EPTSo, the last 5 years I have been working in the medical field. My job title is intraoperative neurophysiologic monitoring. Not to brag or anything but in my city in this particular job I'm considered to be the best for this line of work. I have worked in around 700-800 surgeries and have developed good relationships with doctors. In Athens there are more experienced users in the field than me and personally I always want to become better and better. This field has a lot of knowledge requirement and to be one of the best you have to try really hard.
Now the reason why I wanted to write a blog.
So in around September my previous boss called me in his office and while I was doing really well in my job he decided to fire me. It was not because I was not doing well in my job, it was not because I did something wrong in the O.R the reason behind it is purely because my previous boss was a business man thinking only of himself and his company. What I mean by that. I used to work in a company in the same field and he approached me saying he really wanted to hire me because I have better knowledge than the people he had (to give an example, I used to do monitoring in brain tumor surgeries while his employees at the time only knew to do spine monitoring). He offered me a better salary and he also said to me that he promise me he will keep me in his company whatever happens (of course if something really bad happened I was to get fired). Well all that were lies because what he accomplished in the end was that I trained his employees then after a year and a half he thought its better off firing me not having to pay a good salary but instead get someone new in my place and give him a salary of 600e / month (I was getting paid almost double than that). Anyway I dont hold any grudges, its how businesses work and I should have seen that coming. After being unemployed for 3 months another opportunity appeared though it wasnt as good as I hoped it would be. I was approached by one company that used to be no.1 in our country in medical devices and in the field I am working, but 3 years ago it almost shut down due to economical difficulties. The past months these difficulties have cleared out and they are trying to make a comeback in the market. The problem in this company and the most important one is that they have old units that are needed for monitoring and their technical specifications are outdated. Basically we have really bad machines and cant do our job at the level we can do.
So I have been thinking for the last days if maybe now is the time to make a move in my life and buy a machine on my own and run the whole thing on my own. I have also made a business plan on the next 4 years and the numbers are ok. To give an example a machine needed for this job costs around 30k$ used and 45k$ brand new. The market is really open right now and such an opportunity I feel must not be wasted. What I got to offer to the surgeons in comparison to other companies is better quality of monitoring by the experience I have and lower price.
I am also thinking of taking some courses abroad to further my knowledge or even try and get some sort of diploma.
Anyone out there that started their own business and what are the problems you had to cope with along the way.
