The Unspoken Sacrifices of Being the Boss (w/Seth Mills)

Imagine carving out a life where the only boss you answer to is yourself. It's the entrepreneurial dream that promises ultimate freedom—but what if that freedom is more fiction than fact? Your host, Seth Mills, strips away the glossy veneer of entrepreneurship to expose the sobering truths beneath. In this no-holds-barred episode of Astro Craft Grow, Influence, Invest, I take you through the unanticipated sacrifices and relentless commitment owning your own business truly entails. From personal sacrifices to the relentless nature of a business that never sleeps, I'm sharing the raw realities of what it means to be your own boss.

Prepare to get real about the financial risks, the societal pressures, and the heavy investment of both time and money that the entrepreneurial lifestyle demands. This episode doesn't sugarcoat the trade-offs, nor does it shy away from the stark reality that sometimes, your phone becomes your most demanding boss. With no guests to distract from the message, it's just you and me on a deep dive into the heart of what it really takes to grow, influence, and invest in your business—and in yourself. Subscribe and tune in for an unfiltered look at the entrepreneurial journey, where freedom comes at a cost, and the phone never stops ringing.

Denzel Washington Motivational Speech:
https://youtu.be/e3FfL46OzYI?si=XGxWgVLlYrR4cpo0

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to the Astro Craft Grow, influence, invest podcast. I am your host, seth Mills, and in today's episode we're going to be talking a little bit about how entrepreneurship is very, very far from being free, and once again, I do apologize for the brief hiatus that we have taken since February or January. We had a lot of personal things going on, a lot of things we had to figure out and a lot of stuff going on in the business. Unfortunately, that will always supersede the podcast. However, I am going to be doing my absolute best to get back on the weekly schedule of uploading these out on every Friday at 9am Central Standard Time. So if you like what you hear on the podcast, go ahead and hit the follow, download the podcast and subscribe if you're watching this over on YouTube, and I will see you guys here in a second.

Speaker 1: 0:48

So, guys, I was actually listening to a podcast a couple of weeks ago and in the podcast, the host was talking about how entrepreneurship is far from freedom, which I could not agree with more. Whenever you become an entrepreneur, you're going to find out very quickly that it's going to eat into your time. It's going to take away from friends. It's going to take away from family, it's going to take away from your job. It's going to take so many things away from you, but it's also going to give you so many things at the same time. So, while it may not be freedom, it's freedom in the sense of you work for yourself. You don't have to answer to somebody else unless you have shareholders, and at that point then it becomes you're working for a corporation that you build. So whenever I say that entrepreneurship is not freedom, it is in the sense that you make your own schedule. But it isn't, because in reality, if you're really pushing yourself as an entrepreneur, you're going to be working 12, 16, 18 hour days sometimes and you're going to have to tell all your friends and your family like I'm sorry, I can't make it. I'm sorry I can't be there. You're going to miss family birthdays, you're going to miss holidays. You're going to miss a lot of different things as an entrepreneur that you wouldn't miss otherwise, right? So if you have a nine to five, you can put in time off requests. You can say, hey, I can't be here this day. Hey, I have something to do. When you're an entrepreneur, you can't do that. You have to answer the phone. The phone doesn't stop ringing just because it's a holiday or just because it's a birthday, and that's especially true in the service industry. We have people call us every holiday, like on the day. Typically it's because of something's going wrong or they forgot about it to the last second and they expect us to work on our holiday because they forgot about it prior.

Speaker 1: 2:44

So whenever we delve into this podcast episode, it's really just taking a closer look at the idea that being an entrepreneur means having freedom, but it also means that it's not always that simple, right, because while starting your own business, it might seem like the ultimate freedom. We're going to talk about the challenges and the pressures that entrepreneurs face financial risks, uncertainties, dealing with expectations from society and all the regulations that come from being in a specific industry. I'm very, very lucky that our industry has not fallen under any of the organizations that mandate different safety concerns and other things yet. However, it is coming, as it will end up being in every industry, right. So join us as we break down the myth that entrepreneurship equals total freedom, and let's get more in depth in this episode.

Speaker 1: 3:39

So the first point that I want to hit is that a lot of people dream of becoming entrepreneurs because they see it as a path to freedom right, we've already been over that. But First you have financial risks, right? So starting a business, it often requires a pretty big investment of time and money, and if you have a lesser investment in money, then it requires a bigger investment in time. And then vice versa, if you have less invested in time, then typically it becomes more of a money issue to hire people to run it for you if you don't have the time to run it yourself, etc. Etc. Right? So entrepreneurs, often I mean and let me back up there's also no guarantee of success. Right, you can pour your money and your time into something 24-7, 365 days of the year. You're not always going to. It's not always going to be a winner. Right? I tried developing three different other companies before I hit my success right here, before I was able to fully pour into one thing and before I fully said, okay, this is going to be a winner, it's already working, let's focus everything we have into it. Right?

Speaker 1: 4:52

Entrepreneurs also often put their personal finances on the line, which can create a lot of stress and uncertainty, and that can ultimately cause an entrepreneur just to give up on their dreams, because if something doesn't work, we live in a very I don't want to say a very entitled generation, but we live in a generation where everybody wants everything. Right now, amazon, for one, ruined it for a lot of people with their two-day and next-day shipping right. So if somebody orders something, they expect them to have it the next day, and that also screwed a lot of small business owners out right. So whenever there's uncertainty and there's people wanting to becoming uh, to become an entrepreneur, they have these staples and these myths and these stipulations that it's going to be instant, overnight success. And that's just not how it works, right? Um, and I I mean getting back to that like next we're gonna talk about, like uncertainties.

