Why is it so hard to go back to working in a company once you've started your own business?

Here's a basic common sense for entrepreneurs, but many employees are generally unaware of this interesting fact: the importance of cash flow cycle.
For example, you only have 50k yuan to buy inventory and sell, with a thin profit margin of only 10%, how much can this business make?
Some people might intuitively say, "Oh, only 5,000 yuan profit, not enough for wages."
But in reality, this condition is insufficient; profit can't be calculated at all.
Because the profit margin isn't the most important thing; what's crucial is the speed of capital and inventory turnover.
Let's take an extreme example: if you can sell all your inventory in one day, then the next day you will have 55,000 yuan to buy more stock.
If you keep this cycle for a month, how much capital will you have? 800,000 yuan, 16 times your initial 50k yuan.
So on the surface, it looks like you achieved nearly 50k yuan in sales in a month with a 10% profit margin.
Many employees hear this and think, "Wow, I’d need 50k yuan in funds to do this business, and the profit isn’t high, so it’s not worth it."
But in reality, you only need 50k yuan in costs, and through high turnover, you leverage a transaction volume of 50k yuan, gaining a 1,500% return on capital.
How important is speed?
For example, if the shipping time becomes two days, the monthly profit doesn’t just drop by half; it drops by 80%.
By the end of the month, you only have 200,000 yuan in capital, which means a profit of 150k yuan.
The saying "fast fish eat slow fish" is very meaningful—fast fish refers to those who discover and seize market opportunities first, and market opportunities, in simple terms, are blank markets, which are most suitable for compound growth.
The earliest movers can use minimal investment to capture huge profits, creating many so-called overnight successes.
And what happens if you’re slow?
The fixed expenses and labor costs I didn’t mention earlier will come into play.
For example, if fixed expenses like rent are 50k yuan a month, and I sell a product with a 100% gross margin—quite high, right?
With 50,000 yuan in inventory, selling it in half a month earns 50,000 yuan; selling it in a month breaks even; selling it in two months results in a 50,000 yuan loss.
In other words, if you buy at 100 and sell at 200, why are you losing money?
Fixed expenses are often the main reason small businesses fail, and the root cause is insufficient cash flow efficiency, which prevents generating enough profit.
That’s why we often hear complaints from factory owners and traders about low profit margins and high labor costs.
And yet, they buy houses and land to expand their scale.
You can see their products—if they’re earning only two yuan per item, where does the profit come from?
It’s probably the boss lying.
Actually, the boss might not be lying; they might just be hiding some information, like cash flow efficiency, which is the key to making money.
Businesspeople say, "Cash flow is blood," and this phrase is far more important than many people think.
Because once their capital stops flowing, the losses caused can be ten or even a hundred times higher than the visible halted funds.
What I just described is only the most basic and trivial aspect of business operation—something that belongs to honest traditional business practices, far from the leverage tricks that some use to manipulate the market.
After experiencing these gambling-like possibilities, it’s easy to see why entrepreneurs become desperate when faced with hopeless monthly wages.
That’s also one of the reasons they sleep on the floor instead of working in a regular job.