As children, we were taught that once we started working, we had our choice of either a blue or white-collar job. For as long as we can remember, that was the norm. You went to school and got a white-collar job, or you skipped school and started working right away at a blue-collar job. We could be a worker, or we could be the person that other people worked for. It seemed pretty straightforward.
Today, however, things are a bit more nuanced. We find ourselves in a labor market that’s moved increasingly, but not completely, toward entrepreneurship. There is a new class of employment, putting us somewhere between blue and white. We’re not certain if our collar is now sky-blue or aqua-marine, but regardless, in this new class of worker, we are part entrepreneur and part worker bee.
Being a professional home inspector is a perfect example of this new-collar type of work. Even those inspectors that currently find themselves working for someone else would qualify as a new-collar worker. No matter what someone’s employment status is, sole proprietor or employee, every inspector is running their own company: a business of one.
In today’s employment world, and particularly in the inspection industry, each of us gets to choose whether we want our collar to be a darker shade of blue or a paler shade of white. Do we find ourselves doing more of the actual hands-on work, or have we decided to focus more on the back end? It’s choices like these that always seem to come when we’re running our business of one.
The direction we choose to take our business is entirely up to us, and unlike high school chemistry class, there’s no right or wrong answer here. Yes, we’re all inspectors, and there is certainly a good bit of commonality between us, but each of us is an individual. We all have our own thoughts and needs, and each of us finds ourselves in our own uniquely specific situation that demands that we make a decision that best addresses that situation. So, inevitably, it’s entirely up to us to decide where we end up in the great collar debate.
Some of us discover that our life runs more smoothly when we focus on the blue-collar work, and in one way or another, pay someone else to do our white-collar stuff. Others lean more toward the white collar, and end up paying other people for their blue-collar labor. In the big picture, neither end of the spectrum is better or worse than the other; it ultimately comes down to what works best for each of us as an individual business owner.
While, in general, business owners who tend toward the white collar often find themselves in a higher tax bracket than their blue-collar counterparts, gross revenue is not the only variable that needs to be taken into account when making this decision. There are other considerations (schedule, stress, family, financial need, etc.) when it comes to deciding how we allot our limited time. Making more money simply for the sake of making more money isn’t always the best call. We all know “successful people” who are more miserable than we could ever imagine, while many of our bluer-collared friends seem to have things together.
We cannot deny that which end we decide to align ourselves with, more worker or more employer, is an important choice, but that doesn’t mean that we’re stuck wherever we land. We may start out blue collar and move over to white, or vice versa. If we simply stop a moment and pay attention, we quickly realize that change is the rule. Things never stay the same and neither do we. Our job, our life, and our self-concept are constantly changing, morphing into something influenced by our previous state, but not exclusively determined by it.
What we were in our past provides a basis for what we will become, but it is not a self-fulfilling prophesy; we still enjoy some level of influence over our future. As long as we choose something that makes us happy where we are now, where we come from and where we’ll end up aren’t that big an issue. Obviously, we need to keep an eye on our horizons and plan for all possibilities, but we shouldn’t do that to the exclusion of our current happiness.
Yes, work will almost always involve some level of hard work. But, if we can’t figure out how to enjoy the process, we’ll likely never reach our goal.
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Thanks, Joe
