Welcome to part one of Ignite Living’s “Why You Owe it to Yourself to be an Entrepreneur” series. In this series we’re going to explore…guess what? That’s right. Why you owe it to yourself to be an entrepreneur.

We’re gonna start this series off with a subject that’s very close to our hearts, stomachs and landlords: money.

If I were to give my top two reasons for becoming an entrepreneur, the first would be freedom and the second would be money.

Now, how much money you make as an entrepreneur will mostly be in ratio to your industriousness, marketing ability and many other factors, so it wouldn’t be fully truthful for me to say all entrepreneurs make more money.

However, the potential for you to make sick amounts of cash is much higher as an entrepreneur. And I can illustrate this by telling you a real-life story that is entirely not even a lie. About me. In my old corporate job. At a HUGE company that I guarantee you’ve heard of, from which you’ve bought stuff and which should have known better.

Corporate suckiness

Back when I was in the corporate world, I out-produced my quota by double. I’m not patting my own back. It’s just the job was easy and I was antisocial and never once left my desk ever, hence production. After the third year of doing this, I asked for what I thought would be a fitting raise and was given the awesome response of “no.”

I wanted to know the reason for that so I asked, “What’s the reason for that?”

My pay, I came to learn, was actually part of a complicated mix of factors, most important of which was how long I’d been at the company. Having been there for X amount of years, I’d make X amount of money. Then later, when I’d been at the company for Y years, I’d be making Y.

Yay. Worst. System. Ever. Gotta love the Old People Win and Young People Get Screwed System of Rewards and Penalties.

Question: If you were about to flush $19,000 down the drain, would you know it?

The question up there is a serious one. If there were a division of your company that brought in roughly $19,000 a month, would you keep it going? Shut it down? Would you even know it was pulling in that amount of money?

I would hope so, but on a recent consult I found the same old huge glaring omission that I find with pretty much any individual or business person I talk to. I tell you, I’m about to hire a guy to carve these into stone tablets for me. Or one of those chainsaw artists. He can carve up my couch to read:

Stats? We don’t need no stinking stats!

I can tell you from first-hand experience exactly what happens pretty much any time you ask an individual or business person for his stats.

“Show me your stats, please,” you say.

“….,” says the guy.

“You know,” you say again, after a long pause, “statistics.”

“Statistics?” says the guy.

“Yeah, stats you know. Up. Down. Sideways. Graph paper sort of thing.”

“Oh, yeah. We don’t really have time for that here,” he says, all puffed up with pride.

“Totally,” you say, “I understand. Must be pretty time consuming walking around with that paper bag over your head.”