When you’re looking to go into business for yourself, how do you decide what business to go into?
For myself I prefer a business-to-business (B2B) firm. For me that filters the type of people I deal with on a day-to-day basis and gives me weekends off – sort of.
If you go into a retail business, you’re looking at a 7 day-a-week lifestyle. You also deal with a lot more charlatans. There are many people out there that will steal from you at the drop of a hat. As a retail business, you are forced to deal with everyone and anyone.
The advantage of a retail business is, lose a customer and you have a small loss. In a B2B, business and you have one customer that is 30% of your sales and you lose them, you’re really hurting.
Another consideration is what kind of work do you like? I’m sort of a geek (probably too much of a geek). So I gravitate to a business that is heavily involved with computers. For me, it’s Microsoft Great Plains.
But I belong to a networking group that has many people doing things they like doing.
A danger in using your likes to start a business is you usually start doing the work yourself. That can be a very real hazard. If you want to grow and make some serious bucks, you need to expand beyond yourself – one exception is entertainers and sports figures.
A man wiser than me once said, “You should work ON your business rather than IN your business.”
Try to set up your business as if you are the owner and manager, but not the actual grunt. I know that’s brutally hard to do – physician heal thyself first.
But if you want to grow beyond just yourself, you need to be hiring people to do the work for you – but how you do that is a topic for another day.
Ozean on December 12th, 2005 at 8:08 am
can i hire a 2 or 3 people at first so i can trust them then move to more people