieve it, working for yourself has an awful lot of positives. Perhaps you gave up wanting to ever work for anyone else again because of bad experiences with employers who have consistently devalued the employee's status, benefits, pay and job security over recent years. Maybe you got fed up working your guts out for peanuts while making someone else rich. So you left that particular rat race behind and did ok working for yourself. Maybe you’ve been up and maybe you’ve been down. But don’t you think it's worth the struggle to be independent?