Over the last few months, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my career moving forward. I have a post-graduate degree in MIS, a few years experience as a Business Analyst, working mainly as a consultant on Workflow projects on Opentext Livelink and a little bit of everything else. I also founded an SEO/Web Marketing company about 2 years ago and I've been spending a lot of time growing that as well, in the process learning Joomla CMS, CRE Loaded, Plone, Etc. Overall, I've enjoyed my work quite a bit, but I feel like I am at crossroads now.
I am debating whether to pursue my entrepreneurial venture - the SEO/Web company, full time and grow it further, or take on consulting work.
I already have about 10 staff members around the world, mostly part-timers, working for me for the SEO company, which is what this site is sort of about. I've spent a lot of time and energy bringing it up to this point and I know that I've just started. If I put in enough time and make some smart decisions, this company can be big enough to fund my full time involvement with it soon enough (my estimate is that it will take 9-12 months). I think I am an entrepreneur at the very core and this option seems like a fun thing for me to do on a long term. Afterall, there's potentially endless growth possibilities and that's what makes the entrepreneurial life so exciting. It also has its share of stresses though. My day will start with irate client calls and staff issues and end with that too. I am a very technically and analytically inclined person and I am not sure I will get enough opportunity to work on technical or analytical things if I choose to run this company full time. The clients will be small businesses - less sophisticated and less state-of-the-art usually compared to large enterprises. So there you see where the dilemma comes from. Also, of course, there is far more risk in running a small business like this to make my living than being a consultant.
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