Back from Vacation With a Bang

I took a brief hiatus from posting while enjoying a little sun, sand, and relaxation on Maui this past week. The trip itself was fantastic but I was reminded that as an entrepreneur you don't really get time off as I spent part of the trip dealing with a government agency and even took an order for a new retailer while I was away. Course at the same time my significant other was also spending a fair amount of time on his blackberry so perhaps the days of the true get-away vacation simply no longer exist.

Vacation has ended with a bang though and it's now back to work. Not only am I leaving for a big tradeshow later this week (and have yet to finalize everything for that) but I am also starting another type of work tomorrow morning - at 4am!

As I mentioned before, this blog is about the uber-small business that doesn’t have any venture funding behind it. Despite the fact that I learned in my Entrepreneurial Finance class that an entrepreneur should take a salary from Day 1 – that’s mighty hard to do when the business is self-funded. I mean, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to cash out assets, plow them into the business and then give yourself part of it back in the form of a salary (not to mention the fact that you’ll be getting taxed twice on that money).

While one day I hope to take a salary or at the very least, take a bonus based on annual profits, we’re not at the “profits” stage yet. So what’s a gal to do?

Turns out that I’m getting myself a part-time job. The part-time job is not glamorous and the hours are crack-of-dawn and the pay pales in comparison to what my bschool colleagues are making, but it is doing something I enjoy, have experience in, and am good at. Plus, best of all, the part-time job employers know that I too am running my own small business full-time so respect the fact that I am only looking to work several hours a week and are scheduling those hours so that they don’t conflict with the typical operating hours of my business (like I said, these part-time hours are darn early). They also don’t have a problem with the fact that there are certain weeks that I’ll be out of town for my business and that I refuse to work weekends simply because I want to actually spend time with my significant other (to be frank, given my list of requirements I was shocked they offered me the job!).

Why am I doing this? I believe that every entrepreneur goes through a suffer phase at one point or another (perhaps more than once?) when the business is nascent and cash is tight. For many successful entrepreneurs we’ve all heard about, this is the time when they run up all their credit cards to make it through. That I believe is sacrifice because you’re at the point where you don’t know whether the business will make it but regardless you’re going to be paying off those bills for a long time to come (baring bankruptcy of course).

Unfortunately I’m not wired like that. My banking father drilled into me the importance of not running up credit card debt to the point where I simply cannot do it without having a nervous breakdown. So since my sacrifice can’t come in the form of credit card debt, I figure it should come in the form of a part-time job.

I’m not expecting to make a ton of cash with this part-time gig, but I’m hoping it will be enough to keep me from stressing about the fact that my bank account is hitting rock bottom and give me a little extra spending cash to buy that occasional coffee (I am in the Northwest so drinking coffee is almost a residency requirement) or even take my significant other out for the dinner I so owe him!