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Though still in my early 20`s, I`ve been interested in small business and the entrepreneur mindset for many years. I grew up in a small town of just over 2,000 in population. Aside from factories for two fortune 500 companies and other opportunities offered in a much larger city a half-hour away, many people in my town are employed through local small and home-based businesses. I learned to appreciate a well managed small business early in life when I took my first web design job (the Summer before entering high school) for a business with a small downtown office and five other employees.
Fast forward six years and I`ve now had the opportunity to work for a larger retail chain, which confirmed my dislike for big business, and another small IT business, which is very much a love/hate relationship at this point in time.
I have been with a web hosting company for five years now. I started out on their technical support team and now serve as operations manager for the entire support division. It`s been a great place to learn business fundamentals - both the rights and wrongs. The two owners are young entrepreneurs themselves; I am older than both of them. But it seems that the happy times are behind me now. The business has failed to show any recordable growth for the past 18 months and I feel the interest of both business owners slipping away as they begin to focus on other aspects and opportunities in their lives. The moral breaking-point for me is that the rest of my support staff can sense the lack of direction as well. They look to me for signs of stability, for assurance that they are not wasting their time by showing up to the office each day instead of going out and searching for a position with another organization that actually seems to give a hoot about its employees. And I can no longer honestly give them that assurance. My gut tells me that in the next 6 months at best we`ll still have a decent team but still no direction or hope, and at worse... they`ll be short four core full-time employees, including myself.
So this is where I stand today. Ready to make the big leap (one small step at a time) toward my very own startup adventure. My current employment takes a lot of time out of the day but also allows me plenty of flexibility in when and where I serve that time so hopefully with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, I`ll be employer-free sometime over the coming months.
Thanks for reading my drawn out tale.
I needed to get some of these things off my chest tonight.
* I`ll get a post up about my business ideas tomorrow - the night comes fast and I got an early morning ahead of me. Thanks again for reading!
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C. Aaron
