Beginning Business Blog

The Burning Man question: " What makes life worth living ?" ~ Larry Harvey , founder, The Burning Man Festival This is not a question economists know how to ask let alone answer.  Yet it is the driving question you must answer when making any life decision such as whether or not to start a business.  Why?  How do you quantify or measure quality of life with numbers?  Figure that out and you'll win a Nobel in Economics. Rather, economists spend their careers quantifying what they can and of necessity ignoring any aspect of quality of life that cannot be set to numbers.  So in the dismal world inhabited by economists, the ONLY reason to start a business is growth as defined by increasing (or decreasing) some numbers of "things", usually money or jobs or efficiency or productivity.  Economists have no language for discussing the core reasons for starting and running a business.  Take Mr. ...

A rnold Schwartzenager once said in a TV interview that “there is so much opportunity in America that most Americans can’t see it” or words to this effect.  Is there a reason that of all American citizens, first and second generation immigrants are by far and away the most likely to start a small business?  They walk onto our shores and see nothing but opportunity to create their own future in their own terms.       Opportunity in the United States (and Canada, too, for that matter) is like the Force in the Star Wars movies -- it surrounds us, binds and gives us our power.  But like anything else, we become satiated and saturated, oblivious to the opportunity that floods our daily existence.  An Opportunity Search is the process seeing opportunity where it lurks, and it lurks all around us. *  *  *       Get a pad of paper and pencil or set a binder to note ideas and to paste articles and ads from magazines ...

“ Choose a business you love and  you will never work a day in your life ”                                 after Confucius T he key to finding the best small business for you is to match your skills, knowledge, experience and aptitudes with a business type most suited to you.  This requires that you develop a very basic marketing skill at finding and identifying business opportunities I call “Opportunity Thinking”.  This is a skill anyone can learn.  Yes, some people will be better than others spotting opportunity, but anyone can learn. What it Opportunity Thinking?   It is the practice of looking at the needs, wants and desires of the people in your community or across the country, and seeing how a product or service can fulfill these needs.  To help you get the idea, let’s look at some examples of...

Start by Analyzing Your Interests and Skills Feel free to copy this into wordpad or MS Word, and spend an afternoon figuring out what business you could start that you are already qualified to run.  The questions below are intended to help you think through what you bring to the game of small business as well as what skills and knowledge you can match with some of the many, many business opportunities in our society.      Be prepared to spend a couple of hours at this, perhaps more.  But, please don’t make a big project out of this exercise -- this is something you can complete in an evening or over a weekend at most. Ask yourself these questions: About My Career: 1)  Is my background in sales?      Administration?      Production?      Support services? 2)  What on-the-job things am I best at? 3)  What am I worst at? 4)  What spe...