Entrepreneur With an Employee Mindset

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What is HTML All The Things

HTML All The Things is a web development podcast and discord community which was started by Matt and Mike, developers based in Ontario, Canada.

The podcast speaks to web development topics as well as running a small business, self-employment and time management. You can join them for both their successes and their struggles as they try to manage expanding their Web Development business without stretching themselves too thin.

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What's This One About?

In this episode Matt and Mike discuss front-end development, covering a roadmap of skills that can be used as a sort of guide through the many front-end technologies. The duo go over a list of topics that you can use to learn front-end development starting at vanilla HTML + CSS, and working into more complex topics like frameworks, JavaScript, some backend tech, and much more.

Show Notes

An entrepreneur with an employee mindset

Getting “stuck” in a contract or working relationship where you just do the tasks you’re given by a client and that’s it for the day
It’s easy to fall into this routine of just being your clients’ employee over the years, especially when you have a lot of clients
This is very common among people that have worked as an employee before, or those that have been in the “traditional” school system where you effectively wait to be given a task, you complete that task, then you get a reward for that task such as money, or a grade
Can really bog down the potential of your business and make your clients’ problems your problems
For example, you can easily fall into hard times when they do, and you both fight to get out of it - when you could have just left them and gotten a new contract
Obviously it’s not as easy as just leaving sometimes, especially if you know them, or have worked with them for a long time. Sometimes it’s better to stay if you believe their product will take off some day
There needs to be a balance of you running your business, and you taking on the tasks that they’re assigning you from their business. Remember you’re offering a service, you aren’t an employee
Knowing when to leave or stay with someone is extremely difficult, we mess this up probably every day
Footnote: You spend more time doing what you’re told than making decisions and running your business

Hesitating on “big” decisions

We all hesitate, rightly so, with big decisions. For entrepreneurs, the decision can take a long time and can even turn into some attempted social engineering
Trying to tailor conversations and social situations so that they fit a certain scenario almost never works - this commonly comes up when you have a difficult phone call, or email to send off - we can imagine the full conversation in our head, their responses and ours, but usually the conversation doesn’t follow such a linear path - remember they have their interpretation of the situation too
Hesitating on investing with something that you won’t miss.
We’ve all been in scenarios where we hesitate for hours and even days on whether we should sign up for some service that costs $10-20/mo
In the meantime, that service may give us access to some software that makes your process better and even gives you ideas for new services and/or products to offer yourself
At the end of the day if you forget to cancel that subscription, you won’t miss the $10-20/mo realistically (do cancel subs that you don’t use as they add up, but don’t fret over a forgotten month or two)
We spend a lot of time hesitating over things that won’t sink us anyway
Use that time to make decisions on truly big decisions that may sink you/your business, or affect you long term