Why I Left a Cushy Job to Be My Own Boss

By Thomas H. Roberts
Excerpted from the July 1979 issue of Planning.

In 1978, I left my job as a planning director and went into business for myself. I was 50 years old, with family responsibilities and no independent income.

I'm not sure exactly when the idea for all this started, but I do remember musing, as everybody does now and then, about who I was and where I was going. At 48, I had for a number of years been a planning director for a respected public agency, dealing with "important" people and issues. I had been a planner for nearly all of my adult life. I had a fine staff, a well-appointed office in a fashionable downtown office building, enough salary and fringe benefits to get by and then some, and absolute job security. Mine had been a good career, and by and large I had enjoyed my work.

Yet things were less than perfect. Without ever completely admitting it to myself, I had gradually become frustrated, bored, and impatient with my job. I was bored with an increasingly routine annual work program. I was impatient with what seemed to be an inexorable drift toward more and more bureaucracy, not just in my agency, but everywhere. And meetings!

I was also impatient because of a decreasing ratio between how hard or how effectively I worked and how much I was paid.

I want to stress that these complaints were more a mark of what was wrong with me than with my place of employment. It was no worse than any other of its kind and, in fact, much better than most. No, this was clearly my problem, not someone else's, and it baffled me. The question was: What should I do about it?

I thought about getting another job. But the plain truth was that, after a quarter century of being an employee, what I really wanted was to work for myself, not for some commission, department, or corporation.

Making the switch One afternoon in April 1977, a colleague and I were mulling over a particularly irksome matter when he half-seriously suggested that we both quit our jobs and go into consulting. I went home, thought about it, and something clicked inside me: I was going to work for myself.

My colleague, as it turned out, was not prepared to make the same decision. But for me there seemed to be no turning back. For weeks, I told old friends what I wanted to do and asked for their reactions. Their thoughts were very helpful in many ways, but two results of these discussions were by far the most significant. The first was the inescapable conclusion that self-employed people really liked what they were doing. The other was that I found another planner who not only felt my idea was feasible but had also been thinking along the same lines. Why not do it together?

Now there are advantages to going into business alone, and there are other advantages to doing it with one or more partners. If you go in with a partner, obviously you are not totally independent. You have to agree and compromise on all sorts of things. On the other hand, having a partner can give you a greater measure of flexibility in matters of illness, vacation, work load, and task sharing. It also lets you combine your strengths and compensate for each other's shortcomings.

Looking back, though, by far the most important consequence of agreeing to a partnership was that it eliminated the option of my getting cold feet and backing out.

Getting started Then followed months of sitting around the kitchen table at night, planning the details. What would we call ourselves? What kind of office would we have, and where? Should we incorporate?

Lining up enough money to survive on was, however, the overriding issue. Cash flow is a notorious problem in any small business venture, and we would be starting from scratch, with nothing in the pipeline and no contracts in our pockets. But, unlike many other small businesses, consulting requires no front-end money for inventory and relatively little initial investment in supplies and equipment. The biggest costs are money to live on during the first year, money to meet whatever other continuing personal expenses you may have, and travel expenses.

Although my partner had some private business experience, I had had none, so I took a night school course sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration at a nearby university. I was also reconciled to the fact that, if it didn't work out, I would swallow hard and look for another job.

Taking the plunge Finally my partner and I both resigned from our positions and opened for business, amid some raised eyebrows and a few gasps. The people who knew us best hired us first -- less an act of charity, I hope, than an expression of confidence in our ability to perform. Much of our early work was subcontracted from other consultants, mostly overload work that they couldn't handle internally.

The first year, and especially the first six months, were sometimes exhilarating and sometimes discouraging. It was a great thrill to get the first client of our very own, a small rural community.

After a few years I found that I performed a lot more tasks myself, and I liked that. On a given day, you might find me not only reading, researching, or writing, but drafting, addressing envelopes, filing, or picking something up at the printer.

To a greater extent than before, I also chose my own hours, and they were fairly regular. I also got to choose where I wanted to work much of the time. We located our office in an older part of town, near a square that has the support services we needed and a subway station. The office was about a mile from my home, and I walked to work along pleasant neighborhood streets.

My days were less alike than they used to be. I had some days when I worked alone in absolute, uninterrupted silence and other days when I juggled long-distance telephone calls or pursued a hectic plane schedule.

Competing I also enjoyed the competitive nature of consulting work. For some reason, I have always liked competitive endeavors, even in my hobbies. Somehow I feel that competing for clients on the basis of higher quality and more efficient service is more savory than the institutional turf-and-budget type of competition that confronted me before.

I enjoyed the variety of people I work with: planners, attorneys, managers, technicians, business people. I also enjoyed putting together teams of specialists for different projects and selecting them on the basis of their competence, compatibility, and exact suitability for a particular planning problem.

I enjoyed sharing my career with my wife, because we worked in the business together. For the first time in years, we were mutually experiencing the problems, disappointments, and joys of our work.

Quibbles That's the good part. Now for the other side. It was easier than I thought to accept the total lack of financial security that comes with self-employment, but insecurity is always there. No matter how busy we may be, I know of no dependable way to predict how much or what, if anything, we will be doing next year or even a few months from now.

There are ways to minimize the effects of this uncertainty, like putting aside savings when things are going well, and looking for long-term assignments. But my self-employed friends tell me that you eventually get used to it. What it seems to come down to is this: If you want to be free, you also have to be free to fall on your face.

Another fact of self-employment is that when you stop, everything stops. This problem is lessened somewhat, but not much, by having a partner.

There is also no getting around the fact that the kind of private consulting I do is very hard work. I'm not implying that public employment is easy because I know it isn't. But a self-employed person also has bosses: his customers or clients.

The life of a self-employed planning consultant is clearly not for everybody. We are all different in the kinds of financial and emotional security we need, in the rewards we want, in the ways in which we want to be of service, and in the things that we are willing to put up with as a part of our job. And, as I have learned in my own case, these things can change within ourselves over the years. The things that satisfied me or bothered me years ago are not the same as they are today. But for myself, I have found a way to be independent and still do the kind of work I like best. And I am grateful.

Tom Roberts, AICP, heads Thomas H. Roberts & Associates in Atlanta.