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Old 07-07-2009, 07:44 AM
RSTech RSTech is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Pain Court, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 174
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I've owned my own business for just over 5 years now which I work at full time. Although there are a great number of pros, here are some of the cons I've experienced:

1) Getting new customers. This is a real challenge. I know my skills can be applied in many companies however it is very difficult to get your foot in the door. Often times marketing dollars are spent with no return on the investment.

2) Paperwork. Processing the bills, invoices, GST, PST, taxes, customer statements, etc. is time consuming. If you're not doing it yourself you're paying someone to do it. At times this can take up to 20% of my time. That's time that I'm not making money.

3) Vacation. It is hard to get away from the business for any length of time. The customers will still call. After 3 years in business I finally decided to just schedule some vacation time but it is still difficult to take more than 1 week at a time. Long weekends are easy to take however.

4) Long hours. Now this is a funny one. With my job I have always put in long hours, just the nature of my work. That being said, my first year in business I put in less hours but that quickly changed as my business grew. 60 to 80 hours a week was very common. In this recession its not so common anymore, more like 40 hours a week now.

5) Constantly defending your prices. Customers always want to talk your price down. Doesn't matter if you are the cheapest guy in town, they want to pay less. You need to have thick skin to handle all the comments about how much you charge. I'm always being bombarded for freebies and lower rates. This has always been the case for me.

I'm sure I have a few more cons but this is a start.
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RSTech
Industrial Automation & Integration
www.rstechnologies.ca
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