Consider the plight of the average worker who reports to a superior forty hours per week while at a company where she has no long-term passion. This tradition of working nine-to-five for someone who will employ you for life is unlikely to be a common reality in the future and is irrelevant to a potential entrepreneur anyhow.
Working for someone else is a great way to get started in the business world, but it’s not where an entrepreneur with lofty goals will want to remain. Fortunately, having a high level of quality output as someone’s employee will ultimately help you ascend “the corporate ladder.” The more hours you spend ascending the ladder, by producing high quality work over a long duration, the more money you will be able to put away due to a combination of base salary, promotions, overtime pay and bonuses.
Your accumulation of wealth as an employee can create some padding for your family, which you can invest in a business or save to provide extra security in case of a missed paycheck. Ultimately, to maximize your take-home pay as someone else’s employee, you need to work your way up to become the person who is in charge: i.e., the boss—the one who determines how the money is spread.
Alternatively, you can take away the knowledge, contacts and cash that you gained as an employee to start your own business where you’d have no choice but to be the boss. In this case, your current bosses and coworkers could conceptually constitute some of your new company’s board of directors, board of advisors, employee pool, or shareholders.
If someone else is your boss, he will not be inclined to help you earn the absolute maximum value that your efforts can create since, by design, some of your pay directly or indirectly comes out of his and his partners’ pockets. However, if you become the boss or a partner, the sky is the limit because you will keep the maximum, fair and legal amount of money that is generated from your hard work.
