From The Australian, Entrepreneur:
The independence flowing from having your own business can come at a high price, Ed Charles discovers | August 31, 2007
MEN work longer hours than women, and self-employed men work longer still. The problem for the entrepreneur is to take control of the hours worked.
“The self-employed just work a lot more and are a lot more likely to work long hours than the non-self-employed,” says Mark Wooden, professorial research fellow and deputy director of the Melbourne Institute and director of Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.
“Something like 40 per cent of self-employed people are working 50 hours or more — the arbitrary definition of long working hours.”
The self-employed are just as likely as anybody else to be dissatisfied with their work hours, Wooden says. “We think these people would like to work a few less hours, but they feel that they have to keep running their business and keep working these long hours because, perhaps, by not being open some hours you may lose a whole heap of business.
“You don’t want to turn away customers, because if you turn away one customer the word gets around and you end up with no customers.”
In addition to following their dreams, the attraction for many people in becoming self-employed is the ability to work flexibly as a trade-off for the commitment and long hours required in building a business.
Leanne Miller joined Mortgage Choice as a franchisee five years ago, and has increased the size of the business from herself and her husband Nathan to a team of six.
“It is definitely more flexible,” she says. “I suppose, though, being self-employed, it really is up to yourself as to what hours you work. I tend to work quite long hours overall.” Sometimes she works up to 60 hours. “But it is on my terms.”
Miller says she can take time off to drive her children to school at 9.30am, pick them up, and even attend athletics days.
“The only reason I can do that is because I have a great team back in the office now. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to offer the same professional service.” During the first few years in the business she and her husband talked about work all the time, she says.
“But at the moment I think that we have learnt we can talk about other things.”
Bianca Bernaldi Smith is an entrepreneur who has taken control of her work hours, although she still works 50 hours or more some weeks. She has the exclusive import rights for Argentinian fashion label Wanama and runs the Wanama boutique on Melbourne’s Chapel Street. Originally a fast-track management trainee at the Commonwealth Bank, she found herself working seven days a week when she decided to embark on her dream two years ago.
“When we were opening the store it was seven days a week,” Bernaldi Smith says. “I used to work on Sundays as well but I cut that back to try and work on a better work-life balance. Running your own business, you can become a little too involved.
“Sometimes it is better when you go away and have a look at what other people are doing and then come back.”
At the Commonwealth Bank the work was close to nine to five.
Because the trainee program was structured, so were the work hours, and for privacy reasons she couldn’t bring her work home with her.
Now taking work home from the boutique is a fact of life. Bernaldi Smith works 10am to 6pm five days a week in the boutique.
“You don’t have that clear switch-on, switch-off time, which you do when working a 9-5 job,” she says. She will videoconference with Buenos Aires at least once a week for an hour.
“Of course, it depends where you are in the season,” she says. “I suppose that my day ends when they wake up in Argentina and they are at work. So it might be, depending on daylight saving, 9 or 10 o’clock at night.”
What has taken the most discipline is to resist the temptation to discuss work all hours of the evening with Bernaldi Smith’s husband Justin, who works in consulting.
“What does take a toll is how much you have to bring home with you, because I don’t discuss the business with him in work hours. My opportunity to discuss it with him is in normal people’s downtime hours. It is something you work through.”
What she does is have nights where she will not discuss business, and set times — meetings — when they will talk through Wanama. “You just have to be quite strict with how you do it, and I suppose that is something you have to learn,” she says.