The easiest way to tell whether you are self employed or an entrepreneur is to count the number of months your business would survive after you have stopped working in your business. Could you pack up your family for six months and continue to run your business? What would you find after returning from your journey? Just as entrepreneurs are different from the self-employed, so is their attitude towards websites. Websites of entrepreneurs are dynamic, always changing entities. Their sites have new content added regularly, and I don’t mean a few times a year, I mean at least several times a month. Entrepreneurs realize that their websites are part of the systems they are building. Websites of the self-employed are like brochures. The self-employed update their websites when they get to it, which is mostly never. Dealing with the website is just another task that they never get to.

The self-employed are constantly in the trenches, hustling to keep up with the daily tasks of working in the business.  Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are constantly working on creating systems. The self-employed are putting out fires while entrepreneurs are installing automatic fire extinguishers. The challenge is that the businesses are constantly forced to deal with fires, and those that are forced to put out fires by hand will not have the resources to grow their businesses. The entrepreneur knows exactly when and why something happens with their websites. They know that they are collecting email addresses because they want to be able to regularly communicate with their prospects. The self-employed don’t have time or energy to plan that far ahead. Even if they have some emails they could email, they will never get to it.

The self-employed are in danger of burnout. They are worried sick if their business slows down and they are working themselves sick when business picks up. For the self-employed life is stressful for the wrong reasons. Entrepreneurs are constantly searching for ways to make themselves redundant in the business. They don’t have to be part of every solution in the business. Their mission is to create a system that runs without them. The entrepreneur’s website is part of the team. It is not a neglected online brochure. Rather, it is part of the system that is constantly generating new prospects, and new interest in the business.

The self-employed have little chance for improvement. Many of them don’t know it, but they are in survival mode. They are constantly busy, but not because they are so successful, but because that is the only way they know how to run their business. The self-employed website hasn’t been updated in years. The self-employed never think of their websites after it was built and put online. They are putting out another fire, and they don’t have time to deal with it.

The self-employed have the freedom to take a two week vacation, but that’s about as long as they can go without jeopardizing the survival of their business. Entrepreneurs can run their businesses from a distance. They are not risking the survival of their business by taking a long vacation. The entrepreneur’s website continues to evolve independent from the entrepreneur. Even during times of vacations or business trips, the website continues to add new content.

If you are self-employed, you are the bottleneck and you are proud of it. You work many hours, and you do virtually everything. You take pride in being busy all the time. You work long hours, therefore you are self employed. Entrepreneurs on the other hand, are experts at removing bottlenecks. Instead of taking more-and-more onto themselves they are constantly searching for solutions for inefficiencies. Entrepreneurs understand that they don’t have time to do everything, and they outsource the work it takes to maintain a great website. Not all entrepreneurs are great writers, so they outsource writing. They are not all great designers, but they know how to hire one.

There is nothing wrong with being self-employed. Sometimes that is your only option. But, often, people are self-employed because they are stuck. They have failed to make the necessary steps to build the road leading to entrepreneurship. Being self-employed impacts all aspects of your business, including your website. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. You could start acting like an entrepreneur by running your website like one.