For several years, my wife and I worked hard for the money at a job with a full service ad agency. Every year, however, we kept coming out on the short end of the stick: working longer hours, living with more stress, securing less net income to cover our mounting expenses. A recent New York Times article echoed the reality we felt more than a decade ago. According to their research drawing from data from the US Labor Department, employee wages are the lowest share of Gross Domestic Product since 1947, with the median hourly wage after factoring in inflation for American workers declining about 2 percent since 2003. Only the top percentile income earners have prospered while the rest of us whither under rising food and energy prices (and soon, rising prices for just about everything else). According to Census Bureau reports cited by the New York Times, the median pay among American workers is about the same, after accounting for inflation, as in 1973.
Besides helping sell products of questionable societal value (and with plenty of negative social and ecological impacts), we kissed off corporate America after just a few years on the treadmill to nowhere. Now we operate a diversified family-scaled, small business based on an organic farm powered by the wind and sun. We use our profits to make the world a better place and have built our business around our passions.
The main requirement of a for-profit business is to make profits, at least once every three years says the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). No requirement specifies how much profit must be made, just some. That’s the big difference between a hobby, where generating revenue is not the primary goal of the activity, and a business. There is no such thing as a “hobby business.” The non-profit business, formed as a special type of corporation depending on its purpose, uses revenues collected to fund its mission, whether it’s saving open space or planting trees around the world to help mitigate the effects of global warming, provide nature-enhancing livelihoods and prevent soil erosion like Trees for the Future does.
As my wife and I explore at length in ECOpreneuring and in my blogs, we approach our passions — writing, photography, hosting people at Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast and desiring to restore the planet — not as hobbies, but as business enterprises. You can blog on the Internet about growing in your garden, or you can write articles about growing food organically in your garden for Hobby Farm Home magazine and blog for GreenOptions.com. One’s a hobby; one’s a business and provides income from writing about something you love.
Turns out, 50% of people in the US are wiser than I thought: there is no quick fix or simple solution.
