YES YOU CANNOT

My wife and I work hard to make a living. We don’t just work 9-5 Monday to Friday with two 15-minute obligatory breaks during each day.

We don’t take our entitled 1-hour lunch break. And we don’t wait in anticipation for government-mandated days off. Other entitlements such as sick leave, parental leave, and stress leave are non-existent for us.

As employers, if our company should fail, we can’t even claim Unemployment.

At the end of each day, when our employees go home, Anne and I are still at it thinking about new business, clients, suppliers, competition, receivables, payables, cash-flow, salaries, deductions-at-source and the mountain of government red-tape and paper-work we have to deal with day-in and day-out just to stay in business.

For us, there is no bailout. There’s no government largesse. There are no entitlements. And there’s no safety net. There’s nothing but hard work, risk, worry and obligations.

We are obligated to all the people from whom we purchase services and products. We are obligated to give the very best results to the people to whom we sell our services. And we are obligated to our employees who have to be paid what they are owed whether we had a good week or not.

And we are obligated to bury ourselves in government red-tape while paying every conceivable tax they can dream up, irrelevant to whether we have the money or not.

For our employees, they have but one working obligation, which is LOOKING OUT FOR THEMSELVES. That is not to say we have never had great employees over the 30 plus years Anne and I have owned our own businesses. But far too many have been real pieces of work.

Neither Anne nor I expect the people who work for us to share our worries, since our company is not their company. Also, no one forced us to become business-owners and employers.

BUT – TO BE PUNISHED AND DERIDED FOR IT?

For Anne and myself to stay in business, we have a tremendous amount of planning to do.

We can’t spend more money than we earn. We have to realistically budget for anticipated sales, planning to earn on the lowest side of our expectations.

We have to establish an emergency fund of sorts, just in case unanticipated events occur, such as a client who goes under, or who can’t pay, or an unexpected expense that comes way out of left field, always bearing in mind that we have fixed weekly inviolable obligations such as employee salaries.

Then there’s our private life, where we have to budget for our home expenses, insurances, meals, vehicles, fuel, general maintenance, entertainment and the horses, which are not free to care for.

What about a vacation?

Like most small business owners, Anne and I cannot afford the time to leave our business. We need to be there to deal with issues that are important to us, because they are critical to our clients.

Whenever we’ve traveled together, we’ve lived on our cell phones taking care of the things that had to be cared for, which is no way to relax and enjoy a vacation. And then there’s employee reliability.

It has happened to us in the past where a critical employee all of a sudden gets a headache, or something like that, and can’t come in while we’re out of town. Anne and I don’t know of such things. No matter how we feel, we have to show up for work.

So, instead of taking a vacation, we take day trips where we drive for several hours to just get away for the day. We don’t sleep over.

When I hear the SCHMUCKS in government, AT ALL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT, speak about the need to create more bureaucracy and higher taxes for businesses and business-owners, it literally makes me so angry, that my heart beats faster.

When I hear a Union Bastard creating the image that business is the enemy to the workers, I’d like to send the Unionist into a duck-walk with one good boot to his scrotum.

And when employees let me know how well Anne and I have it because of THEIR EFFORTS, we just shake our heads in sad amazement.

I am writing all of this, because the INCOMPETENTS in public office in Canada and the USA have decided that it’s a good political strategy for them to declare war on business and business-owners.

Pandering to the SOMETHING-FOR-NOTHING Bunch is a great way to get elected, just ask Barack Obama and his Canadian counterpart Stephen Harper who is getting adept at doing the same.

But, in the final crunch, it is NOT the government, the unions or the workers who create the wealth and jobs people need to keep the ball rolling and the wolves from the door.

IT TAKES PEOPLE LIKE ANNE AND MYSELF, people like us who are willing to take the risks and pay the price, who are painted by the YES WE CAN Group as the villains within our society.

Don’t get me wrong, there are tremendous benefits to owning your own business if things go right. But those benefits are diminishing with every new law and entitlement.

One day, when Anne and I feel that we’ve had enough of the abuse paid to us by our dumb-ass governments, employees who figure they’re making us “rich”, and unions who want to tell us how we should run our own businesses; we’ll simply close-up shop causing our employees to be unemployed and the government to find our vanished tax dollars elsewhere.

If enough of us in the business-owning community feel the same way, and decide to pack-it-in, what will these geniuses have to say for themselves then?

It certainly won’t be YES WE CAN!

My next editorial will deal with the unintended consequences of screwing-over the business community.

Best Regards . . . Howard