I could see myself doing the same or similar. Starting a business with the goal of growing it to the point of just sustaining my family's lifestyle to bridge the gap to retirement. Once we own this house and our kids become self-sufficient, our monthly expenses can drop quite drastically and we'll be able to sustain ourselves off of something much more modest than my current salary. Giving boat tours on the great lakes while fixing up a small cabin or something like that. Also considered a camp site / cabin rentals. Something that gives me an excuse to get outside more and moving around but rarely involves urgency and deadlines. All things which can earn some money, but unless I really grind at it they really aren't designed to grow too much.
Well.. those and the liabilities and risk.
And what liabilities do they have?
All of them associated with operating their business. The most pertinent to this discussion would obviously be workers compensation in cases of work related injury or illness.
Is insurance that offers unlimited coverage free? No? That's a liability, then. You will have to pay this insurance whether you are profitable or not. That's a risk, you see?
> there is the corporate veil for that.
Very few business actually structure themselves in such a way to receive this benefit. It's not automatic either, you'll still need lawyers to make this argument for you in court should you be sued.
> Just declare bankruptcy and start over.
You do realize there are multiple different types of bankruptcies and not all of them allow you walk away and "start over."
> Not like you are losing the money you extracted from the company.
Yes, those are called "profits" and they are taxed. Most companies are not entirely liquid and the majority of the value is in the operation not in past "extracted" money.
Owning a $100 million business is not at all like having $100 million in the stock market.
My post is not targeted to the people who have started a lifestyle business or someone who has built a $100M enterprise from the ground up.
Much of the worlds wealth is concentrated through inheritance and the effect of compounding interest.
A person of normal intelligence with a large inheritance can easily live off other peoples work by a diverse portfolio, accumulated by previous generations. Large wealth inheritance creates obvious power imbalances in any economic system, unless every participant(or most, anyway) in the system has themselves large amounts of inherited economic wealth.
My (skilled) labour is valued somewhere at $50-$250/h. Yet, the offspring of the ultra rich("the owning class") receive x10-x100 of what i receive without lifting a finger.
I will note that SEs include contractors. They may have less admin work than other owners or SEs, but also less freedom and opportunity to innovate, and perhaps more cause to feel unhappy.
Aside from that, I don't have much insight into non-contractor SEs, how they differ from NEOs, and why they're supposed to be less happy.
The median for non-employer owner being 24k while the median for employee is 62k is surprising, I would expect the owner to be above or comparable. I guess there's a lot of unsuccessful one-person businesses. Looking at the full report, the median household income for NEO is 100k, and 110k for employee, and wealth for NEO is 5k higher. So there's something else going on there.