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Last Sunday was Father's Day here in Australia and, because Steve is such a hard person to buy for, I took the easy way out and gave him a gift voucher for one of the local book stores. Now Steve is never one to let a gift voucher die of old age and by Monday lunchtime he was back with two books.

One of them was Michael Gerber's E Myth Mastery. Gerber has actually written a number of books about the E Myth and if you want to know where to start then find a copy of The E Myth Revisited and dive into it. But don't expect it to be about email, e-commerce or anything else related to the Web. Instead dive into his books with the expectation that you're about to read something that's about succeeding in business and you will find plenty to interest you and plenty to challenge you.

In the forward to the E Myth Mastery Gerber says that he's about to tell you the story of a small business person who had entered into her own business because she expected that it would give her freedom only to be sadly disappointed. That had some resonance with me because we have a friend who runs his own small business and he too has no freedom.

While that doesn't seem to bother him greatly, because he's doing something that he really loves, it does bother his wife. Instead of being as free as some other wives she knows (whose husbands work for wages and salaries) she is sees herself as tied down by the demands of her husband's business and she can't understand why.

When her friends can go on holidays because their husbands have paid holidays time every year she has to remain at home because her husband's small business has no one to cover for him and if he shuts up the shop for a week there's no money coming in. While her friends can go out and buy whatever they want she has to be prepared to curtail her spending in the quiet periods and she just doesn't understand that.

She thought that when her husband became his own boss life would be wonderful, they could take holidays whenever they wanted and with his own income their standard of living would be the equal of many of her friends. She didn't understand that there are fewer freedoms when you're running your own business than what there are when you're just working for someone else no matter how boring and hard that work might be.

But then that's only half true because there are freedoms that you can enjoy when you are your own boss if only you are prepared to recognize those freedoms and find that those freedoms are important to you. Before Steve and I got into business for ourselves we worked for others and we hated it. Sure, we had the weekly income, we had paid holidays, we worked eight hours a day, we had weekends off and if we were sick our income didn't stop but those freedoms weren't important to us.

Now we work for ourselves we work 12 or more hours a day, we take very few days off and rarely have the opportunity to take a holiday, we often work weekends just to keep up with the demand from our clients and we too have to balance our spending because payments don't arrive every week like our pay checks once did.

Despite all that, we're happy, we have freedoms that we didn't have before. Our work is challenging and rarely ever boring. We are making our own future and would never want to go back to working for someone else. We accept the fact ... and were aware of it right from the start ... that being a small business person was never going to give us the freedoms that others might think comes to those who are their own boss and so we have not been disappointed in any way.

Sometimes we might grumble about it. Sometimes we do look with some envy at some of our kids who are working far less hours and making more than we do but then we remember the freedoms that we enjoy that our kids don't.

So where do you fit into what I've just talked about? Are you coming into this industry hoping that by being your own boss you'll have the freedom to do things that you can't do if you're working for the man? Do you really understand how hard it is to be a small business person or are you only seeing the small business world through rose-colored glasses?

If you're just starting in this industry - and doing it after work and on weekends as so many of us did when we first got started - then you need to stop and consider your motivation for coming here. Are you looking for your version of freedom and will you be disappointed when you don't find it? Or are you in touch with reality and do understand the freedoms that await you when you become your own boss?

If you do understand what this business requires of you then jump into it and work hard to develop a successful business. If you still think that working as your own boss in this industry is all about sitting at your computer wearing nothing but a bright smile and taking time off whenever you feel like it then perhaps you need to reconsider because all you'll end up with are some skid stains on your chair.