Beginning Business Blog

Busking at Seattle’s Pike Place Market If you’re not familiar with the terms “busker” and “busking”, well, according to the Oxford English Dictionary the word busk is an English verb dating to a 17 th century French word meaning “to sell” that came to mean “to play music in the street or other public place for voluntary donations” in 19 th century Britain.   So a busker plays music in the street. . . you get the idea.   And busking can be a profitable business for many street performers, at times the musician’s only source of income. One place in this country with a strong busking tradition is New Orleans where musicians, often world-class players, set up in the streets of the French Quarter with a hat on the sidewalk for tips - usually seeded by the busker with a few one and five dollar bills to suggest an appropriate donation.   Over one three week period I watched a succession of wonderful musicians busking in front of the world-famous Cafe' Du Monde'. ...

I passed this business some months ago, then found this story on the West Seattle Washington blog.  It is reprinted here due to the interest of so many people - lots of hits ~ Meet West Seattle’s “Psychic Barber”: He KNOWS you need a cut R ick Cook, owner of Rick’s Barber Shop at 5251 California SW (in West Seattle, Washington), has inherited both a sign and a claim to fame: “Psychic Barber.”      You’ve probably laughed, driving along California SW, when out of the corner of your eye you caught a glimpse of two white neon signs next to each other: “Psychic” “Barber.” That reaction was partly by design; after a psychic moved in next door to Rick’s Barber Shop, Rick had a matching white neon “Barber” sign made by the same person who created the “Psychic” sign.      Now, Rick owns the “Psychic” portion of the signage as well, and his front window proudly announces “Psychic Barber.”   The Psychic Barber attention came after Rick had ...

“ 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...