Beginning Business Blog

“ 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...