The title of this article sounds like a riddle, and the answer is already hidden in it: nobody who believes they have no business of their own actually lacks one. Or, to put it more directly, everyone has a business of their own, it is just that most people run it very badly because they do not know they are running it. I am not saying this for the sake of a pretty paradox. This idea once changed my attitude to work, and I have watched it change the attitude of many people around me, from programmers to accountants.
A business called you
Look at employment through an entrepreneur's eyes. You have a product: your time, skills, experience and character. You have a customer: the employer who buys this product at an agreed price. You have a contract: an employment agreement with terms, deadlines and penalties. You have marketing: your CV, reputation and recommendations. You have competitors: other candidates for your position. By every sign this is a business. Only a very peculiar one: with one single customer.
Every entrepreneur knows that a business with one customer is a deadly risk. If that customer leaves, goes bankrupt or decides it can buy the same thing cheaper, the business ends in a single day. That is exactly what dismissal, redundancy or a company closing looks like for someone who never thought of themselves as a business. For them it is a catastrophe out of a clear sky. For someone who did think about it, it is an unpleasant but predictable situation they had been preparing for.
The medieval master
I like to recall how medieval craft guilds worked. An apprentice studied under a master for years, then set off travelling as a journeyman, worked for different masters in different towns, and only after creating his masterpiece became a master himself. Even while working for someone else, he was building his own trade: accumulating skill, reputation and connections. He knew that one day he would open his own workshop, and every day of work in another master's shop was an investment in that future workshop. Modern employment is often arranged the other way round: a person works for one company for years and accumulates nothing for themselves personally except a line in their employment record.
You can work for anyone, but when you learn, grow and build a reputation, you are always working for yourself. That is the only company you can never be fired from.
What a person running their own business inside a job looks like
I once talked to two developers of roughly the same level whose company closed at the same time. The first spent several months looking for work: he had a CV listing his duties and nothing else. The second found a new position within a couple of weeks, and the employer reached out to him first. The difference was not in their skills. All that time the second one had been running his small business: writing articles about what he solved at work, speaking at meetups, helping people in professional communities. His product was visible on the market, he had a sales funnel, even if he never called it that.
When you think of yourself as a business, familiar things start to look different.
- Learning becomes R&D. It is not a waste of time but an investment in the product, without which it becomes obsolete.
- Reputation becomes marketing. Every project, every text, every public talk works for you for years.
- Salary becomes price. And price is set not by years of service but by the value you create for the customer.
- The employer becomes a customer. Treat them with respect and do your work honestly, but do not mistake them for family and do not invest everything you have in them.
- Side projects become diversification. A second source of income, even a small one, turns a one-customer business into a two-customer business, and that is a completely different level of resilience.
Does this mean everyone should become an entrepreneur?
No, and I want to stress that. Working at a good company can be an excellent strategy for the business called you: you get hard problems, a strong team, a stable income and experience you could never gather alone. Many of the best specialists I know have never started a company. The question is not form but attitude. An employee who thinks like an entrepreneur is usually more valuable to their company and better protected at the same time. And an entrepreneur who thinks like an employee, waiting for someone to come and sort everything out, usually closes down quickly.
I think the world is moving towards a point where the difference between employment and entrepreneurship will blur more and more. At Ingello we see this in our own teams: they are decentralised, we have no single command centre, but we do have shared technology foundations and shared experience. That is partly why business.ingello.com exists: a public knowledge library whose purpose is to help small independent teams work autonomously and well. The more people know how to run their own trade, the less they depend on one big customer, and the healthier the market as a whole.
What to do tomorrow
Describe yourself as a business on a single page. What is your product? Who are your customers now, and who could they be tomorrow? How does the market learn about you, apart from your current employer? What are you investing in so that your product is not obsolete in three years? If some questions have no answer, that is no cause for alarm. It is simply the task list for a business that, as it turns out, you have owned for a long time.
