Pretty much as the title suggests.

I feel like when we went into this endeavour of starting a business (trade business in Australia) I was told stories of wealth and freedom and excitement.

All it feels like is stress, being kicked and then kicked again while you’re down, dealing with ungrateful staff who want to do as little as possible but think they are entitled to the fucking world on a silver platter, and still waiting on that whole wealth thing…

Lately it feels like our staff are just taking the absolute piss. For our tradesmen we pay WELL above award with allowances, 5% annual bonuses, weekly Friday beers, dinners throughout the year, endless flexibility and patience. We pay our tradesmen more than ourselves by a long shot. Despite this, the attitude is shit, they don’t finish on time so they can run the clock and get overtime pay, spend insane amount of hours on the phone to their boss to explain to them the most simple tasks, it’s at the point where he’d be better off just doing it for them.

On top of all the horrendous parts about running a business, getting such horrible feedback and attitude from staff sucks. I feel like we cannot possibly give them anymore or be any more lenient. I feel like we are getting taken advantage of and the attitude is let’s see what we can get from these losers instead of a mutual respect we’ve tried to foster.

I hate this. I don’t want to do this anymore. I honestly don’t see any benefit of running our own business at this point. I think my husband would be better off going to the mines or even working for an energy company. At least then we could clock off after a work day and we’d be paid immensely more than we are now while working for ourselves.