GoFaxer Blog

There is a common perception that going into business for yourself is a dangerous approach to life. I read a great article by Bill Buxton at BusinessWeek.com about this issue. He make the distinction between gambling and risk taking. He says:

“. . . just because someone won a multimillion-dollar windfall by buying lottery tickets with their retirement fund, or survived running a treacherous river without any training, the fact is not altered that what they were doing was gambling, not investing. The end result is as unrepeatable as it can be inadvisable.”

He submits that running your own business is in fact a risky venture, but not a dangerous one. Dangerous is where you throw caution to the wind and allow fate to be your guide, whereas entrepreneurship allows you to mitigate a lot of the factors of the risk. By making smart decisions that decrease your costs, like choosing to use email fax, you decrease your risk. And by making smart decisions that increase sales, like hiring an amazingly talented sales manager, you further decrease the risk of failure.

When you consider the fact that there is no guarantee that the cushy and comfy corporate job that you have is going to be there forever, think again. With a constantly fluctuating market place, no job is safe. At least with owning your own business, you control the risk factors to a greater degree than you might working for someone else.

That, to me, doesn’t seem risky. It actually seems safer.