Normal jitters

I have woken up this morning and am having my monthly worry about work loads - its quiet, too quiet - can I afford to continue with the job that I adore????

Since becoming self employed in January of 2008 I regularly panic about my workload, after all I have 3 children, 4 dogs and bills to pay, I need to make sure that my money is coming in. But this is a job I truly believe in, I love doing and it gives me time to spend with my children so what do you do? I make sure that my turnaround is within 24hours whenever possible and do my best to give good customer service and make sure that I am professional at all times so that I retain my existing clients which I consider essential.

The only part of my job I am not so keen on is chasing invoices - I hate it to be honest. I have only not been paid once and given the fact that I have been in business for nearly 3 years and only have one unpaid invoice thats not bad going! But when is too early to chase invoices and what is the polite way to do it? But as I said I am very lucky with my clients, they all pay on time (if not early) and are brilliant in that regard.

But what does get me at the moment is these facts:
1. Training providers are still advertising training courses for DEAs, "earn between 25,000 -30,000 a year" - thats simply not possible in the current climate. There are alot of DEAs that sunk retirement/redundancy/loans etc into training with training providers that promised them the moon, stars and sun and they have had to return back to previous methods of employment because the work simply isn't there and yet the training providers are still out there taking money off people.
2. Where is the unity with DEAs? There are several groups/organisations that are trying very hard to band DEAs together (I was involved with one of them) so that the self employed DEA can work together for better prices and better promotion but there isn't enough DEAs joining the groups.
3. Middlemen - there are too many firms out there offering cut price/ reverse auction EPCs to the general public but who pay the DEA a pittance. It isn't good for the industry, isn't professional and doesn't do any good for the pockets of the DEA.

There we go rant over for the morning, better go and do the school run x