The New Professional

The old employment model is breaking apart. Only the foolish, complacent, or lazy refuse to see it and seize the opportunities to protect themselves and their families.

Many people who thought they could escape that trap by becoming their own boss in small busineses, franchises, or consultancies instead find they are caught in an even tighter vise. With their life savings often on the line, they work incredible hours. Customers and clients pay them like small businesses, but they are taxed, regulated, and sometimes sued like they were big businesses with bottomless resources.

In an era of historic economic prosperity, we are seeing unprecedented downsizings and layoffs. Companies are scaling back traditional benefits such as health care coverage, telling employees to go find it on their own. Firms are outsourcing more functions than ever before to avoid overhead costs of full-time workers. The high-tech, global economy has made it possible for domestic industry to move not only manufacturing jobs off-shore but white-collar tasks as well. Merger mania has only just begun! The population is aging. Professionals could soon spend more years in retirement than on the job. How many will be financially prepared for such welcome longevity based on their current occupations?

In sum, they are finding an opportunity to fill in the missing pieces of that "portrait of success and happiness" they have been working so hard to perfect: financial independence, long-term income security, time freedom, control over their own lives, and attachment to a cause greater than themselves.

Looking For The Right Opportunity

Franchises and small or family-owned businesses for most represent an imperfect alternative to the corporate world or their professions. They can be high-cost, high-risk ventures that are more likely to double, rather than halve, the time you must spend on the job away from your family. I learned that being your own boss isn't all that it's cracked up to be. There is a lot of volatility. As a small business owner I had problems with employees, overhead costs, taxes, and liabilities.

You can no longer depend on your employer or your job to provide for your security or even to be around tomorrow. How long could you last? If you are an employee who works for someone else, you should find a new model to take control of your finances. The same is true for business owners or those with their own medical, legal, and other professional practices. If you own your own business, you're not exempt. Most businesses are being crushed with overhead, taxes, and emlpoyee headaches. Owning a traditional small business can be a financial death-trap. You pay a fortune to get in, and all you pull out is an average income. Just as with the facing employees working for someone else, the old model of owning your own business and being your own boss is gone, too.

Many new Professionals are finding a new business model in network marketing, one that blends the best attributes that traditional employment and small business ownership used to provide but that also offers advantages found nowhere else.

It is a home-based business opportunity. There is no store, no lease, just a phone, a fax, and a personal computer. Your commute lasts for as long as it takes you to walk down the hall.

It entails no employees, payroll, schedules, payroll taxes, workers comp claims, and no employee headaches.

It offers a potential for rapid increase in income and for high income, because when you are freed of all the headaches inherent in the old model, you are able to focus all your attention on customers, sales, and income.

You develop a secure diversified income, a residual income that pays you for the efforts of others you bring into the business.

Putting yourself on the right side of the global economic changes does not necessarily mean throwing your current career and lifestyle overboard. It does mean managing your career in a flexible, diversified, and entrepreneurial fashion. The days of working one job for one paychek are dying. An entrepreneurial career means diversifying your activities and developing several streams of income. For some, that may mean a job or practice with a network marketing business on the side. Others may pursue their small business full-time and invest some of the profits on other businesses, stocks, or properties. But for all it can mean retaking control of your financial and personal life.

Investment guru and autor Robert Kiyosaki sums it up this way: "It's time for people to begin minding their own business. A job means you're being paid to mind somebody else's business. In this new economy, you're paid to mind your own business. The idea that you can go to school, get good grades, find a safe, secure job, and have the company and the government take care of you is fundamentally of the Industrial Age. It was a good program as long as you were born prior to 1930".

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