illness vs. one-man-business

[duncan drennan]

Yesterday I was diagnosed with glandular fever which has stimulated a whole lot of thoughts that have been lurking around in the back of my mind.

Dave put it really nicely in the BEE submission, something to the effect of

For example, a 50 employee firm has 50 x 8 x 22 = 7300 hours/month to handle the 5 major business
functions: sales & marketing, human resources, production, finance, administration.
Our 5 man SME competitor has just 5 x 8 x 22 = 730 hours to handle almost the same level of admin.
And our entrepreneurial start-up SME is carrying the same load in just 160 hours!

What has been lurking in my mind the past couple of weeks is the difficulty of being as efficient as possible. Essentially a one-man-business (OMB) has the challenge of waking up and being 90-100% efficient every single day - and that is just to be able to handle the day-to-day tasks!

There is no one to pick up the slack if you have a bad day

The main reason this has been going through my mind is because I've been trying to figure out how to sustain and grow the business and still fit in enough work to be productive enough and grow the cash flow. Obviously this is made much harder by being a startup, and my product being a service - my service in particular.

Now I'm faced with the challenge of potentially not being physically able to be 100% efficient (glandular fever is viral and you pretty much just need to rest it out, approx 4-8 weeks - for more info look here)

It is relatively easy to protect against major things like ending up in hospital (income protectors and insurance - difficulty here is getting the level of protection right, cash flow vs. risk), but being out of action, or having reduced effectiveness due to being sick is a bit more difficult.

So, what do you guys think?