Customer Reviews

Escaping The Self Employment Trap: The 5 Secrets To More Time, Money And Freedom

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This is a dense book full of actionable AND insightful ideas. Think of The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less, and to some extent, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.

Victor is simply brilliant. I'm on a mailing list of entrepreneurs, many of whom are very, very successful. Victor occasionally replies to people's questions, and his advice is always concise, thoughtful and very helpful. I found myself paying extra attention to what he had to say. I ended up teasing him that "you should write a book!"

It turned out he had ... several of them.

I've read many books on business, lifestyle design, financial freedom and so forth. Provided you have a business idea, this is the best there is. (If you don't have an idea for a business, the Four Hour Workweek might give you some.) You may think because I'm slightly acquainted with the author, I'm biased. Not so. I'm writing this review to help -you-, not him.

The E-Myth Revisited sells you on setting up a system so you can "work on your business, instead of in it." This book shows -how-.

The 80/20 Principle tells you to focus on activities that will bring the most return for the least effort. This book shows exactly what those activities are - at each step of the way. (There's 5 steps.)

The 4-Hour Workweek discusses lifestyle design and gives some good ideas about how to do it. It also talks about how to recruit virtual assistants to free up your time. Victor explains a bit about lifestyle design - how to make sure your business revolves around your life instead of vice versa. That's it - no explanation of all the cool things you can do with your free time. Instead expect an explanation of how to get free time. Lots of it. You'll learn in depth about how to create -systems- to delegate all those annoying things that need doing, without having to do it yourself. In particular, the explanation of having a results description instead of a job description lets you recruit the perfect candidate.

I've been looking for the magic bullet to recruit the right people. My own experience has been very hit or miss, but I eventually found some great people. "Escaping the Self Employment Trap" is second only to Smart and Gets Things Done in giving guidance in how to recruit people. However, Smart and Gets Things Done is for recruiting programmers, and "Escaping" is better overall for recruiting people to run your business systems for you.

There's a lot more in here than what I just explained above. For example, there's a chapter on turning marketing into an investment instead of an expense. This is a key concept that can turbocharge your growth. Victor explains how he took a business from $500 a month in revenues to $30,000 a month, in just 90 days. He also explained his mistake that cut his profits in half, and how to easily avoid it.

If you are running your own business (big or small), and want to figure out how to make your life easier, and your business grow much faster, get this book. You won't regret it.

"Escaping The Self Employment Trap" is another masterpiece from Victor Cheng, whose insights continue to surpasses even this jaded reader who had read many books on the matter as well as in general. While it's easy to categorize it as a street-smart, "in-the-trenches" type of book with actual, real-world advice examples (which would have even been enough), but it goes beyond that to discuss the theory and reasoning to show you why the concepts and ideas work, thereby completing the power you can derive from this masterpiece.

Cheng provides the 5 "secrets" (or steps, if you will, noting that these are ideally applied in sequence) to work ON your business instead of IN it. But there's more.

There may be some books that share the concepts (notably E-Myth Revisited, or Robert Kiyosaki's books, among others), but this stands on its own, to complement but also provide unique insights beyond what the other books provide, and espouses the importance of how to escape the trap that hits many small businesspeople, and then provides you with not just a way out of it, but shows you the way to jump-start your way out of that purgatory of frustrated, burnt-out self-employment, and permanently as well as sustainably become a true, free, lifestyle entrepreneur, which is what is likely the reason you got into business for yourself in the first place.

There are concepts, ideas and theories, but also specific examples, ideas, tips and techniques, while giving you concrete examples on how to actually work out the processes that serve as the foundation for growth, and that make this book something you'll wish you read years ago, but which you can only be too happy to be reading now.