11 More Things to Know Before Starting Your Solo Business

You've been thinking about striking out on your own for years. 11 more things to consider before going for it.

So you want to know what it’s like and/or what to watch out for when starting your own business? If so, here is my initial “10 Things to Know” list, but I soon realized I had much more to say. So here’s part dul¹ of my things to know before starting your own business list, AKA 11 More Things to Know Before Starting Your Solo Business:

Being self-employed, My social life at work largely consists of talking to a sound-reactive guitar strap

11: You may need more money than you anticipate

On that note, you may think you have your expenses budgeted out, but inflation in terms of how much things cost, plus “lifestyle inflation” can change things a lot. My big driver is the two additional children that our family added since I started working for myself.

Other than that, we tend to live a fairly frugal lifestyle, but whether through extravagance, or via life changes, new costs add up fast.

12: You can keep business expenses low… but not $0

My expenses for running my business range from a few hundred dollars to over a thousand dollars depending on the month.² Expenses can be anything from software licenses (e.g. Autodesk Fusion 360), to travel, to manufacturing printed circuit boards that I sell here (and the necessary postage to send them off).

While there are some things I can write off as business expenses for tax deduction purposes–e.g. part of my house “rent” value, utility bills, and repairs–at the end of the day it would likely be much less expensive just to have a smaller house.

If you made $80,000 before as an employee, but make $80,000 now you’re actually making less money. On the other hand:

13: No commute is a HUGE benefit

The average US worker spends roughly an hour total commuting to and from work every day (i.e. 30 minutes each way). At my last job I spent about an hour on the road each day, driving approximately 44 miles.

Given light traffic in the area, it was a pretty easy commute all things considered, but still that’s 5 hours per week, or about 250 hours a year(!) over 50 weeks. I.e. 250 hours that I could have spent with family, working out… playing video games, staring off into space…³ Or $25,000 at $100 per hour if one was very ambitious.

Also, 44 miles at $.70 per mile per IRS deduction guidelines is $30.80 per day, 154 per week, or $7700 per (50 week) year. Even a rather average commute can leave over $30,000 ($25,000 time + $7700 vehicle) of value on the table versus working from home.

One might also seriously consider living closer to work, or prioritizing a remote job, but that’s for another newsletter.

…Unless you commute by bike. In that case, disregard the above bit. Image

14: You need to exercise (but you have time)

When I quit my last corporate job, I was really worried about staying in shape. As an engineer, I was often sitting at my computer, but much of the time was spent on the plant floor, walking from place to place and working on more hands-on problems. I was genuinely concerned that my future more sedentary lifestyle as a writer/consultant would be detrimental to my health.

In reality, I found that I had the time to work out, and that I really need to get out of the house for an hour or so every day. Working out isn’t so much a chore anymore, but an escape that I genuinely look forward to.

But you have to actually do the work and get in the habit. Long story short, after a few changes, and significant consistency, I’m in the best shape I’ve been in since my mid-20s.⁴

15: What about health insurance? Benefits?

The supposed lack of health insurance is one of the biggest things that holds people back from working for themselves. However, it’s not as big of a deal as people think. Our family has a Health Insurance Marketplace plan, which an insurance agent initially helped me set up, though I’m pretty sure I could have done it myself.

This sort of insurance is highly subsidized for incomes up to 400% of the Federal Poverty level, which works out to be $146,320 for a family of five or $60,240 for a family of one. Insurance for my family is fairly affordable premium-wise, but the deductible is quite high. We do have an HSA, or health savings account, which is an excellent way to save on taxes.⁵

16: You’ll miss work friends

To generalize based on my experience as a work-at-home man-spouse, it seems that my wife is way better at making friends than I am. In part, I think this has to do with her meeting up with people in relation to our kids. Maybe if the roles were reversed, I’d be the one out there making friends, but I doubt it.⁶

All that being said, for professional men and women–but I think especially for men–work is your opportunity to meet and hang out with friends while working toward a communal goal. You don’t get that working for yourself. Being a part of other organizations can help fill that void, whether that takes the form of church, a local makerspace, meetups, sports, civic organizations, or whatever else. Still, those are typically once or twice-a-week affairs (at most).

