Guest Speaker: Erik Hanberg

Having a guest speaker visit a classroom is always a pleasure.  It provides students with several good opportunities; for starters it adds an additional voice to the mix besides just the professor's rambling.  But more importantly it adds additional perspective about the subjects at hand.  Erik Hanberg is an entrepreneur that has had both success and failure with his businesses during his career, not entirely different from our professor, but his path, like the path of almost every entrepreneur, was distinctly different.  Erik and his wife started their "Entrepreneurial Adventure" with a semi-solid foundation built from the salaries they received working for well established companies.  After leaving those companies, their income has streamed from a number of sources; a graphical design company, a theater, a startup, and even selling a number of books Erik wrote.  The variety of sources and variety of work created some new possibilities, as well as some new risks.

Erik detailed for our class, a numberless chart of his income over the last several years, broken down in terms of what source the money came from to help illustrate how his ventures have ramped and faded over time.  This of course, started with his salaried career.  The first thing I noticed was that the salaried career made a very flat, predictable, and fairly large amount of money for him and his wife (at least compared to the income from the other sources).  Once the "entrepreneurial" activities started, the income immediately took a dive and the rate began to jump up and down sporadically.  Some of this jumping was due to vacations, and travel, that in a regular company would have been impossible.  But some of it was simply the instability of business in a recessed economy.  Personally, that kind of unstable income, by choice or not, gives me heartburn, and I’d much rather work my salaried job with 4 weeks of vacation per year, 10 holidays, and an 11 week sabbatical every 7 years.  But everybody is different, and Erik seems quite pleased with how his ventures are fairing.

My key take away from his presentation was that creating your own job can enable you to structure your life in a way more suitable to your taste at the potential cost of stability.  Like all things in life it seems to be a trade off, more dynamic hours with less income predictability vs. more income predictability with less dynamic hours.  Whatever floats your boat… If you do it right, you can get a rock solid income foundation layered with pits and planes, if you do it wrong you can hit a pretty epic iceburg.

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