So in the early stages being your own boss provides the wonderfully double edged experience of being responsible for everything and in real control of nothing.

All that having been said, the huge satisfaction of securing and then delivering a piece of work simply on the back of your own imagination, application and ingenuity does begin to give the “being your own boss” mantra some real oompmh.

A personal anecdote. My elder daughter in her pre-university gap year spent a couple of months in New Zealand. On her must-do list for the trip (unbeknown to her doting parents) was a bungee-jump – in the place it was invented. When she got back regaling us with this and other highlights, I noticed that she could have bought a video of her jump.

Problem was she told me that while she had felt the jump had been completed with elegance, style and some brio – the video that she has viewed showed a tumbling and comical flailing of arms and legs and not too much else so she passed on bringing the video home for the delectation of family and friends. And maybe the real task – as with so much else in life – is to turn that sort of experience inside out.

Setting off on your own in business feels like nothing more than the out-of-control falling and jerking of a bungee jump.

What you need your customers to perceive is the elegant and stylish descent accomplished through the achievement grace under pressure.

Like bungee jumping itself its all about elasticity and stretching the point.

And maybe if you can just pull it off that’s an acceptable Great White Lie.

* Mike Loftus is director of News from the Future