Hi and welcome to my blog! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and do come back.

I have been resisting employment for a while now. I can’t really say why for sure but one of the reasons was the 9-5 brand. I didn’t want to work to make someone else money. No no no. I was detered by the hours for sure. I was insistent that working for someone else would restrict my flexibility. This was my steadfast opinion.

However things have changed, slightly. When you are working for yourself, or to make your own idea work you lose sight. You lose sight of rational working hours, of the distinction between work and play. Free time becomes a thing of the past. You become obsessive about making things work (especially in the online industry where normal trading hours do not ever apply). Thus you don’t really notice that you are waking up at 7 and working till 11pm. You don’t notice because you don’t care. You are driven, focused and as I’ve already noted, obsessive.

In short (like I’m ever short) when you are an entrepreneur you are consumed by what you do 100%. Often when you work for someone else you do just that, you work. You work 9-5 hours and stop working when you get home. This is the joy of work, you get to stop. Somehow many people miss this small joy. Trust me when I say it is a joy when you are (or should be) able to leave work at work.

In today’s day and age with the internet around working hours, jobs, the usual are not the usual anymore. Things have changed, variety is the norm. Things are happening and sometimes, working hours are fantastic.

Let us be perfectly honest. Making money online in SA is difficult unless you are employed by a big media house (which in itself is tough).

Those who know me or read this blog will know that I am an entrepreneur and media practitioner and not necessarily in that order. This means that I am broke some of the time. This gets old really really fast, if you don’t know, trust me on this one.

What I am getting at is that it’s tough to make a living online, it is. I am really curious to know if there are gabillions of online entrepreneurs in SA who are making boatloads of money or at least, are making a living? Are you out there? If you are, let me know cause I wanna know how you did it.

Who am I kidding? As if anyone who made the dosh is going to splurge their secrets to me on this blog? Are you?

Being a young entrepreneur has opened my eyes to numerous things in the last year. The most amazing of all of these things is the astounding amount of young people doing incredible things.

Be it entrepreneurs, media practitioners, young accountants, academics or wood importers (yes, there are people who import wood), there are young people succeeding and making millions.

It really does beg the questing though, how do we manage? How do these young and successful people deal with the pressure of being broke, being wealthy, carrying employees, salaries, decisions, organisations, reputations, meetings, dinners, parties, presentations, financials, tax, registrations and more? How?

I am not sure that all of these young go getters are managing to do all of this to be honest. I am sick of seeing people loving life, happy as the day is long and rich as shit. Bull. Ask any entrepreneur and they will tell you that their success did not come easy and did not come fast. It came after planning, work, failure and diligence.

There are many young people in the SA industry at the moment who are youthful, talented and going to be successful. There are also many people who are young and talented but who are also arrogant, naive, idiotic and moronic if they think that the sun shines out of their ass and the job will make them who they want to be.

You make the job, the job does not ever make you. Let’s just be honest here for a second, reputation is not everything, practical experience and a history of success is. Your friends make you, you on the same level, make your friends. Do not let the job taint your life, your lively hood and your friends. There is more, at our age (my age of 23) than the job. There really is.

Are you a key man in your business? Do you represent your business and the interests therein? Are you the face of the brilliance?

If so then some might term you to be the key man in your business (you could also be the key woman, but I am a man so we’ll run with that). If you are the “key man” in your business then you will understand the pressure that you are under to perform.

The Key Man does not, in any way imply the best person, the performer or the smartest most successful person in your business. You are simply (in my mind) the man that the business relies on. As the term itself states, the Key Man.

This concept has started to plague my mind a bit. As a young entrepreneur I am battling with the idea that I might be, and more than likely am a Key Man in my company. The issue here is simple: I am where I am because I love what I do. I run websites, I help build them, I promote them, update date them, punt them and live them. This, in theory makes me the key man. I also meet with potential investors, advertisers and marketers. This makes me an entrepreneur. Being the key man involves a lot of participation. This is where the problem comes in.

If I am managing 3 websites and contributing to 3 blogs, I am spending more than half my day online involved in the sites. This leaves very little time to actually be an entrepreneur. To find clients, to keep them, to meet with potential advertisers, to develop new products to market your existing ones and to simply run a company and manage all your shareholders.

This is something that is increasingly concerning me. One of the solutions is to hire people to manage and maintain certain projects. How do you get someone in to raise your own children, all day every day? I am not comfortable with that. I like my hands on approach very much. I like being under a bit of pressure to perform because that is when I perform the best. But also, I am the key man and hence I am many of the sites I run. This blog for one. Who would read nicharalambous.com if it wasn’t updated by nicharalambous himself? No one. It is as simple as that.

I don’t have an answer to this conundrum and I am not sure that there is a specific answer to the problem. I think that this might be one of those situations where experience and time dictate the route that each entrepreneur needs to follow.