EP 71: 10 Things No One Told You About Being Your Own Boss
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Okay, guys, I have to admit something. When I came out of college, I had this really idealistic view of what the working world would look like. In my head, I thought it would be all sparkly and filled with exciting work trips, amazing high-heeled shoes and outfits to wear, and happy hours filled with coworkers and cosmopolitans.

What I learned was that business professional had a certain look to it. I had to wear closed toed shoes at all times. The firm that I worked for even really nailed down what color my nails could be.

which I put up with because I thought, hey, I'll climb the corporate ladder and it'll be fine. I love what I'm doing. Until my manager at the consulting firm sincerely got upset with me over taking a day off work to attend a funeral for someone who wasn't an immediate family member. I distinctly remember thinking, you have got to be kidding me.

Why have personal days if I can't actually be expected to take them off? It's not like I knew three weeks in advance that this person was going to pass away. I mean, life does happen. So when I finally did quit that role, I can remember being on the plane back to Atlanta from Denver, Colorado, which was where my last consultant project was based, dreaming of being my own boss. In my head, this new version of the working world was

looked even more like Carrie's version of Sex and the City from the HBO series. It was days filled with a few hours of work, even better shopping sprees because now the clothes didn't need to be corporate professional and my shoes could be those amazing high heels. And quite frankly...

My happy hours would be filled with Cosmos at this point. Honestly, I went into real estate because I had no clue what else to do. And I knew I did need to help pay the mortgage on the house that Jeff, my husband and I had recently purchased at the time. So for me, the transition into entrepreneurial world wasn't really a hard one. I naturally have lots of drive and ambition, and I had the goal of remaking that paycheck so that I didn't disappoint my husband.

But I will admit, there's a few things I'd wish I'd known in advance about being your own boss. Since there's no onboarding manual for going into business for yourself, I'll let you consider this episode the girlfriend's guide to starting a business. The real deal of it, you could say. Because here's what I have found along the way. And I've got 10 of them. So stay with me because you might find that one or two you didn't even think about.

Number one, girlfriend, there are no promotions, paid holidays, or other goals to celebrate. Holy cow, no one is bringing cupcakes into the break room because it's Sally Sue's birthday and...

You really can let go of the expectation that, Hey, I'm going to have a yearly review with my boss. And at the end of two years, the next step up the ladder goes from junior consultant to full-fledged consultant. And then in five years, you're expected to make manager. And then three years after that partner or whatever the career path is that you thought you were on. There's really no path in the entrepreneurial world. You have to create it for yourself and

And you have to be okay with following it for yourself. You may think of promotions in terms of being in the corporate world, you know, you got like a bump in the pay raise. So yeah, as an entrepreneurial person, you can have a promotion just in, hey, in 2022, I made X amount of money, and it increased 15% in 2023. That is in fact a promotion. But there's no set guideline for when that's coming. And you have to be okay with that when you're your own boss.

All right, number two, you might gain a pound or 10. I mean, let's just be honest, ladies, half of us are working from home now and our offices are probably on the same floor or really close to the kitchen. So when you are not feeling creative or motivated, or you have a lack of energy for the day, or heck, just when you're bored of checking your email, you might find that you wander on into the kitchen a little bit more often.

The other thing is because you're sitting sedentary at your own desk, you know, in your home, you probably are actually working longer hours without getting up and moving around. So you're not hitting those 10,000 steps anymore. My Apple watch yells at me by three o'clock every single day because I used to hit 10,000 steps earlier in the day. And

And now that I work from home podcasting and doing all the things I do sit in my chair a lot more. And so, yeah, you may gain that weight. If you haven't already gotten into a really good workout routine, I highly recommend going ahead and getting into one now before your business really takes off. All right. Number three, you thought you quit that nine to five for the flexibility only to end up working seven days a week.

It is so easy as an entrepreneur to,

to really just never turn it off. To know that you can always pick your phone up and check the email. You can always respond to someone. Your brain is probably going a million miles a minute with what do you need to do to make the business work, to move the needle forward. Saturday mornings are no longer lazily spent having French toast and coffee on the back porch. They are spent putting together a project plan for the next week so that you know what you need to do in order to be successful.

In fact, you might find that 3 a.m. wake-up calls are happening in your brain because you can't shut your brain down sometimes as an entrepreneur. When you're your own boss, you're never just done with the work.

