Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

Running your own business is great. At least it’s great for me. One of the things that I like is there’s nobody else to hold me back. There’s nobody to make me stand by their bad decisions.

I also like that I schedule my time, and this works out great for me. I have a dog and I have no guilt from being at work all day because the most I’m away is four or five hours, usually less, and he’s fine with that.

But the trade off is that I just sent out a bill to a customer and it’s very late. I spent most of this evening working, because I was working on finishing up a milestone of sorts, and just wanted to get it out of my hair. But those last minute details always take longer than you think. You know you’re essentially done but it’s still 3 more hours of work until you stop working. Here are some of the things I have to do when I’m “done”:

• Code review and check in code.
• Create tags for new versions of themes and plugins.
• Copy new code to secondary environment, production or customer test environment.
• Investigate and fix any weird bugs between my environment and theirs (often due to accidental hard coding of values.)
• Write up customer facing descriptions of all the tasks I did for the latest work.
• Create an invoice.
• Send invoice to the customer along with executive summary of what was done and good tidings.
• Schedule meetings and list customer requirements for upcoming work.
• Send customer supporting documentation, such as instructions or screen shots.

I’m sure there’s more, but my point is, all this stuff takes a long time. During this finishing process you’re often wrapping up loose ends that can send you back to square one. When you’re so close to being done, you tend to get obsessive about finishing, which means you’re up late working because you’re almost there.

I can see why businesses fail. I can see how a lot of people aren’t cut out to do this. I have huge motivation for running my own business, I like the lifestyle and in addition to my work related skills I have business and accounting degrees. I just don’t see how people without this would be able to do it.