Entrepreneurship is great due to the high correlation between effort and success. Starting your own website like this one is very inexpensive and easy to do nowadays. If you want autonomy and believe you have what it takes to create income out of thin air, go for it! There’s nobody to blame for your failures, just like there’s nobody to reward but you for your victories.

Anybody who incessantly complains about their job should just give entrepreneurship a go – they will probably never complain again. A day job is a walk in the park compared to entrepreneurship because of the necessity to wear many different hats e.g. accountant, operations, marketing, sales, producer.

What I’d like to do in this post is provide a rough estimate of how much you have to make as an entrepreneur in order to make equivalent money as a worker bee. Hopefully this post will give you a better idea before taking a leap of faith. After all, you don’t want to quit your job and die alone do you? There’s no honey when you got no money.

Grey Skies On The Horizon

At some point or another, you will be passed over for a raise or promotion. The goal is to actually start strategizing about your future BEFORE this unfortunate event occurs.

Perhaps part of the reason why some men make more than some women is because men are more aggressive in having the compensation talk with management. Back when I was working on Wall Street, I made sure I had a very serious heart-to-heart talk every two years with my bosses about compensation and promotion. I very clearly laid out my goals about when I wanted to get promoted, and how much I was looking to make, in a respectful way of course.

Before each sit down, I made sure my performance to date was solid. I included a short five-to-eight page powerpoint presentation to demonstrate the progress of the business under my leadership. The goal was to make it easy for them to pay and promote me, and it worked. By 27 I was promoted to VP and then to Director by 31 where I stayed for three years until I left to focus on writing.

Towards the end of my career I knew that I would never reach Managing Director. I would have needed to relocate to Hong Kong or New York, and then prove myself for another three years before getting the nod. My manager was at least five years older than me based in NY and wasn’t even an MD. How the heck was I ever going to get ahead? I wasn’t. Once we realize our limitations, we must be happy with what we have or do something. I always like taking action, so I negotiated a severance.