Business Philosophy

I was at an educational seminar a week ago sponsored and hosted by ASBA, the Arizona Small Business Association. We were talking about branding our businesses to help recruit the best employees, which isn't really important to this post at all.

I was talking to Donna, one of the owners of Network Dogs, Inc. She said that she and her husband (another owner) would rather make $1 profit on 1,000,000 customers than $1,000,000 on 1 customer. Her reasoning was that they couldn't give the level of service they wanted to and didn't have the resources to handle the big contract, but they could help many small companies.

That got me thinking and today I finally found the correct articulation for my business philosophy. My philosophy is that I'd rather spend 8 hours a day working for 5 clients than 40 hours a week working for 1 client.

Here is my reasoning. My business is to provide administrative and bookkeeping services to small businesses on an as needed basis. This means that I am a contractor who sells my professional services to people who don't need a full-time employee. Spending forty hours a week, every week, working for one company makes me less of a contractor and more of an employee. There may come a time (rather soon) where I may need to go back to being an employee for a while, but I'd rather not. I'd rather have the experience that comes from working for a number of different clients. I've also found that I like working with small businesses. They are fun and interesting. Sure, I sometimes miss the corporate environment, but not enough to want to go back there forever.