With the economy beginning to look like it may have bottomed out, many valuable construction men and women who have found themselves out of a job through no fault of their own may be thinking about starting their own construction firm.

This may be a good move for you, but you will want to go into this—or any business venture—with your eyes wide open. Most general contracting firms start out small—formed by smart and ambitious people who have proven themselves in another construction firm. But accomplished as they may be at what they’ve been doing, they may not be prepared to take on the range of responsibilities forced on them in managing the business of construction in its entirety. I believe this is the primary reason for the 43% four-year failure rate (as of 2002: US Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

Indeed, starting and running your own business are two of the toughest jobs you or anyone can have. You may not have a boss looking over your shoulder telling you what to do, but you actually have the most demanding boss of all: a tyrant who lives right inside you and will demand your attention every minute of your day. He’ll be there to ask you hard questions, judge your performance, nag you about tomorrow’s meeting when you go to bed at night. He expects you to risk a lot of your assets, maybe all of them, especially in the early years. It’s low pay or no pay for you, but he won’t hear of your missing payday for your employees. Most work weeks for you are six or seven days long, and this ogre wants you to be the first one in the office and the last one to leave. He turns thumbs-down on the new truck you’ve decided you need. This boss expects you to do many things at one time and perform them with excellence even though you haven’t mastered all of them yet.

Why would you work for this guy, you ask? This option looks pretty low on the slate of opportunities to those who have opted for a more mainstream existence, yet quite reasonable to us who go out on our own. It’s because getting our own business off the ground, creating our own opportunities, blazing our way through the thickets we encounter, and driving forward when the darkest clouds loom gives us a confidence, a pride, a joy of life that cannot be bought, bargained for, or willed to us by a rich uncle. It’s something that wouldn’t be the same if we hadn’t paid for it with sweat, tears, worry and sacrifice. But as we grow and learn, this live-in drill-sergeant of a boss begins to give us some slack, some tastes of the milk and honey.

The author of this article, Nick Ganaway, was a successful general contractor for 25 years. He is a consultant in Atlanta, Georgia, for contractors and other small business owners. Nick has described how to set up and manage a construction business that is profitable, enjoyable, and enduring in his book, Construction Business Management: What Every Construction Contractor, Builder & Subcontractor Needs to Know.