Company executives often earn eye-popping, mouth-watering paychecks, with a lot of heavy allowances and bonuses. As if the huge paychecks are not enough, personal expenses on both domestic and external fronts are usually absorbed by their companies. In places like the United States, staggering bonuses in stock options have often raised eye-brows among the populace. Being a company executive therefore has a lot of reward to it, making such positions the envy of members of the public.

White-Collar Appeal
It is little wonder then that white-collar jobs remain overwhelmingly attractive to most fresh graduates. After all, who wouldn't want to be an executive officer of any of the banks, oil companies or telecom operators, etc? In fact, many are just content to be employees of those companies and wouldn't care whether they advanced to executive positions or not.

Great Reasons For Paid Employment
Seriously speaking, there are many factors to recommend a good white-collar job. Having a steady income by way of a regular paycheck is a very stabilising opportunity. It can make a lot of things possible by taking guesswork out of your income flow. Planning becomes easier, allowing for better allocation of income between expenses, investments and other uses. Again, for a beginner without any accumulated resources, it's easy to see paid employment as the most viable option, since all you require is your skill and knowledge. Also, big companies already have a positive image that robs off on the staff. Getting a job in any such company immediately catapults your social standing, making you the envy of people who know you. Even for not-so-big companies, having an employment and a steady income confers positive social status - people have respect for somebody in employment. Besides, not everybody has the stomach for risk or the skin to stand the grit of life on their own. Starting a business is obviously a stretching experience which requires a lot of courage. A seemingly easy way out is to claw into an existing business as an employee, free of risk, and earn a living. All said, employment readily provides a soft landing that anybody could easily find attractive.

The Rat Race
With so much going for it, you'd be surprised to learn that many in employment are very unhappy and wishing their lives were different. Many also live on the edge, always haunted by the fear of loss of their jobs. The impact of work situation stress on health is also considerable. The reasons are not far-fetched. Paid-employment has been characterised as a rat-race situation. People trade their time for a pay that, in many cases, barely takes them through part of the month. A number will already be up to their necks in debt ('book-me-down' purchases at neighbourhood shop, goods on credit from office hawkers, due consumer finance repayment to a bank, etc) by the time salary comes again. Except for the few in big financial institutions, oil companies and a handful of other well-paying sectors, many merely eke out a living. Even in the financial institutions, the majority are stressed out by overwhelming performance targets. In many cases, personal live is absorbed into the job, with little or no time to constructively work on personal interests. If the ultimate outcome was financial independence, it would be worth it, but the majority here will burn out their lives without any comfort that they could survive for twelve months without struggling to earn fresh income. It would seem, at the end, that it's not all that glitters that's gold.

The Hard Road To Travel
With paid employment offering so much appeal, but with a lot of baggage, some people choose to pursue the uncharted course of starting a business. Starting a business is, however, extremely challenging because of the huge risks and trying moments that go with it. So you ask: "what is it that provides the boldness to confront the challenges of a career in business ownership, with no guarantees of any income and often with the responsibility to pay salaries to others, even when not sure of how the resources will come?". Obviously, it is something in the make-up of such individuals that 'blinds' them to the risks and propels them into such 'gambit'. Often they are even excited at the prospect of facing the risks and hassles. Indeed, the profile of an entrepreneur reads something like this tough combination:

1. Is visionary - able to see far beyond the challenges, to the hour of glory.
2. Filled with courage - ready to confront tough challenges.
3. Risk-taking - ready to put resources and future on the line.
4. Confident - believes in his abilities and ready to test them out. 5. Is competitive - being there requires taking on many battles.
6. Able to provide leadership - to drive a team to achieve his goals.
7. Ready to sweat it out - knows that long, tasking hours of work are required.
8. Willing to sacrifice immediate comfort - success takes time and effort to come by.
9. A communicator - must get his ideas out and sell them.
10.A resource manager - may operate on shoestring for a long time.
11.An organiser - must organise successfully to achieve results.
12.Is adventurous - thrilled to face the unknown.

As you see, it reads more like suicidal instinct to want to be an entrepreneur. Yet, it's entrepreneurs that move the world! They create the businesses that employ other people. The generate or develop the product and service ideas that solve our needs. They build the businesses that others buy into as shareholders. Virtually, they create our tomorrow.

Business Builders Are World-Beaters
Well, labour has its rewards. It is not strange therefore that the world's richest people are business owners - they acquired their wealth by creating and building businesses, sometimes selling in whole or in part for staggering sums. There is a huge potential reward in creating and nurturing a business, notwithstanding the risks and the fact that many die before they can take root. Some of the highly successful business owners staggered a few times, sometimes declaring bankruptcy before later bouncing back and getting it right. The reality is that each outing, whether very successful or not, provides a learning crucible and only takes the entrepreneur more steps closer to the breakthrough.

Rich Dad Poor Dad Said So
The strength of business-building as a wealth creation platform was strongly espoused by Robert T. Kiyosaki, popular investment author and creator of the Rich-Dad-Poor-Dad series, in his work CASHFLOW Quadrant - Rich Dad's Guide To Financial Freedom. He identified four income platforms which people generally fall into. The quadrant labeled 'E', meaning employment is the familiar spot we are trained to end up in: acquire education, get a job, work and retire and earn pension. The problem with this, as powerfully argued by Kiyosaki, is in the limitations it imposes - your earnings depend on your continued work (suffer stroke and the company sacks you and stops paying you, hard as it sounds); you are taxed to your bones (PAYE, deducted at source); your hours are strictly traded for money (no work, no pay); earnings are more or less capped (you generally can't earn more than the approved wage). The 'B' quadrant, the other quadrant we are interested in here, refers to business ownership where a system is built to generate money, irrespective of where the owner is. When you build a business, you begin to enjoy leverage - having your money and other people work for you. Here, there is no cap on your potential earnings. You not only can enjoy similar income profile as the top company executive, the value of the business is yours. If you do a good job and the business properly takes root and flourishes, your golden years can really be golden. Building and selling a business is one of the most rewarding investments. Take the recent case of YouTube, an online consumer media company, founded February 2005 and acquired by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, barely 21 months after. Can you beat that? How much did the owners invest? Or, look at the local banks that recently went public, selling a fraction of their ownership to the public for several times over what they invested to set them up.

The Roll-Call Of Top Money Earners
Now, look at this list of the top 15 world's richest people and note the source of each person's wealth.

If you stretch the list further, you get the same pattern. While this doesn't say that everybody will succeed in business, it does show that the reward of success could be emphatic. It is for the individual to weigh the options and know what best suits him or her. What we've attempted to do here is show the limitations and potentials of each option. So, where do you stand?

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