A business is an activity that you plan and organize in order to generate profits through the production or sale of goods and services that satisfy the needs of a market. This activity must be planned to be sustainable over time. Have I had or do I have my own business? Initially, when I saw the question among this week's topics I hesitated.

For 35 years I have worked as a teacher in the areas of language and literature and I have also worked in the editorial area as a proofreader and advisor in the process of editing books. Although for some years I worked for public and private companies and cultural institutions, for more than twenty years I have worked as a freelancer, but I have never registered a company, I have no employees. This made me hesitate.

Well, the fact that I have managed to stay so many years doing the same work, getting paid for it, and that for more than two decades I have done it autonomously, already answers the question about whether I have had a business of my own, even though I do not have a registered company. An educational service business and a publishing service business, which I initially did for others, and which I then began to offer on a freelance basis.

One of the biggest challenges of owning your own business is to maintain it over time. Finding customers who are willing to pay for your product or service makes your business profitable and long lasting. Generally, when you dedicate yourself to teaching, and especially if you do it as a freelancer, your income is not very large. You do it because you like it, by vocation. You find great satisfaction in teaching others. You don't do it for the money. When you work freelance in publishing, the same thing can happen to you. It's more profitable and easier to do it for a company, but that company keeps most of the profits.

An intermediate solution that I have found over the years, when students and clients do not come, is to offer my editorial services and my classes to institutions and companies, but without compromising my freedom and my time. That is, for a certain period of time, or to carry out a specific editorial project, I make an agreement. Thus, in the last few years, I offered workshops at La Poeteca de Caracas, a private foundation dedicated to courses and events exclusively on Poetry, and at the Los Palos Grandes Library, which belongs to the Chacao Mayor's Office, both located near my home. Alliances can be very convenient when you work independently.

One of the biggest challenges when you work as a freelancer is to learn to plan and do it with an entrepreneurial mindset. That has been my great challenge. Although I have dedicated myself to letters, to literature, I had to learn to do the math. I had to stop doing activities that were no longer profitable for me. Recently, I asked a relative to help me make an Excel spreadsheet that would allow me to manage my finances in a much more systematized way. As numbers are not among my skills, I had to ask for support.

The world has changed a lot and very quickly in the last decades. For those of us who were born in the last century and are not digital natives, it has not only been about learning to use computers and smartphones, which is already a challenge; but also living in the digitized world involves paradigm shifts, change of mentality. Coupling yourself to an industry that took over the planet and almost all the activities that are done on it, that requires you to be constantly updated, to learn to use new tools, new applications, new platforms, each one with a different operation, all the time. Stop the world I want to get off!

To offer your products and services today in an effective way you must know about digital marketing. It no longer helps the recommendation, word of mouth, someone recommending you. It's not just about putting an image and a price on some social network, you must learn how to do it. I have had to take courses, understand how things work in digital media and now the new challenge is Artificial Intelligence, a new tool that can be very useful if you know how to use it.

When the Covid 19 pandemic began five years ago, I had never taught online. I could no longer teach face-to-face classes. I had a bad internet connection. So I had to learn how to use videoconferencing platforms, the newest thing I knew was Skype and I didn't know how to use it very well, I had attended some events through Zoom, but I didn't have a personal Zoom account. Finally, I got to know Google Meet, which has turned out to be the most user-friendly platform for teaching. I am still learning some features of Google Meet.

When you have your own business you can have two problems to be aware of, because you don't have an established schedule, you make your own schedule. You can become a workaholic and not have enough rest spaces in your schedule, which can end up making you sick; or on the contrary, procrastinate, not establish a work schedule and be unproductive. In my case, I have tried to strike a balance, establish an agenda of pending work and a schedule to do them, but also establish rest breaks and days in which I do activities outside the house that allow me to distract myself. But I must admit that there are times when procrastination has won me over, I have been distracted and I have wasted time when I had work things pending.

When you have your own business, the ideal is to find a balance, to find financial freedom. Be productive, without working for others, but learn to generate profits without mortgaging your life. I think that is the ideal. The new sales and service platforms can be very useful for those who know how to use them. I don't know yet. But in the long term it is my goal, to be able to offer my editorial services and my classes on a platform. For now I am in a learning stage. I hope you found my experience useful. Thanks for reading.