On Tuesday I accepted a position as a copywriter at a NYSE listed corporation, a salaried cubicle job with a cushy benefits package, free Starbucks in the break room and fancy flat-screen monitors in the lobby; ending in a single phone call three-years worth of toil and sweat as a private entrepreneur. In the aftermath of that decision, what I feel above all else is a sense of relief. Having spent 33% of a decade as a self-made man, living and dying, so to speak, on the fruits of my own labor, the prospect of a traditional nine-to-five seems like a breath of HEPA-filtered fresh air.

Ruminating – in the sense of reflecting and not cud chewing – on the past three years, I am both extraordinarily glad to have swum in the deep waters, and equally glad that it is coming to what appears to be a tidy and perhaps surprisingly untragic end. It is the dream of many an office-jockey to suddenly pull up the stakes and work in a bathrobe from the downstairs office, and let’s be honest, any work environment is improved when you enjoy it in the comfort of Terry Cloth. That said, the magnitude of work, funding, planning and support needed to start a home business is simply inconceivable until you’ve attempted it, particularly when you’re stewing under fluorescent lights at the office feeling decidedly underappreciated. Just as parents-to-be are laughably naïve when pondering how easy it’s going to be for them to raise their children, so too the talented but under-informed might later compare entrepreneurship to being hit in the face with a small moon.

While my small company has surprisingly survived these years, and will actually carry on without me, I think it’s fair to say that starting a business might be reasonably compared to pushing a Volkswagen up a large hill using only your tongue. I could probably blame the difficulties I experienced to a slowing economy, or a weak dollar, or a general consumer malaise, or rising corporate taxes, or the credit crisis, or unfair competition from large competitors, or rising insurance costs, or a lack of resources. Those all seem like equally legitimate grievances, and given some time I could probably concoct a half-dozen others. What is remarkable is that those are just the tip of the iceberg trying to gouge through your own personal Titanic, and are most often compounded by lack of experience, underfunding and the endless potholes of unforeseen complications. On any given day in the early life of a small-business you start so far back in the field that the pole position might as well be on Mars. The reason so many business fail in the first five years is not because entrepreneurs don’t want to work hard, but because they think hard work is all it takes.

Hard work is great, but you’ll never be able to build a house just by chopping down trees, no matter how hard and well you work with a chainsaw. Talent is great, but the talent to be a writer, or a graphic designer, or chef or taxidermist has nothing to do with the vast necessity of resources and ability one needs to run a business. In the end people who have a talent for business make the best business owners, and the independent talent of the world are left to wonder (again!) why their dedication to quality and clear technical experience continues to go underappreciated while overpaid hacks rake in all the good account. Fortunately, it turned out that I had some smatterings of latent talent at the art of business, but even with that, considering what few meaningful resources we had at the launch of my company and how little I knew about what was expected, I’m frankly startled that I didn’t drive myself into something like bankruptcy before the ink had dried on the documents forming my S Corp.

I was lucky. I had a business with no overhead, where our product was a digital file, where there was local demand and limited competitors, and which could be differentiated across multiple customer bases. Had I been in a position where I had to manage inventory and suppliers on top of everything else that already seemed exponentially more complicated than I had imagined, I’m pretty sure I’d either be clinically infirmed or panhandling today. Instead I’m coming out relatively unscathed with slightly more debt than I’d care for but a respectable client base that can provide enhanced supplemental income in the future. Incredibly, even as I go back into the corporate work force for the stability it provides, knowing what I know now, I think I’ve been incredibly successful in just avoiding the now clearly visible cadre of calamity that I didn’t even know had surrounded me from day one.

I don’t think people who have never started their own company can fathom the work and stress of the process. From the outside looking in, it’s a paradise of setting your own hours and being the sole beneficiary of your own efforts, but once you’ve crossed over you realize how illusory those perceptions are. You only seem like you’re setting your own hours because in most meaningful ways you have actually chosen to be at work in one form or another every waking moment of every day. For a long time I thought of weekends not as days to be spent in leisure, but as the times of the week when fewer people called about work. And, as for being the beneficiary of your own sweat, let me assure you that it’s far easier and more reliable to get your weekly paycheck than it is to pry payment from a customer who dramatically underestimated the work needed to complete his project – regardless of how many times you warned them or the quote they signed. Sometimes I wonder if it might not just be easier to throw my own invoices in the trash, and save everyone else the hassle.

Let me just assure you, that if you have ever thought about starting up a company because you don’t make enough money at your current job, then you don’t have enough money to actually start a business. Anyone comfortable enough in their finances to carry the burden of start-up costs, like a pack-mule carrying a battleship up the slopes of the Grand Canyon, probably isn’t the type to be stewing over poor compensation in the first place. Go ahead and imagine a number you think it might cost to start the business of your dreams, now triple it and imagine that tripled pile of money being burned like books in rural Mississippi.

If I had it all to do again, I’d really have two accounts for start-up. One would hold the bathtub full of money it takes to get the business going, with things like legal and accounting fees, equipment, software, fees for joining business networking groups or the local Chamber of Commerce, perhaps rental space, supplies, taxes, and on and on. The other would be what I had to actually live on for the first year or two, because there’s simply no room in the budget of a fledgling business to actually pay yourself. Relying on a business weeks or month old to both support itself and you is a lot like relying on a newly born foal to carry a jockey into the roses at Churchill Downs.

I don’t mean to be entirely pessimistic about starting a small business, but in hindsight I wish I’d had better warning about what I was up against. There is a good reason that people persist in starting small businesses every day, and it has very little to do with breaking the bank or cornering the market. There’s the success of the first payment, the repeat customer, watching as the business begins to grow despite all odds, the prized account landed, the satisfaction of independence. It’s tiny rewards for monumental struggle that sometimes get lost in the hard times but shine bright on those rare days where to can feel the wheel turning slightly forward.

I’m glad I did it, and that probably is a result of simply having survived, but going back under the dry roof of a big company that seems to be weathering the apparent storm of uncertain economic times, I feel far more willing to go with the flow instead of swimming upstream. I suppose it’s a little bit lazy, and the true entrepreneur who thrives against the tide might scoff, but with a second child on the way my priorities have tectonically shifted. Give me a cubicle and an in-box, I say. Sounds like easy street.