What Color Is Your Parachute? Part 21

On the other hand, there are loads of people in this world who love to help others get started and they have very generous hearts. Generous with their time, generous with their stories, generous with their advice.

Your goal is to find three such people, who are willing to help you by relating their own history, because when you're done you should know enough to make a list of the necessary skills, knowledge, and experience they all agree are essential. These days, everyone's preference is to do such interviewing by e-mail. I think this is a big mistake. Face to face is to be preferred, in every case. Try business people in a city that's an hour's drive away. They are not as likely to see you as a potential compet.i.tor, unless you're both going to compete with each other head to head on the Internet. When you have a list you're satisfied with, give this list a name. Call it "A" of course.

d. Back home you sit down and inventory your own skills, knowledge, and experience, by doing the self-inventory described in chapter 7, the Flower Exercise. Give this list a name, also. Call it "B."

e. Having done this, subtract "B" from "A." This gives you another new list, which you should name "C." "C" is by definition a list of the skills or knowledge that you don't have, but must find-either by taking courses yourself, or by hiring someone with those skills, or by getting a friend or family member (who has those skills) to volunteer to help you for a while.

f. For example, if your investigation revealed that it takes good accounting practices in order to turn a profit, and you don't know a thing about accounting, you now know enough to go out and hire a part-time accountant immediately-or, if you absolutely have no money, maybe you can talk an accountant friend of yours into giving you some volunteer time, for a while.

I can ill.u.s.trate this whole process with a case history. Our job-hunter is a woman who has been making harps for some employer, but now is thinking about going into business for herself, not only making harps at home, but also designing harps, with the aid of a computer. After interviewing several home-based harp makers and harp designers, and finis.h.i.+ng her own self-a.s.sessment, her chart of A B = C came out looking like what's shown below.

To download a printable PDF of this image, please visit http://rhlink.com/para14027 If she decides she does indeed want to try her hand at becoming an independent harp maker and harp designer, she now knows what she needs but lacks: computer programming, knowledge of the principles of electronics, and accounting. In other words, List C. These she must either go to school to acquire for herself, OR enlist from some friends of hers in those fields, on a volunteer basis, OR go out and hire, part-time.

It should be always possible-with a little blood, sweat, and imagination-to find out what A B = C is, for any business you're dreaming of doing.

But let's say you've come up with a business idea that you're just sure no one else has ever thought of. Who do you go interview, then? Parallel businesses. Let's take a ridiculous example. You want to start a business of using computers to monitor the growth of plants in the Antarctic(!). A parallel business, in this case, would be: someone who's used computers with plants here in the States, or someone who's used computers in the Antarctic, or someone who has worked with plants in the Antarctic, etc.

You would get names of these people, go talk to them, and along the way you might even discover that there is actually someone who has used computers to monitor the growth of plants at the South Pole. Then again, you might not.

But what you would get, for certain, is an awareness of most of the pitfalls that wait for you, by learning from the experience of those who are in these parallel businesses or careers.

There is always the danger of a new start-up, online or off, going belly-up. Your startup. But with wise preparation you can minimize that possibility.

Are you cut out for this sort of thing? Only you can answer that, in your innermost thoughts. Just remember, it takes a lot of guts to try ANYTHING new (to you) in today's brutal economy. It's easier, however, if you keep these things in mind: 1. There is always some risk, in trying something new. Your goal, I hope, is not to avoid risk-there is no way to do that-but to make sure ahead of time that the risks are manageable.

2. As we have seen, you find this out before you start, by first talking to others who have already done what you are thinking of doing; then you evaluate whether or not you still want to go ahead and try it.

3. Have a plan B, laid out, before you start, as to what you will do if it doesn't work out; i.e., know where you are going to go, next. Don't wait, puh-leaze! Write it out, now. This is what I'm going to do, if this doesn't work out.

4. If you're sharing your life with someone, be sure to sit down with that partner or spouse and ask what the implications are for them if you try this new thing. Will they have to give up things? If so, what? Are they willing to make those sacrifices? And so on. You have a responsibility to make them full partners in any decision you're facing. Love demands it!

Starting up your own business outside the home without first listening to the experience of those who have gone before you, and profiting from their mistakes, is just nuts. Yet millions of people do just that, every year. And then they wonder why it didn't work out. As one woman said to me, "Yes, I knew I was being foolish, but I thought I'd get lucky." P.S. She didn't.

But you are wiser.

It is up to you to do your research thoroughly, weigh the risks, decide if they're manageable risks, count the costs, get counsel from those intimately involved with you, and then if you decide you still want to create your own job by starting this kind of business, go ahead and try-no matter what your well-meaning but cautious friends or family may say. They love you, they're concerned for you, and you should thank them for that; but come on, you only have one life here on this Earth, and that life is yours (under G.o.d) to say how it will be spent, or not spent. Parents, well-meaning friends, etc., can give loving advice, but in the end they get no vote. Just you ... and G.o.d.

Starting a Home Business

A home seems like an excellent place to create your own job. Low rent (ha!). Short commute! Low overhead. That's the vision. Sound like it might be a fit, for you?

