Owning your own business has pressures and responsibilities that Mac will never fully understand unless he gives it a go. That being said a 16 hour a day slave is not the proper way to run a small business. I say that very bluntly. I have been in business for 40 years and I have worked plenty of long days. If you let that become the standard, you have no one to blame but yourself.

If you have never taken a class on the cost of doing business or don't have the familiarity with establishing your hourly rate, then you really need to sit down and do that first thing. The odds are pretty good that you are charging a lot less than your cost of doing business, and cannot afford to work less than 16 hours to make ends meet. If you are making a ton of money and could scale it back to 10 hours a day and still make ends meet, then you need to cherry pick more or get some help.

With a wife and lots of kids, I understand how a business can rip you off and steal the time that you should be spending watching your family grow - but only if you let it. It is a dynamic that a business owner will always be dealing with, but he has to manage it.

My business goes back so far that our hourly rate for repairing audio gear was $19 per hour. We worked a lot of hours. Then we went to a seminar on the true cost of doing business. One of the principles of learning your true cost of doing business is that you can double your hourly rate, and still lose half of your business, and you will still be making the same amount of money, with a lot less paperwork and headaches. We went home on a Friday evening with a $19 per hour rate, and opened up Monday morning with a $45 per hour rate. We did not lose business. We were working ignorantly before that.

Jeff, we are 4 hours apart but I will be glad to spend some time with you if you wish. You can get hold of this and manage it.

BTW, you likely would have a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach after a couple weeks of being a rep.