I wake up at three o'clock all the time and I realized that my dream had turned into what is my to-do list for the next day? How do I need to respond to someone who has said something? What's the next episode of the podcast going to look like? How do we serve our clients the best? And because my brain went into work mode in the middle of the night while I was dreaming, I literally will wake up and then I can't go back to sleep. And I bet a lot of you will find that you'll be in that situation as well.

All right, moving along to item number four on things I wish I'd known and being my own boss is it can get lonely. There, I said it, I will admit it, it can get lonely sometimes.

So make sure that you incorporate some things into your world, like doing a little happy dance when you do hit your goals or making sure that you and your girlfriends have lunch at least once a month, if not more than that, because you'll want to see some of the outside world. And you don't want everything you do to always be a networking event where you have to be

on and in working mode. You just need your girlfriends around you occasionally, and you don't want them to forget about you just because you're not going into the office every single day. So get ready for the loneliness and then figure out how to move through it and over it. Otherwise you are really going to start regretting being your own boss.

Number five, your clothing options become less interesting. Remember how I said that I thought I would get to wear amazing high-heeled shoes and go on shopping sprees all the time? I mean, I guess I can. The truth is I just don't have as many places to wear them to anymore. So the reality of my clothing now is Lululemon loves me. I think I personally provide a good percentage of her PNL.

spandex, workout clothes. Yep, I'm not actually working out. You're probably not either. They're just super damn comfortable to sit in or wear all day long. That becomes the norm. And in fact, the more and more you find yourself in your home office working, the more and more you find that little other things may start to go away. Like,

doing your hair or your makeup or well, bras could become optional. I found this one to be true for myself at one point and then discovered, especially if you find yourself with a lack of motivation or energy in your work, get up and put it back into your routine to take the shower, do your hair. Okay. Sit at your desk and your fuzzy bunny slippers like I am, um,

But maybe do take the time to do the rest of the things because we often, when we feel better about ourselves and how we look, it shows up in how we work. And if we show up to work sloppy and not ready to go, it is a lot easier for our mind to mentally shut down and we can be sluggish and, you know, in what we're doing every day in the task. So kind of take a look at what your clothing options are, what your laundry looks like, how

how often you're going through your shampoo and your makeup and then decide like, do I need to go back to dressing up just a little bit? All right. Number six, you forget to take out taxes and year number one could leave you a big old surprise bank account debit.

Now I was really good and I always have been in my entrepreneurial journey in taking out taxes. I probably take out way more than I should. And I set them aside in a separate checking account every single time I'm

get a commission or get paid for something because I don't ever want to have that oops moment of, hey, the IRS needs their portion too. But I know a lot of my girlfriends have had a problem with this, especially the ones who went to real estate. They go to the closing table, they get the check and

money's already been taken out of the check because you always owe your broker something, and then they'll forget to take out the taxes. And so then when it comes to be April 15th of the next year, they're filing extensions and scrambling to figure things out because they don't have enough excess income sitting in the bank to pay the taxes. So make sure that just because you're not in a W-2 role anymore, where a

corporate company or a boss is taking out your taxes, that you have a good system in place to do it yourself and be really consistent in it. Otherwise it's going to bite you in the butt and you're going to really regret that one.

All right, number seven is being your own boss. You're going to learn how strong you are in some things and how much you suck in some other things. I was recently talking to one of my students and she discovered about being her own boss and being the CEO of her company was it was really driven by sales. What?

drove the needle forward in her business was bringing new clients into her company and having them sign contracts for the product, the work that her company did. And in order to do that, she really had to get out and be networking and be working the crowds and selling in essence in a sales type role. And that just wasn't her jam. It's not the lane she needed to be driving in. It didn't bring her passion. It drained all of her energy.

but she still owned her company and this is what she wanted to do. So what we work through in our mastermind session was she had to go higher to that role. And that was the biggest shock for her to figure out was owning your own business means initially you have to do everything yourself, but if something isn't,

is a big piece of your business, like for her, it was the sales piece and that's not your strength and it's not one you're willing to get better in, then you're going to have to hire out in order to keep the company moving forward. And she had to hire into that role a lot faster as she started her business than she ever anticipated because it was blocking her from moving forward. Some

Sometimes admitting to ourselves what our strengths and weaknesses are is the hardest part of being boss. And it's also the most shocking thing because we might think when we go into business for ourself that we can do it all on our own. Or you might think, hey, I know I'm going to need help in X, Y, Z, only discover that you're not really good at ABC. And that's really where you need someone helping you out in.

