Young Entrepreneur Blog

Our recent post entitled: 7 reasons why working online is better than your job was a big hit. A reader called Super Mike had some additional reasons why you should consider working from home.

His reasons are so good that we thought they deserved a post of their own, so Mike, let us know your website URL so we can credit you properly.

From Super Mike:

* When you work 3x as hard for your dead-end cubicle job employer to meet HIS deadline, he reaps the benefit. But for yourself, you can work 3x as hard and reap the benefit yourself. In fact, as a freelancer, this should be one of the first things you do in your first few months. You’ll be surprised to find out how easy it is to make your last salary in the first 6 months of work or less. It’s amazing how much an employer can skim off the top of your back, making you believe that it is so hard to give you a promotion because there “just isn’t any budget for it this year”. Yeah, right. Meanwhile, the boss purchases another yacht, drives a fancy SUV, gets an expensive golf club membership, travels only with first-class accommodations, and gives his kids a fully paid ride through college.

* If as a web developer, then you get to stick with the language and tools you like to use, not whatever your employer wants you to use.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, when the boss wants you to hand you an impossible project and a ridiculous deadline, you often have to take it or suffer a bad performance review. As a freelancer, you get to deny those projects and even get a chance to negotiate a better rate or a deadline that you think you can meet.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, if you get a lame manager or lame HR rep. that cannot do their jobs properly, you have to suffer and take it. As a freelancer, you do not have this and you often can drop a belligerent client like a rock and have another client the next morning.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, if your boss wants you to work with a lame file server, lame computer, lame web development server, or lame database server, you have to sit there and take it. Not so as a freelancer.

* Occasionally on the Internet, but definitely not rarely, there are people on the Internet who have tiny little $75 computer tasks that might take them all day and cost them a lot more cash. As a freelancer, you can take these little tasks and knock them out in 15 minutes (and if not, then you can get better at this over time until you do). That’s $300 an hour — about the same as most lawyers make.

* At a dead-end day job, your boss’s client base usually was grabbed the old-fashioned way with cheesy sales guys on golf courses, telemarketer calls, or flights all over the place. But as a freelancer, clients see your listing on a board or an inexpensive ad, or read your blog, and send you requests in your inbox. It’s far more efficient and has far less overhead.

* Your appearance, race, gender, physical health issues, and many other factors are not important to your freelance clients, but they can be debilitating items in a regular day job that may cause you to lose a promotion, get you fired, prevent you from getting clients, or prevent you from even getting that job.

* In a dead-end cubicle job employee, when you get excited about the fantastic income opportunities about the next big thing on the Internet, such as a new programming language or a new technology platform — you often cannot jump on these opportunities and must watch it on the sidelines while others capitalize on these moments. But as a freelancer, you can read a few books, read some website content on the topics, run some tests, and jump right in within a week on these new platforms.

* When you have an illness or a death in the family, you can often negotiate better pauses in work schedules with your clients than you can when you work for a dead-end cubicle job employer.

* When you work in a dead-end cubicle job, your employer often brags to potential clients about your talents as if they are HIS. If he misses mentioning a talent to his client, he could potentially lose the deal and you never had a say in the matter. So you are limited. However, as a freelancer, you get to pitch your talents to your clients as best you can and more directly, and reap the benefit. Also, in that dead-end cubicle job, your employer used your talents to lure in new business, skims most of the cash off the top for the guys in the Executive Wing, and then tell you they don’t have a budget to promote you. As a freelancer, you don’t have to sit there and take that.

* Just as you said, clients are out there 24×7×365. You can literally wake up at 3am in any timezone, put out a cheap Internet ad for your services, and get a potential client email within two hours, if not more clients than that.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, when you are running late, you have to risk life and limb to drive faster to work, often forgetting things that are so far back at home that you cannot retrieve them. As a freelancer, when your client expects you at 9am for a conference call, you literally get up at 9am, flip on the laptop, and you’re ready for business — no rush, no fuss.

* In a dead-end cubicle job, you waste a lot of expensive fuel getting to and from work, and for many people it’s often as much as one hour to get there and back. As a freelancer with a business online, about the only time you worry about fuel is when you want to head to the beach!

* As a freelancer, you can take vacations any time you want, and as often as you want. You may have a client deliverable you’re still working on, but at least you can work on it easily while on vacation without having to have a physical presence in someone’s office. For many people in dead-end cubicle jobs, they get hounded on their mobile phones and pagers while they’re trying to enjoy their vacations. As a freelancer, you don’t have to have any of this.

* Getting sunlight, fresh air, or communing with nature is important for us as humans. Many cubicle day jobs don’t give you enough of this. As a freelancer, you can get as much of this as you want, relaxing with a laptop.

* There are many online businesses that, once you get started in them, can often work in autopilot without much attendance to them, earning you cash while you do something else. You can’t get that in a dead-end cubicle job in most cases.