So many of you tell me how happy you are to be working for yourselves. “I never want to be an employee again!”

I’m right there with you. So today, let’s talk about the thing that’s going to lose you this game of Never Will I Ever: acting like an employee in the company you own. 

Because here’s the thing: you’ve been trained to be an employee for a very, very long time. 

Even if you’ve never had a formal job, the American education system was designed to turn you into a productive employee of someone else. Those subconscious habits and expectations we have when we’re employed don’t just fall off because we started a business. 

Most of us carry these ideas with us:  

All of that makes sense in an employee context. If you’re an employee, you show up, you do the job, you get paid. Sometimes, you’re asked to do something you don’t agree with or that doesn’t work out. Your boss doesn’t get to not pay you for the effort.

You were there. The law says you must be paid. That’s the deal.

When you own and run the business, there will be times you work hard, put in long hours, and do the right things…and you get bupkus.  

It sucks, but it’s one of the mindset shifts of business ownership.

You can try that new social media campaign. You can make loads of videos. You can launch a new product or service. You can spend hours polishing something to get it just right. You can do deep research and develop a beautiful report. 

And at the end of all that, you may end up further behind, with less money. 

This is where I often see some of the brilliant founders I work with get stuck. Because sometimes your work is an investment, not a job.

You have bills. You need the business to support you. 

But if you need the business to make a certain amount of money, the question is not, “Why isn’t the business paying me that?” The question is, “What does this business need to do to make that money, how long will that take, and am I willing to do that?”

There’s no real way to skip over this step and say, “I started the business, and the market value of my role is this, so the business should pay me that wage right now.” 

You should absolutely know the market value of your role. (You can’t build a successful business where you’re an unpaid volunteer.) But you also need to figure out and do the activities that both pay you what you want and cover the costs to run the company.

The business doesn’t owe you a paycheck because you filled the time. And it’s never going to pay you for performing the role of So Busy.

A lot of employee work is time-consuming. Sometimes, it’s necessary -- things like designing and building processes, managing change, developing a brand, and getting people on your side need your time and focus. 

But sometimes, it’s time-filling corporate theater. 

Recently, I had lunch with a former client who’s returned to a day job. First thing she said as she rushed in? “Wow, these guys can sure fill up the day.” Chit chat. Finding a conference room. Reformatting. Nitpicking whether that color is really the corporate blue, and does everyone know which Pantone? Are you sure? Let’s review the brand guidelines again.

You know you’ve done it. 

If your company sold 10 hours of work, then your time record also needs to be ten hours of work. So, you make the work take ten hours. Or someone decided to play “not my fault” and now you’re spending a day as Spider-Man pointing at the other Spider-Men.

But now you’re the company. If the thing you used to spend 10 hours on can be done in three, just do it in three. You do not need performative perfection. There’s no Gary to argue that your points have no merit because you had a typo that one time. There are no gold stars (or gold bars) for filling the day.

Being an owner means knowing when you have to spend the time to get it exactly right and when done is good enough. When to say no to a meeting that can be an email. What’s a good use of time.

If your business was your job, this might be an issue for you. Maybe you were a marketer, operator, consultant, or finance person, and you had regular working hours. So you start the business because someone will pay you to do the thing you do, but for yourself. Nothing wrong with that. 

But now you also own the company.

That means there is a whole other pile of work that did not exist in your old job description: sales, pipeline, pricing, cash flow, admin, marketing yourself, etc. You’re responsible for all of it. 

If you used to spend all 40 hours of your week doing your work, you now have a whole other shift after it’s done. 

Buckle up, cupcake. 

If you want to keep your old work schedule, you may realize you have only 20 hours to “do your job.” The other 20 hours may need to go toward the work of owning the business. And by the way, getting the old 40-hour job done in 20 hours does not guarantee you get paid. It means you kept your contractual promises. Unless you get paid up front, you still have to collect the money.

One thing I do with clients is talk through what they’re doing they’re doing and look for the time leaks.

Because we love rearranging the deck chairs. The posting. The scrolling that we are generously calling “research.” The extra two hours on something that was already good enough. The perfectly formatted report no one asked for. The process you brought from your old job because that’s how it’s been done.

In my second year in business, I caught myself doing this. I was creating a monthly board deck. I had this moment of, wait, what am I doing?

There was no board or presentation. 

The board activity forced accountability. But there was no board! I was already reviewing the numbers with an eye to performance against my goals. 

That was my own outdated employee mindset hanging around in the business, wearing a little fake mustache.

So look at your own week and ask:

Pay close attention to that last question. Showing up and passing the time does not yield money in your bank account. It is your job to figure out what does. 

That doesn’t mean every minute of your day has to be some perfectly monetized hustle goblin activity. Running your company and making time to think are important. You get time to human.  Being more intentional in the time you spend on the “job” helps to make space for other things you need and want to do.

But you do have to make it clear to your brain that showing up does not guarantee that you’ll get paid what you made at your job for doing the “same thing.” Less busy work, more getting things done.

Ready to get started? Great, here’s what you do:

Need more help? Book a free 20-minute strategy session.

July 1 regulatory changes. There are loads of state and national labor law changes coming on July 1, including minimum wage, employee privacy, hiring transparency, and reporting requirements. Check this article for updates in your operating locations.

Cheaper general AI models. Last week, I wrote about some of the limits on small business adoption of AI. This week, a company offering an open source version of AI got a significant round of funding.  Open source inference models are less expensive to build and allow companies to customize them for their own data. Less expensive general technology could encourage building of targeted models for general small business use.

ICYMI, here are resources you should know about:

It remains really, really hard to go to jail for not paying your taxes. Last week, comedian Carlos Mencia was arrested in Los Angeles for 12 counts of not paying his taxes. If you live in fear of being jailed by the IRS, here’s some hard evidence: it takes five years of not filing personal and corporate taxes, and a worthwhile amount of money owed, to justify the cost of a legal action. (And residency in a place like Los Angeles with a dedicated Business Tax Fraud task force.) There are lots of things in the world to worry about, but I’m confident in saying that you will not be attaining the title of “one of California’s biggest tax scofflaws.”