All right, number eight, you'll also figure out when you're your own boss, how much ADD you actually have.

There is absolutely no way on the weekend that I'm going to clean the kitchen to the extreme level that I might clean it when I know I've got something I just don't want to do at work to do. I will easily at that point get up and go clean the kitchen. Why? Because I can distract myself with the stuff at home versus doing the work stuff.

We often as entrepreneurs get really caught up in the busy work of things, you know, those little bitty things that make you feel like you're successful, but really aren't doing anything to add to your overall revenue in the business. And that is because our ADD kind of takes over and we can squirrel off in a million different directions other than focusing on the one thing that we really need to do right now in order to make the business work.

I will tell people all the time, you probably only need to work about a four to five hour workday every single day, but you'll find yourself working nine to 10 because you just got distracted along the way. So watch out for all of the ADD that you may discover yourself. All right. Number nine, girl, when you work for yourself, know this budgeting takes on a whole new meaning. It was a

So easy for me to think in the past, oh, fantastic. I own my own business. Everything's a write-off. Well, first off, you need to make sure with your CPA that what you're writing off is legitimate write-offs because you don't want to get in trouble with the IRS. Remember, we've already talked about that one. But the other piece is this.

You have to remember at the end of the day that even if it's a write-off for tax business purposes in your business, someone still has to pay that credit card at the end of the month. There is a massive difference in my husband's job

When his boss says, hey, you can go buy printer ink and he can put it on the corporate card. Well, guess what? His company is then paying that corporate card. It never comes out of our paycheck. We never strike a check for it. Versus if I say we need ink in the printer, I'm going to write that off as a business expense.

Yeah, come tax time, that might be a write-off on business expenses. But in the immediate right now, when I buy that ink from OfficeMax on my credit card, I still have to pay that at the end of the month. So learning how to work your budget on a monthly basis, you've got to get over that mentality of like everything's a write-off because you still do have to pay it in the meantime.

And last but not least, when you learn to be your own boss, you'll learn that accountability can be the dirtiest word ever. Nobody wants it. Nobody wants to be accountable to their business or to have someone else hold them accountable. I mean, heck, you went into working for yourself so that you didn't have that big bad boss hanging over your shoulder every single day telling you what you needed to do, how to do it, and when it needed to get done.

But the truth is every single business has a few fundamental things. There is marketing. There is lead generation. There is the sales funnel. There is social media. It all has to be done in any different business out there in order to really make it something worth having as a business. And if you aren't holding yourself accountable, who else is? You can't.

might be the personality that looks up and goes, yeah, I can do that. I know I need to lead generate for at least, you know, an hour or so every single day, I will put it on my calendar. And by God, I will not get up until I've gotten it done. Or you might be like most of us who are like, oh, gee, accountability, lead generation, I'd rather go to Target. And then we get up and go to Target. Because again, that ADD might kick in. And we think, yeah, I really do need some new laundry detergent.

If you are one of those people, I really do recommend getting a business coach, having someone hold you accountability to your goals and to the things that you need to do every single day to move the needle forward. Because accountability, we think of it as a dirty word. We all cringe when we hear it. But truthfully, it's the thing that you need the most in your business. So get used to saying it and get used to doing it. I'll leave you with this last thought.

You're going to want to quit possibly multiple times a week. You might want to quit because it gets hard. In fact, running a business for yourself is so simple that it is hard. As you get older in the business and as more and more stuff evolves in your business, your dreams, goals, and visions, they may change along the way. And so you might get frustrated that you feel like you're constantly on a hamster wheel, but I promise you it is so worth it.

You are worth owning a business. You are worth working for yourself. You may be the hardest boss you've ever had, but at the end of the day, when you can sit back and say, I did that, I own that. I have financial freedom. I have time freedom. I'm living my best life because I'm running my business the way that I want to run it. It is so worth it, girlfriend. All right. That's all for now. Hey, I hope that you'll take a minute.

And drop into my Instagram at itsjoannbolt. And just let me know if any of this resonated with you today. Did you find yourself laughing out loud at some of the things that maybe you wish you had known but hadn't even thought about? Or just nodding in agreement that, yeah, Jo, I totally realized that the first couple of years of owning my own business. You are spot on, girlfriend. I would love to have that conversation with you. So drop in to my DMs anytime you want. Otherwise, make it a great week and I'll see you next Tuesday.

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