How to compare a job offer with staying self-employed
A concrete employment offer gives a business owner another possible working life to examine. Make both alternatives specific enough to choose between.
You have been running your own business, and someone offers you a job. Parts of it appeal to you. You might want colleagues to work with, more time on a particular kind of work, or fewer decisions resting with you. You also know what you would miss about working for yourself.
Before deciding, describe what you would actually be agreeing to in that role. Give the business alternative the same attention. The comparison becomes useful when you can explain how each option would affect the work you want to do and the life around it.
Identify what attracts you to this offer
Start with the particular role. Which part would you like to spend more time doing? Perhaps you enjoy helping a team work through difficult customer questions, while finding and arranging the next assignment takes up more of your attention than you want. That is a specific reason to examine an offer that would let you concentrate on the customer work.
Ask what you would still value about the offer after a good month in your own business. Then look at the frustrations you hope the job would remove. For each one, find out what would happen to that responsibility. Some work may move to another person; other responsibilities may remain part of your new role.
Find out how the role would work
Take a responsibility from the role description and ask the prospective employer how it works in practice. Who decides what receives attention first? What would you be expected to decide yourself, and where would you need somebody else's agreement? Use a recent example from the team to understand what those expectations mean.
Imagine that you run a small consulting business and have an offer to join a client's internal team. You like working with them and want to spend more time developing their service. In the role, several department heads would be able to ask for your help. You need to understand who settles competing requests and which work you could decline. Those answers would affect how much room you have for the work that attracted you.
In that hypothetical situation, a conversation with the hiring manager about competing requests would be more useful than assuming that employment would remove the need to manage priorities. You can also ask about the working arrangements that matter to your life, such as when you need to be present and how the team handles work outside those hours.
Describe the business you would continue
Use your current commitments as the starting point. Which customers and work would you keep? What would you change, and what would making that change require? If staying self-employed depends on stopping a service, you need to consider the promises already made and what you would be willing to offer next.
Be specific about the work you still want to do personally. You may want the freedom to choose assignments and also want more collaboration. Explore how you could arrange that within the business you actually have. Keep possible future arrangements separate from anything somebody has already agreed to. The same applies to work you hope to win.
Clarify what your decision depends on
Look at the differences you have identified. Which would you be happy to accept, and which would make an option unworkable for you? Include the practical arrangements you rely on outside work. If the decision depends on an unanswered question about the job, put that question to the employer before treating your preferred answer as part of the offer.
You may discover that you would accept the role if its responsibilities were clearer. You may prefer to continue the business with a change you are prepared to make. Either way, name what needs to happen next and who needs to be involved. You can then examine the response alongside your own preferences.
If you want help thinking through the choice, bring the actual offer and examples from your business into business coaching. We can examine the work you want to keep, the responsibilities you are willing to take and what must remain possible outside work. Coaching is available online in English or Danish. The first conversation stands on its own; you decide afterwards whether to continue.