Being an entrepreneur, and that too a successful one, comes at a cost.
To have your own business up and running in Australia, there are many investments that you might have made – infrastructure, time, research, manpower, permits and licenses, as well as monetary.
If you are a home-based start-up, the cost might significantly come down, because you would be a one-man army (most probably), with little or no extra investment required in a commercial property for office space. However, the need to have a dedicated office phone, computer, equipments that aid execution of your services, etc., would still be required. If you are a small-to-medium sized business, the expenses still go up in the office space, the office furniture, the telephone lines, marketing adverts, permits and grants, employee salaries, employee benefits, and the list goes on.
How can we forget the cost of having a faxing facility? Proposals, Quotes, Official Documents, etc. would need to be sent out for various business purposes. The cost of infrastructure setup for fax would account for – bulky fax machine, printer to receive fax, scanning machine, and dedicated phone line for the fax. This entire setup can be too intimidating, and can be conveniently replaced by an easy-to-use efax methodology. Using internet to fax your documents can not just save your time and money in infrastructure setup and faxing process, but also offers a convenient and secure way to send the fax documents to the recipient.
This was all about the hard costs that an entrepreneur incurs for his business. But what about the other intangible costs? An entrepreneur loses out on many happy/ free weekends with family, evening strolls with loved ones, peace of mind, anxiety over approvals of company requirements, insecurity, and fear of the business being ridiculed as a failure. These are too hard to even imagine by those who have comfortably settled in their regular routines of a permanent employment.