by Lang Zaam

Created on: October 03, 2008

Working for 45 years is enough to have a story about being self employed. To answer the question if it is better to be self employed compared to working for an employer is entirely up to ones character. In my case, I came to Canada, young and well educated in the art of technical instrument making. My luck, before coming to Canada, was to have worked for a research facility applying my talents in the design of equipment for testing. Having full knowledge of working with precision machine tools came in handy in the design as applied on the drawing board.

In Canada I set out to work in the engineering department of a well know equipment manufacturer. After three years and getting better at spoken English I was promoted as a sales Engineer in a major industrial City. One year later I resigned my position and started on my goal of being self employed.

During the year, while employed as a sales engineer, I signed up for a three months course in sales and sales management with a local university. The clincher in my decision to become self employed came when the professor wrote the following on the board: "what is more important in sales as a salesmen, to be knowledgeable or nice?" He tore up a piece of paper and gave the class, of about thirty students, a sliver of it. The instructions were to write down a "K" or an "N" for whatever you belief is most appropriate. The prof gathered all the slivers and counted the K's and N's. We all then learned that 90% of the students had written an "N". I was stunned with the stupidity of the outcome because to me the answer was an obvious "K". The prof never said anything about the appropriateness of the answer, it was just an exercise in forming a statistic as it seemed.

I considered myself knowledgeable enough in the design of automation equipment to offer my services to the industry at large.

The multinationals quickly put me to work because in the late 1960 production was increasing and manpower shortages stimulated the requirement to implement forms of automation. Their production engineers became my friends with a mutual need, they would get me a coffee or buy me a lunch with the object of discussing solutions to their production problems. My task was to commit solutions to a blueprint so these companies could go to the manufacturers for actual equipment.

Specialization was my interest and fun and in order to get the best of both worlds we introduced our own manufacturing shop instead of relying on contractors. First it was

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