Speaker 1: 5:58

I mean, in the business world, things can change rapidly. What works today may not work tomorrow. You may have a product that is doing extremely well today and then tomorrow zero sales, right. So we're always having to constantly adapt to shifting market trends and also consumer preferences, which, in my experience, it can feel anything but like freedom. Because if you're constantly having to go and change and adapt, you're going to have to be working overtime, you're going to have to be working once the day's over. There's no nine to five.

Speaker 1: 6:33

When you're an entrepreneur, if you're the entrepreneur running the entire show, even if you're on the back end cutting checks, you're still getting calls, you're still going to have to answer to people, you're still going to have to help your employees, you're still going to have to contact your customers every once in a while and still have a hands-on approach, right? Yeah, you're always going to be working, whether you realize it or not. There's times where it'll be 11 o'clock at night and I'm laying in bed still thinking about work, thinking what I could have done differently that day, thinking what I can do tomorrow to expedite something or make more money. And that's the way that an entrepreneur has to think to succeed, at least in our generation, and not only that. Then there's the pressure from society and expectations from society, because people often always have very high expectations for entrepreneurs, right? Expecting them to be innovative, successful and constantly hustling. And the pressure. It can be overwhelming and it can make it feel like there's no room for failure, when, realistically, failure is what drives us to succeed more and more and more.

Speaker 1: 7:43

Um, whatever you, you have failure going on. It's, it's one of those things that it's a building block, right? So if you're failing, you're doing something right. You are going. I mean you're, you're trying right, and if you're doing something right, you are going. I mean you're trying right. And if you're failing, then you're going to be learning from those mistakes.

Speaker 1: 8:05

Um, I, I, personally, I had three companies that failed before I found the one that started, uh, or that took off, like I mentioned earlier, and the failures are what pushed me to continue going. A lot of people, if they fail, they say, oh well, better luck next time. But with me, when I fail, it's like one of those things where I have to push myself to do better, just to prove to myself not to prove to everybody else, but to prove to myself that I can make it and that I can do it Right. So I, I, just I, uh. What I want to get across, the point I want to get across today, is that if you're failing, at least you're trying. You're doing more than 95% of the population, um. So keep on going, push through it, you can get it, and and you're going to end up having a success. I can't tell you when, I can't tell you if it's today, tomorrow or 50 years from now, but if you keep trying, at some point you are going to succeed and there's this stigma that you have to succeed on the first or second time. Or you're not going to succeed at all on the first or second time, or you're not going to succeed at all, and that's just not accurate. That is not accurate.

Speaker 1: 9:28

Thomas Edison, I believe he made over a thousand light bulbs and a thousand, and first was a light bulb and it worked. He kept trying. That's what I'm getting at. There's a very good quote. I'll have to find it for the next episode. That's what I'm getting at. There's a very good quote. I'll have to find it for the next episode. Denzel Washington did a very, very good motivational speech for a college campus at their graduation and he used that example. I will have to find it because I would love to plug that here or at least in the bio on this episode. As a matter of fact, I will link that link on this episode like description or bio. So just go to this episode, click bio, click description and the link will be there. I'm going to make sure that I put it in there for this episode because it's a really good list and it's like six or seven minutes, but it just talks about failure more in depth and having a fallback plan or not having a fallback plan.

Speaker 1: 10:23

It's definitely something you guys should listen to, though, and finally, when we look at business freedom, there's a lot of regulations and red tape. I mean, you have a lot of rules and regulations, from taxes to licensing requirements to employment laws, and in navigating all of this, it can be very time-consuming and frustrating and, again, it will continue to take up your time, especially because laws change every year in September, and, as a business owner, you have to stay up to date with them or it could come back and haunt you and it could potentially bankrupt you. Um, now, a lot of business owners find loopholes, and they find where they can have a little bit of gray areas. I, for one, don't like doing that, just because it's it's very dangerous to mess with a lot of people in the government, so I do my best to stay as honest as I humanely can be, you know, but it's just one of those things where you have to stay up to date on everything. I'm just trying to give you guys all of the different things that could potentially be going on as a business owner that you may or may not realize, right.

Speaker 1: 11:42

A lot of people aren't going to think about regulations and what they're going to have to do to do that and everything else that comes along with being a business owner, until they're already a business owner. And then it's like, oh well, I did this to have freedom, but now I have less freedom than I did with my nine to five right freedom, but now I have less freedom than I did with my nine to five Right. Um so when we talk about entrepreneurship and freedom, it's very important to recognize that the reality is far more complex than the dream. Um now, while entrepreneurship can offer a sense of independence and autonomy, it also comes with its own sets of challenges and constraints. For example, what we we talked about in this episode and I know it was a short episode, but I just wanted to hop on here push out an episode for you guys.

Speaker 1: 12:25

Next episode will be probably a normal 30, 40 minute long episode Going to try and get our co-host, nick Dawson, back with us for that episode, but we will see what comes from that, from that. But I do appreciate you guys for listening. That's it for today's episode. Join us next time as we continue to explore the fascinating world of entrepreneurship. Thanks for listening. I am your host, seth Mills, and thank you once again for tuning in to the Astro Craft Grow Influence Invest podcast. We will see you next Friday at 9am.