It’s also neat to interact with people who you wouldn’t necessarily run into otherwise. For example, at my last job, one of my coworkers was from Jordan, and it was neat to be able to get to know a bit more about that part of the world⁷.

17: Certain people you won’t miss

While I enjoyed working with most of the people I’ve come across in the professional world, there are definitely some people that I got along with… less well than others. So I won’t miss them.

At the same time, being able to deal with people that can be difficult is a good skill to have. If you don’t get to flex those figurative muscles (while practicing not flexing your literal muscles) I think your conflict resolution skills begin to atrophy. Even if you can still deal with issues properly, they may still bother you more than they should.

Or so it seems. I’ve been out of the work-for-others world for a while, so I may be losing perspective at this point.

18: Self-Employment Complicates Home Loans

This was a whole thing, but when we bought our current house circa 8 years ago I was self-employed–or President of Jeremy Cook Consulting LLC if I wanted to sound important. After getting pre-approved for a home loan (and with 20% + down), I was told that since I had worked for myself for less than 2 years (IIRC) I basically couldn’t prove that I had the proper means to make my loan payments.

This made me rather upset,⁸ considering the person who pre-approved my loan apparently hadn’t done his homework, and his paraphrased response was, “Well, sorry.”

The happy ending was that, I eventually talked to another company who understood that they could use my income before I quit my job to count as time working for myself and got my loan approved. Good to get a second opinion. Perhaps even better to do major financial stuff before going off on your own.

Seriously though, how cool are my business cards?

19: It can be hard to describe your job to others

If you’ve been reading Tech Adjacent for any length of time–first off, thanks–you hopefully have some sense of what I do. I’m an engineer who writes technical and technical-adjacent articles for a variety of customers, drawing on my engineering expertise and experience. I also do other projects that don’t always pay as well, but are good experience.

Still, that’s quite a mouthful. Generally I say that I’m a technical writer, and sometimes reference that I have written articles for Popular Science, because people know that title. That sort of encapsulates what I do. I could accurately say I’m a content creator, but that seems like a made-up job to me.⁹

20: Did I have a productive day? No idea

When you go to work for The Man, The Man typically pays you an hourly wage or monthly salary. If you are at work, as far as you are concerned, you produce a specific dollar amount of value every single day. Working for yourself, there are days that you turn in a big project, worth lots of money, and other days that you make nebulous progress in sales, organization, skill-building, and… writing your newsletter.

While it might seem like grinding out work for paid projects is productive (and it is), that one phone call you make tomorrow may actually net much more money in the long-run. Or maybe you do a certain kind of training that costs you both money and time with no immediate payback. That training could actually may be the most productive thing you do all year.¹⁰

I’m not sure I have any good advice here, but just step back and consider what you’re doing once in a while, rather than grinding away at what you do all the time.

21: You CAN do it!

I once saw a quote (that I’ll go ahead and butcher): “People will tell you that what you’re already doing can’t be done/is a bad idea/is unrealistic.”¹¹. In other words, if you’re making a living as, say, a photographer, some people will still say (or at least think) that this is a bad choice as a job for whatever reason¹².

To be fair, it is hard sometimes. I’d advise saving up as much money as possible before striking out on your own, but working for yourself can be done, and it’s not a crazy idea.

I remember before quitting my job, I asked my account if what I was thinking about doing was a crazy idea. He said no. I was planning on taking that leap to self-employment, but I still felt like I needed permission from… someone I guess. My answer to you:

1 - You don’t need my permission to work for yourself. You don’t need anyone’s permission¹³, but you do need a solid plan (or at least a plan) in-place, preferably one in which you’ve actually run the $$$ numbers.

2 - If you need it (and you have a plan) - you have my permission to work for yourself. There, for what that’s worth. And, in all seriousness, if you want to talk shoot me an email: hi at jeremyscook.com. I would be happy to discuss.

