One Day I'll Work for Myself by Benjamin C. Waterhouse

Author:Benjamin C. Waterhouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

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* Please note: I was unable to independently confirm the figures cited by Mr. Koach comparing the relative cost of SEC form filing and four-year tuition at MIT.

7

BE YOUR OWN BOSS

One day in 1989, my father came home from selling industrial machine equipment all day and announced that he had quit his job. At forty-five years old, he was sick of commuting to work in a jacket and tie every day, only to work for someone else and draw the same paycheck week after week. He was a good salesman, he figured, and he knew the local market for small-scale industrial machinery. So from that day forward, he would answer only to himself. He would be self-employed.

I don’t recommend my dad’s approach as a model of marital responsibility. My mom was somewhat put out to learn, without warning, that she would now be the family’s sole breadwinner for the indefinite future. Nonetheless, my family’s story is a poignant example of how pervasive the ideals of self-employment and independent business ownership had become by the end of the 1980s. The virtues of individualism, of breaking with the established order, and of taking advantage of an opportunity to develop something new all had become thoroughly baked into American culture. The siren call of starting your own business seemed to sing louder than ever.

The national press breathlessly perpetuated that message. Throughout the 1980s, reporters paid particular attention to the apparent trend of high-ranking corporate executives walking away from the rat race. A fifty-nine-year-old financial executive named Robert Ritchie, for example, seemed to embody an idyllic, if somewhat stereotypic, dream. Facing the imminent threat of being laid off, Ritchie decided to redefine his circumstances on his own terms—by taking an “early retirement” and buying a country inn in Vermont. There, he reported, he finally found his bliss. He was “earning less money, working longer hours, and enjoying it more.”1

Combining corporate skills with a lifelong passion—that became a running motif as be-your-own-boss stories proliferated.

In 1985, after seven years as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), thirty-six-year-old Jim Koch decided to change things up. “Being a consultant makes you cocky,” he told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. “You think you can do anything.” In Koch’s case, “anything” meant starting the Boston Beer Company, whose signature Samuel Adams beer is often credited with launching the craft brewing movement in the United States. While Koch’s success was unusual (and delicious), his determination to go it alone wasn’t. His former bosses at BCG estimated that some 30 percent of people who left the consulting firm in the mid-1980s went on to start their own companies.2

These folk tales played critical cultural roles. First, they linked the old reverence for small business ownership with the new excitement around entrepreneurship. After all, both Ritchie’s Vermont inn and Koch’s brewery were prototypical small business ventures, even if the latter became an internationally recognized brand. And second, they gave the impression that successful, liberating self-employment was widely achievable. If

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