Work on the Business, Not in the Business

Everyone is self employed.

I read the "World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman recently. He had a chapter that discussed how in the past people would go to work for one company and spend their lives there. Now everyone is expendable and most service jobs can be offshored. This means we are basically businesspeople and we are all self employed. Our skills are our business. If we improve our skills we improve our product.

There is an interesting book by Mark D. Csordos called "35 Business Lessons for Entrepreneurs". One of his most interesting lessons was "Work on the Business, Not In the Business". Mark created and ran a mystery shopping business. He found that he was spending alot of time working on spreadsheets and doing work that he should have his employees do. This is working in the business. He decided that he would spend his time marketing his company and getting new business. This second choice is working on the business.

When you are working for someone else and spend time doing work for them you are working in the business. When you go to user group meets, publish articles, and improve your skills you are working on the business. In order to keep your current paycheck coming you have to spend atleast 40 hours working in the business. There is no getting around this. Keep it at 40 hours and spend the rest of your time working on the business.

No matter what you do for a living you will use a narrow set of skills at any one time. However, there is always something new to learn. Look at the market and decide what you need to learn in order to make you more valuable to other employers who will pay you better. Do not waste your time with lower value skillsets that will not increase your income. For example if you are a software engineer, do not work on desktop support skills. Those jobs pay less than what you make. Work on skills that employers need. By need I mean willing to pay more than you currently make. Spend time at home teaching yourself.

If you are a "workaholic" and your employer loves you, you are working in the business. Yes you may get a "surpasses expectations" instead of a "meets expectations" on your review and get a whopping 1-2% greater raise and/or a slightly bigger bonus, but you are not going to get that 20% pay increase you can get by switching jobs. You will also not improve your skills as much as when you target your learning to new skills at home and on your own.

I routinely hear people say that you should do the best job you possibly can all the time. I then ask why? All I hear back is "because" or "you just should". Wait a second, when you buy a product from a business do you think they are always giving you the best service they can? No they are giving you service to the point where it is profitable to do so. If it costs them more money to give you service than they recieve in revenue, then they will not be bothered to lose you as a customer. Your company treats its customers like this. Your company is your customer. Treat them the same. Do a good enough job.

Now some of you will be concerned that co-workers will not think as much of you. That is not necessarily true. You want to impress fellow technical people because they may know about other jobs in the future, but managers are in a different job category and the odds of you running into them again is very small(though it may happen so at a minimum meet expectations). If you improve your skills and become a knowledge base your co-workers will come to you for help. This will impress them and this adds value to your future career. You get these skills by working on the business and not by doing excessive work for your employer. They are just not worth the trouble.