Every Saturday morning, I go onto the radio to tout the virtues of owning one’s own business. “You’ll never be more free!” I proclaim, “Why work for someone you don’t even respect?”, I ask.

Some of you … many of you in fact … have taken my advice. You’ve shucked your corporate garb and gone ahead and joined the ranks of the self-employed.

Feels good, doesn’t it?

But as you grow from your basement to your first commercial office space, you begin to notice that your business becomes your new love. In essence, it becomes your passion, right up there with wife and family.

And as this happens, the lines between “it” and an arms-length method of earning a living for your family begin to become less and less discernable.

And as this “blur” (between “corporate assets” and “private assets”) becomes more and more fuzzy, so too can become your interest in even making them precise and discernable.

Examples abound. The “company car” (remember what your accountant told you; no more than twenty per cent can be for personal use and you still must document that twenty per cent) becomes simply, “the car”. You travel to a trade show event and charge not only your airfare and hotel stay to your business, but you also allocate those same expenses for your spouse and kids!

Dinner out with the family every Friday night? No sweat --- put it on the company AMEX card and cleverly ask your wife during dinner if you should now switch from a “cash” to an “accrual” accounting system. (“That’ll satisfy those IRS boys”, you think to yourself.)

A few years back, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a column dealing with a study (by NYU professor David Yermack) that correlated slipping business performance by companies whose CEOs use their company-owned corporate jets for personal business. In fact, the article shows that companies who permit this practice “underperform the market by more than four percent over the long (ten years, as defined by Professor Yermack) term.”

That’s big bucks!

Why is this, you ask?

Well, Yermack believes that executives who enjoy excessive perks such as this “may be less likely to work hard, are less protective of their company’s assets, and/or are more likely to tolerate bloated or inefficient cost structures”.

So do I. “Soft” makes you weak. It really doesn’t take all that much time for your brain to turn to mush.

Think it through. Which are the only two constituencies that a business owner or CEO must truly care about? That’s right: Customers and Employees.

And who are the very first to know about “perq abuse” by the CEO or owner? Correct again. Customers learn about it from frustrated sales and support staff that are forced to work sixteen-hour days to feed the vices of the boss/King. Most other employees hear it first from accounting --- the same people who must deal with turning the boss’s new Porsche into a “company car”.

And of course, the fact that there is a private parking spot reserved for the boss/king only serves to reinforce the impression that the employees are working for Royalty, and not just “Regular Joes”.

One of this report’s findings that did surprise me was the fact that the CEO’s of Family Owned businesses were most apt to abuse the corporate jet for personal pleasure. Yerback’s speculation here was that, “founders do not recognize boundaries between personal and corporate property as clearly as non-founders”.

While this finding surprises me, I guess this makes sense, especially since the Founder has sweated for and thus probably feels as if every asset of the business is an asset that he or she actually paid for in some way, shape, or form.

But I guess I’m hanging around with the wrong entrepreneurs, since I know of but one or two true founders who could possibly be considered an abuser of their own company assets.

But I do see the roots of this type of behavior every time that I visit a start-up company and right there in their parking lot is a sign that says, “Reserved for CEO”, rather than “Reserved for Employee-of-the-Month”.

Or, when I see a CEO asking his or her assistant to run down a Christmas list for his wife/husband.

These are smaller things, to be sure. But someday, they could become a G-4.

At which time it will be too late to stop the engines!