Difference between a self-employed and a business owner

As an engineer by profession, I had always thought of being a consultant. In fact, before I graduated from college that was my biggest dream. I thought that being a consultant also means you are in business. What I did not realize is that as a consultant you still do not have FREEDOM. You still do not own your time, you still don’t have passive income.

I cringed when an Assistant Vice President from my most recent company rejected a business offer of mine because he said he only entertained Consultancy Business Opportunities. True enough, he is a very good engineer but I realized that he was not an entrepreneur. A lot of people with Phd’s believe that they are bound to be rich because of their title. What they don’t realize is that their potential for generating income is still a 1:1 ratio and not leveraged. A real business is something that you do not NEED to spend your time on once it is up and running. A consultancy business, unless you do not need to do any consultancy work yourself, is not a business but a job owned by the consultant.