Well, for right now.

This means any number of things from day to day, but mostly it means I have a hell of a time trying to find paying work, and that I have a challenge ahead of me for keeping business separate from family and home life.

Granted, it doesn’t mean I’m not successful with what I do, and how I do it. It just means it’s more of a struggle – or even more an active effort – than working at a regular job with a regular company.

In my time as a self-employed individual, I have learned a couple different things about decision making. I have also never dogged my way through the 9-to-5 lifestyle as a long-term employee, so I have a fairly pristine outlook on goings on when working from home.

What is decision making?

Decision making is exactly as it sounds – choosing between two or more alternatives and sticking with it. In decision making, we make our way through a number of different stages – research, evaluation, choosing, and monitoring – and along the way, we learn a lot about new things we never imagined having knowledge of and take major steps and, at times, risks.

Decision making as a manager is different from decision making as an owner. As a manager, you are spending someone else’s money, leading you to be prone to taking on more risk. As an owner, you are essentially making decisions for your child, meaning life-and-death choices are harder. Of course, very rarely is a decision life-or-death for a major corporation. Wal-Mart can open a failing store and operate it for years to come, and it will survive just fine, so long as other stores make up for its shortcomings.

As a small business, especially home-based, choices are often tougher. We cannot fail for an extended period of time in any area, or things are going to start to go south in our personal finances.

Additionally, small businesses are often in the market for investors and other forms of financial help. If a home-based business owner shows a history of poor choices, getting a credit card or loan in a time of hardship is bound to be more difficult.

Fiscal decisions

When it comes time to make a choice, money often plays a major role in business activities. Sometimes, the choice is between a bad option, such as a loss, or a good option, like a positive return. Other times, we are choosing between good money and better money, or a short-term boom as opposed to a long-term boom. Yet other times, we choose between two evils: an extreme loss of money, or a moderate loss of money.

Money, unfortunately, is going to be at the root of almost all business decisions. Regardless of how we personally feel (which is almost bound to be an emphasis on money anyways), we also have to take into consideration our stakeholders – any employees we have, our families, who rely on our income, and potential investors and creditors.

Ethical Decisions

Sometimes a decision isn’t strictly financial, or can even be completely non-financial. In almost every situation, we will have to come up with an answer to an often challenging ethical dilemma.

While ethics is a topic I plan to cover somewhat frequently and deeply over the years to come, I only want to get into a basic discussion right now. When it comes to ethics, you will need to keep your ethical viewpoint in mind, such as being an enlightened egoist, keep your utilitarian (or not) values in check, and go for a good that you will stand behind. It isn’t always going to be what other people think is right – indeed, we all have different views of ethics – but if you act ethically and in such a way that you view as right, people will respect that.

And now we come to the bottom of the barrel…

Personal decisions

In the meantime, you’re going to be making personal decisions for your own life and your family.

Sometimes, these decisions will involve your business. Often, they reflect on your personality, and come with a public reputation attachment as well.

In making personal choices, you will often influence those people around you who pay attention to you, or even look up to you, or are out to hurt you. Competitors, fans, friends, and visitors will all be looking at your history – including your personal decisions – to determine if they want to give you their business or if they can destroy you.

One key to remember: do not act in a way that betrays you. What I mean by this is that there are difficult decisions and there are easy decisions. Regardless of the level of difficulty, and regardless of what other people think about it, make decisions in a way that you agree with personally. As the owner of a business, you have many reputations to care about, and many stakeholders, such as employees and your family. This means they will try to influence you. If you do not act in a way that you agree with, you will be unable to defend that decision if anybody asks, and you will begin to resent yourself – to feel like you’ve “sold out.” Do not do this.

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Image by Scott Ingram Photography via Flickr

Things become overwhelming. I’m not being negative; I’m being honest. And what do you do when things become overwhelming? Besides cry, that is… You ask for help! And no, I don’t mean seeing a psychiatrist and asking for a healthy dose of Xanax (although, you could do that, too). Today I’m here to talk to you about outsourcing your work.

By outsourcing, I don’t mean off-shoring operations to India.

I mean hiring a marketing company to do your SWOT analysis. Or hiring a copywriter (did you know I’m one?) to help you in establishing a relationship with potential new clients. Or possibly having a personal assistant around to answer simple emails, fetch your coffee, and update your website with your newest products. Or even giving someone else administrative duties over your 401(k) plans.

There. Outsourcing doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?

We all outsource from time to time. If you’re not a website developer, you probably gave someone else the task of creating yours for you (or maybe you just used a point-and-click-to-make-a-design service, in which case… I have no words). If you’re not a writer, you probably had someone else write your copy for you – and unless you’re incredibly confident, someone else edited it.

Sometimes, things can get a little hairy when we’re running a business. You’re not just thinking about your product. You’re thinking about customer relations, public perception, marketing, advertising, design of your website, copy, sales, employee and human resource management, bookkeeping and accounting, benefits packages, revenues and profitability, accounts payable, accounts receivable, customer service, order fulfillment, and then, on top of that, your own personal life. It can be overwhelming.

So what do you do when you’re overwhelmed? Outsource.

If you’re not an accountant, you have no business preparing your own taxes completely by yourself – send those returns to a CPA for confirmation that you’ve done them right and haven’t missed any deductions you could be taking or glaring errors that will get you into trouble. If you’re not into websites, have a web designer run an audit on your website and make sure everything works, everything’s usable, and everything is moving you toward your goal. If you’re not a writer, have an editor check for inappropriate content (hint: there’s more to it than cleavage and innuendo).

Of course, some people do take this idea to the extreme, and such is Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. I don’t advocate outsourcing to an extreme because I have not tried it for myself. However, in a world where we look at self-reliance as best by default, sometimes, try giving somebody else a chance to surprise you. You may find that your life becomes a lot easier and you get closer to operation without headaches.

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