The PROBLEM With Your Career Path
A profound tip to help you avoid wasting your life and push through the inevitable glass ceiling.
A profound tip to help you avoid wasting your life and push through the inevitable glass ceiling.
There’s a flaw in your career path and like me, it was a tough lesson to learn.
Most careers are “service based”. What does this mean? It means you get paid per hour, or a certain amount for providing a service.
You’re a nurse? You’re a service based business.
You’re a marketing consultant? You’re a service based business.
You’re a wedding magician? Then you’re a service based business.
Why is that a problem? It means the only way for you to earn more money, or increase your earnings is to increase your hourly rate, or work more hours.
Therein lies the flaw of all service based businesses. When I sat back and thought about it, it shocked me to my core.
I’m not a self-professed genius by any stretch of the imagination, but almost every person I knew was a service based business. They had a cap on their earnings. Me included.
Surely I should have thought about this sooner?
The cap is enforced by the demand and the average rate of pay. Nobody will want to pay me £250,000 per year if they can get someone with the same skills to do it for £70,000.
Depending on the company, location you live in and your experience, there might be a glass ceiling of potential revenue for you as a worker.
But the cost of living constantly increases, tax laws change and financial responsibilities grow.
It’s not the only problem. Service based businesses are inherently undervalued.
Earlier today my car went into the garage and needed a new coil pack. Knowing nothing about cars and taking a cue from the speed in which he diagnosed the issue, I estimated a coil pack at a price below £50 for my car.
The final bill was £205. With over 3x the cost of the new parts being labour.
“That’s expensive I thought”
I was wrong, but I still thought it.
Now not everyone is as rationale as me, a man who’s literally writing a bloody blog on the value or services and why it’s a problem. So you can see how others enforce their own assumptions against a particular service.
How much would you pay someone to walk your dog?
How much does it cost someone to paint your garden fence?
Would you protest at £60 an hour for each service? Of course you would.
Therein lies the problem. Now the demand for those services at that price is low.
The lower perceived value of someone’s time is like a debilitating disease. It’ll make your position steadily weaker until you’re dead.
“Not me. I’m gonna rise through the ranks to management level and then I’ll be getting paid more.”
Perhaps this should be saved for another blog, but there will soon be more people dependent on the workforce than there are people working.
State pension requirements are so much of a concern that the age of eligibility in the UK has gone up to age 67. (My grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer at age 68)
As a service you will be working until the day you die. Or if you’re lucky, you’ll stay healthy enough to have a few good years in you.
Perhaps you luck out and finish with a good pension from some big Japanese company that didn’t go out of business in the 30 years you were there. Those cases will be few and far between.
Companies and governments need the working class to stay working so they’ll change the rules of engagement along the way to ensure people rarely step out of their own established class.
Private pensions of old will disappear. It seemed good at the time, but companies paying you £20,000 per year to NOT work for them is crippling.
What if medicine advances and you live to be 97? That’s going to cost them delicious profits!
Also as a service earning over a certain amount, you’ll be taxed 40 or 50+% (depending on which country you live in).
This ensures that proverbial ceiling’s pressure.
Working more = earning more = paying more in tax = only netting slightly more money despite the grind.
Charging more = earning more = paying more in tax = the same damn thing.
There are only so many hours in a day, so working more is a terrible choice with an inevitable cap.
Now the more you earn the more you get taxed line is not a revelation. I’m not sporting the beard of Captain Obvious today, but it does help enforce how big of a rat wheel that service based businesses are.
You will never win.
You are a milk cow for the government and your tits will be sore.
**queue that one happy guy from LA that has 10 high paying clients**
“I have to disagree with you. I made $200,000 last year and only worked 30 days.”
This is a broad rule my friend. I know there will be exceptions to the rule, but this blog is to help the masses.
To find one pearl you might have to open 1000 fucking useless oysters.
“But Geraint” I pretend you’ve asked. “How do I win long term?”.
The answer is a product based business. Thanks to e-commerce you can sell while you sleep. You could sell 100 books during the night and not have to be present for any of those sales.
Product businesses allow you to serve more customers with the same amount of time.
It’s worth thinking about if you’re stuck in a dead end job, or leaving school and wondering what to do with the rest of your life.
I could dropship clothes (like I do with my friend Oban from http://www.Ghostandglory.com) and sell and fulfil orders without being present.
Owning a product based business mostly pays someone else to be the service monkey.
Especially with digital products there’s almost no cap to your earnings potential.
One man could sell 1 million products in a day. Or he could work for 8 hours a day for a set hourly rate, regardless of productivity.
Time is a greater currency than talent.
No matter how good you are, some companies prefer availability over capability.
Now this isn’t as witty as my other blog entries… and after a long hiatus, it’s probably going to take me a while to get back into the same flow, but it is a good thought exercise.
What are you? A product or service?
Do you want financial freedom? Do you want no debt, a nice house, lots of free time to spend with the family and a few holidays per year?
It’s unlikely you’ll get it while you’re still a service.
Geraint Clarke
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