Why I made businessdreams.net

19 November 2008
Posted in General - General

Now here is the point of all this waffle. 

I am not an IT expert or a programmer! If you are then you can probably tell that from reading some of my articles. But it is the fact that I am a rank amateur that I believe makes this web site viable. If I can create online businesses that make money and free up time to spend with my family, then so can YOU! And the other great thing was that I built all my e-commerce stores without any paid assistance. My most recent shop was conceived, built, stocked and received its first sale in a week! The cost to me was £2.99 for a domain name! And a weeks very hard work!

How did I end up starting businessdreams.net?

I left school at 16, like many people, with almost no qualifications. I got a job in a shop for a very low wage. I soon realised from talking to colleagues, that the way to get your wages up was to work hard and get a managers discretionary rise on top of the annual pay rise.

This I did and within 5 years I was quite pleased with my lot! I worked damn hard

(my manager was happy), I was paid what I thought was fair (I was happy) and because I was happy I made my customers happy. I looked after my employer and because they didn't want to lose me, they looked after me. This was 20 years ago now. It was downhill from there. Much has changed since then! Four things especially.

   1. There has been legislation making, downsizing, restructuring and other methods of 'getting rid' of staff much cheaper.

   2. Due to the new ease of replacing staff a new phenomenon that I call 'management by manual' has arisen. Every job is precisely defined so that staff (and managers) can be easily disciplined or dismissed for simple breaches. This has made the once most simple shelf filling, and service jobs extremely stressful. This new phenomenon also meant managers could be taken on much more cheaply and when they 'fail' replaced more easily. Of course by 'fail' it usually means being on the wrong side of office politics! All this significantly eroded job security.

   3. New employee 'protection' laws. The minimum wage was an excuse for any already low paying employer to freeze wages and synchronize them with the minimum wage. Although for an exploited few in illegal sweat shops this might have been of benefit, for the vast majority the minimum wage was a sentence to a life time of government justified low wages.

   4. The fourth significant nail in the employees coffin was the anti employment discrimination laws later made worse by European expansion and the influx of cheap labor. I, like many of my colleagues would find myself rushed from pillar to post working hard to compensate for the previously discriminated against. It might jog your memory of situations you have been in when I say I would pack bags for the disabled checkout operator, then load up some heavy boxes for the elderly shop assistant and then sort out a customer complaint for the member of staff who can't speak English. And of course we all earned the same minimum wage. I was discriminated against because I was normal(ish). Simply put the employees paid the price for anti-discrimination, not the employers!

All of the above of course is great for shareholders and executive bonuses. Simply put the vast majority of the working population is expected to be efficient, hard working and loyal. In return they get a lower wage than they would previously and no loyalty whatsoever.

Eventually I realised that jobs didn't pay and I started a business and got rid of my job. It then dawned on me that I might not be the only person who wanted to do this. I hope you enjoy businessdreams.net.