Is opening and running a business a good idea for you?

Is opening and running a business a good idea for you?
To own a small or medium size business is both good news and bad news. The good news is that you can have lots of fun running your own small business and make lots of money. But, don’t let anybody kid you, the bad news is that you can lose your shirt or blouse in opening and running a business.
The difference is something I discovered a long time and ago and I have been teaching all over the world. In fact, the reason I am writing about business in this week’s column, is that I just returned from Ciudad Juarez where I spoke to about a 1,000 entrepreneurs and business people and this was the topic of one of my two speeches.
The difference between making money and losing money in a business is something called “business knowledge”. You can be an expert in your product or service and that won’t do you any good unless you know how to run a business.
I constantly tell my fellow professional speakers that until they treat their speaking business as a business and not as a profession, they won’t make it in that highly competitive field.
There are three ways to acquire business knowledge and the first way is the most common one and the most dangerous: trial and error. If you want to find out if the stove is hot, you place your hand on it. It is rather a very good way of learning from your own experience, but also a very painful way of doing it. In fact, several major universities, one of them as I remember, Tulane University in New Orleans, did a study some years ago and discovered that the average small business person failed almost four times before they finally succeeded. Think about the pain and suffering you must go through by learning from just your own experience.
The second way of acquiring business knowledge is through the purchase of a franchise. There are very good franchises that will make you lots of money but to be able to own one, you really must put down a lot of money. As a plus, they will give you an exact road map on how to run the business and the fact that the brand is already established, they will avoid lots of headaches and heartaches in running a business.
The third way of acquiring business knowledge is the most painless way and that is what you are doing in reading this article, learning from other people’s experience. Anyone can learn from their own experience, but the really smart person learns from the experience of other people and that is what I try to convey in this article.
Any business you want to open has an association of businesses that belong in order to help and learn from each other. For example, I belong to the National Speakers Association and I believe that a very important factor in my success as a speaker is due to what I have learned in that association. Again, I learned from the experiences of others.
It is no secret that the economy is hurting here in PR, in the US and all over the world. Lots of people have lost their jobs so because of it, they are now in a position that they must do something to survive and one of the alternatives is opening your own business.
People have lost control of their lives and what the lack of control can mean is stress. In fact, now we know that stress is directly related to the lack of control. Think about the things right now that are causing you the most stress. These are the things you have no control over. But one good thing about small business is that you start to get control of your own life.
It is also lots of fun creating new ideas, new products or services and testing them in the market place.
One of the paradoxes however that I have discovered in my career, owning my own speaking business since 1995 is that small business is not for everybody, but it doesn’t matter if your work for somebody else or you work for yourself: If you only do that work for the money, and that is the weird part about this, is that you will never make any serious money. But, if you get involved with a job or a small business that is so much fun that you say, “I would do this for free”, that is when you can make lots of money. And, that is the paradox.
Go out there and find some fun and follow your passion.
Somebody some time ago said that small business is not about making money, but rather becoming who you really are. And you have got to get involved with a business or a job that is having some fun while you work at it.
Finally, one thing about business I don’t want to forget mentioning is that there are no restrictions or limits.
You know, when you work for somebody else, you are always limited in how much money you can make, or how much responsibility you are going to have based on your boss’s perceptions of your own skills. And a lot of time their perception is based on a resume or an interview.
In small business, no one cares about that. For example, although I tell everyone to get a degree, some of the richest men in the world didn’t go to college, dropped out of college and some didn’t even through high school. In a small business, no one cares about those things.
In small business, no one cares about your age. Harlan Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken with a social security check inside this shirt pocket.
In terms of sex, how many women reading this article are tired, frustrated, and angry and pissed off because they are working right next to a male counterpart and on average according to some statistics, are making 10 or 20 per cent less for no other reason than their sex.
Maybe this is one of the reasons that women right now are starting small businesses at a higher rate than men.
No, opening and running a business is not for all, but if you have no job, you have some common sense, you find a need and you fill it, you might hit the jackpot.