3 - You CAN do it! Rob Schneider and Ice Cube can’t both be wrong.

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1. Hopefully not dull, but dul, AKA two, i.e. one of the seven or so words of Korean I remember from taking Tae Kwon Do as a child. I can still throw a pretty good front kick though.

2. Or quite a bit more than that on the month that my Lenovo Yoga notebook’s motherboard decided to burn itself up. While expensive, I was able to get a new Macintosh notebook shipped to me by the next morning IIRC. It would have been even better if my previous notebook waited to break until the M1 chip came out, but this computer still largely does the job (even if Final Cut Pro has been crashing lately).

3. And yes, as an employee you can get paid to stair off into space. I’m sure I did it sometimes, though in my defense some of that staring off into space time was likely thinking through problems.

4. See 👇

5. What is a bit sickening is how much the plan actually costs before subsidies, which also makes me consider what will happen if and when my income exceeds certain thresholds. the $60K upper limit for a family of one is a reminder that while I make more money now than when I was single, there are many more holes in our proverbial financial boat than when it was a single-person pram.

6. Mostly it’s moms with their kids at the park, story time, etc. I’m not sure how my wife would feel about me coming home with women’s phone numbers all of the time. For that matter, I typically try to avoid any behavior that could be even vaguely be conceived of as flirting–especially with women that could be seen as attractive–which probably comes off as standoffish at times.

7. Most prominently, I always thought the place at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (but not his last crusade apparently) was a movie set. My Jordanian former co-worker informed me that it’s actually a real place called Petra. And that it is pretty rad. Sure, I could have learned that on the Internet, but I didn’t. And it’s better to hear about it from someone who has actually been there.

Also, he brought us baklava from Jordan at least once, which was fantastic (and surprisingly stable freshness-wise).

Petra: A real, actual place. Image: Wikipedia

8. Actually, a lot of things about the home buying process made me cranky. Among other things, I’d advise working with people that do real estate as their actual job, not as a part-time side hustle.

9. Maybe it’s my age. Depending on where you look I’m either a very young Gen X person, or the oldest of the Millennials. In other words I was mostly thinking XTREME sports and the like were things that cool older people did and that maybe I could do someday. Then I got to do some of it (i.e. mountain biking). Perhaps wisely, I was never that XTREME, even if I picked up a scar or two along the way.

…This one time I was riding down this nice trail with a few little jumps and a slight downhill angle and ended up getting thrown over the handlebar, bonked my head, and scraped my chin(?) to the extent that I had to have stitches. I was (as always) wearing a helmet, but I remember waiting for the doctor and reading a pool maintenance magazine that was in the lobby, thinking that the writing was utterly fascinating.

That wasn’t right though. I didn’t have a pool. And that sort of publication certainly didn’t have the funds to hire a David Foster Wallace-caliber writer. For that matter, why was a pool maintenance magazine in the waiting room at an urgent care center? Did I hallucinate the whole thing?

When you go over the handlebars of a bicycle there’s this moment of dread where you think “wow I messed up, I’d better enjoy my last 1/2 second before I get hurt.” But after doing this maybe 15 times, my body was mostly able to react to these conditions, rolling out of it with a bruise or two. The incident above happened when I was still pretty new to this sport and on some very hard-packed dirt.

10. An example in my own life is the day I spent in 2019 learning the basics of KiCad, an electronics design program. Now 5+ years later, I’ve designed somewhere around 50 circuit boards, selling hundreds of them for thousands of dollars in profit. I’ve also written about these techniques and projects in various publications, which meant further cash stemming from this training.

While my per-hour rate for these designs is still somewhat nebulous, I’ve mostly done these things when I didn’t have immediate paid work to complete. Plus, I’ve had a lot of fun with this pursuit.

11. I’d advise you not to use that quote if you watch Edge of Tomorrow with your wife and she says it’s unrealistic how good of shape Emily Blunt is in after she just had a baby. No further comment.

12. Even if, or perhaps because, they dislike their more traditional job.

13. Assuming you live in the United States. I’m assuming North Koreans and the like have to ask permission.