There’s a difference between you owning a business and the business owning you.
There’s an easy way to tell: can you take a break for a month without your business crumbling? If yes, congratulations. If not, there could be an issue with the actual price of your billable hours.
It all looks so clear when leaving our boss’s office for the last time: you know how to do the job, and you know just how much the boss charges the clients. You will charge less to be competitive but get more for yourself in the end.
The problem is, when you are employed, you have 40 billable hours per week. When you are self-employed, as an expert or specialist, 12 billable hours is often a mark of a successful week. So you end up doing a lot more unbillable work, working more, and getting less money.
I’m not here to discourage you, on the contrary. The solution is simple, just not easy – make every billable hour count for much more, and you could be back “in the saddle” of your business in a couple of months.