Owning a small business is all about creating value. You’ll hear entrepreneurs often put a lot of emphasis on creating value. Without it their business won’t have a reason for existing. But what do they mean with value.

Many of us work for big companies, like I do. Deep inside a large hierarchy it is difficult to see if our work has any impact on the organization. Although these days with new fads like Scrum and Agile there is a lot of talk about adding value, you just have to try to figure out if your new piece of software adds anything to your big corporate. Not as simple as it sounds.

In a small business creating value is much easier. You create a product or design, market it and see if it sells or not. For instance this Barcelona cement tile design is based on an existing one. I copied it and put it on Zazzle products like iPhone cases. Lo and behold, I sold products and made a profit. Therefor for a couple of people I created value.

I can put a figure on value. And I can experiment with creating value. The original design wasn’t completely to my liking, so I tweaked it. Making sure that it was more like an Islamic geometric pattern. With the following result.

The new version I introduced in my RedBubble shop and hopefully it will start to sell.

The point is that in my online business I know that I’m creating value. And that I can improve on creating value, either by new insights in marketing and designs or new skills in making designs. That is a powerful control on your life and income.

Working as an underling in a big corporation you’ll never really know if your work really matters. Or more scary, after you get a pink slip, it really doesn’t matter for the rest of society also. Over the last four years I saw many colleagues leaving the company, voluntarily or involuntarily, and not being replaced. As if their jobs never added value after all.

So take control of your life by taking control of creating value.