Well, let's start out with a dose of reality. It can be a great idea (I have a home business myself). But be aware that there are three major problems with home businesses: 1. The first major problem of home businesses is that this is a rich playground for scams, that can cost you lots of money but never give any back. A lot of people like the idea of a home business, so vultures have taken advantage of that. You will run into ads on TV and on the Web and in your e-mail, offering you a home business "buy-in." They sound enticing. But, as AARP's Bulletin of March 23, 2009, pointed out: of the more than three million Web entries that surface from a Google search on the terms "work at home," more than 95% of the results are scams, links to scams, or other dead ends. Even the sites that claim to be scam-free often feature ads that link to scams. The statistic is: a 48-to-1 scam ratio among ads offering you a nice home business. That's forty-eight scams for every one true ad. This swamp is filled with alligators! For further details and warnings, see http://tinyurl.com/2d6xkc3.

2. The second major problem of home businesses is that even if you start a legitimate one, be it as writer, artist, business expert, lawyer, accountant (doing people's taxes), consultant, childcare, or the like, out of your home, it's often difficult to maintain a balance between business and family time. Sometimes the family time gets shortchanged, while in other cases the demands of family (particularly with small children) may become so interruptive, that the business gets shortchanged. So, do think out thoroughly ahead of time how you would go about doing this well.

3. The third major problem of home businesses is that it puts you into a perpetual job-hunt. Yes, I know. You like the idea of a home business because you hate job-hunting. You are attracted to the idea of a home business because this seems like an ideal way to cut short your job-hunt, by creating your own job.

The irony is, that a home business makes you in a very real sense a perpetual job-hunter-because you have to be always seeking new clients or customers-which is to say, new employers. Yes, they are employers because they pay you for the work you are doing. The only difference between this and a full-time job is that here the contract is limited. But if you are running your own business, you will have to continually beat the bushes for new clients or customers. Some of us have absolutely no appet.i.te for that aspect of home businesses. Forewarned is forearmed.

Of course, the dream of most budding home business people is that you will become so well known, and so in demand, that clients or customers will be literally beating down your doors, and you will be able to stop this endless job-hunt. But that only happens to a relative minority, sorry to report. The greater likelihood is that you will always have to beat the bushes for employers/clients. It may get easier as you get better at it, or it may get harder, if the economy goes further south. But you must learn to make your peace with it-however grudgingly. Otherwise, you're probably going to find a home business is just a glamorous synonym for "starving." I know many home business people to whom this has happened, and it happened precisely because they couldn't stomach going out to beat the bushes for clients or customers. If that's true for you, but you're still determined to start a home business, then for heaven's sake start out by hiring someone part-time, who is willing to do this for you-one who, in fact, "eats it up."

Anyway, there are a bunch of resources on the Web, to help you make a home business succeed, such as www.ahbbo.com. This is a great site, with lots of information for you if you want to learn more about a home-based business. There are more than a hundred articles at www.ahbbo.com/articles.html.

Buying a Branch of a Business That Already Exists

Franchises, as they are called, exist because some people want to start their own business, but don't want to go through the agony of starting from scratch. They want to buy in on an already established business, and they have some money in their savings with which to do that. Fortunately for them, there are a lot of such franchises.

Franchises used to be much more popular than they are today. Blame it on the Internet. It is so easy to start your own business today, compared to, say, the 1980s.

So, I will mention briefly the existing business opportunities there are, which you may want to look at to see if there is a fit. But I also want to sound warning notes about each of them, so that you will go in with your eyes wide open, if you decide it might be a fit. We live in a world of spams and scams these days, and consequently the pathway to creating your own job has its perils, as well as its rewards.

To find the range of possibilities, to decide if any one of them might be a fit for you, start with the following sites: www.franchiseopportunities.com www.franchisedirect.com www.franchisegenius.com Now, here's the rub. Franchises require you, generally speaking, to have a bundle of cash, if you wish to buy in. And you may not be able to take much money out, the first year. And they are very risky businesses. Their failure rate is high, particularly in these difficult economic times. You have to guess what kind of services or products the public wants. And the public is tremendously fickle.

So, if you start out thinking that maybe, just maybe, a franchise might fit you-not only creating a job for you, but also for others-you owe it to yourself to investigate the whole idea, and that particular franchise, thoroughly. That's: thoroughly. Thoroughly.

Start that homework with these sites: http://tinyurl.com/64gda2: Interesting checklist from Entrepreneur Magazine on "Are You Suited to Be a Franchisee?"

http://tinyurl.com/bv83cxu: The best franchises in 2013 according to their owners' ratings.

http://www.franchisematch.com: Helps you research franchises, based on your own interests and priorities. Uses 2013 data.

http://www.bbb.org/us/article/4580: A Better Business Bureau article (dated 2000) on the things to beware of, in purchasing a franchise.

http://tinyurl.com/3vv97lw: This site, Franchise Genius, tells you how to research a franchise thoroughly, before you buy it. It goes over all the things you need to know the answers to, if you're going to come up with a business plan.

http://tinyurl.com/3bzbrxw: This site, JasonTees.com, cleverly lists franchises whose owners have defaulted most frequently on their SBA (Small Business Administration) loans, as well as those franchises whose owners have defaulted the least frequently.

http://tinyurl.com/44yxdvh: Nolo Press has a good article here about fit, called "Starting the Right Business for You."

Please note that there isn't a franchising book, or site, that doesn't warn you eighteen times to go talk to people who have already bought that same franchise, before you ever decide to go with them. And I mean several people, not just one.

Most experts also warn you to go talk to other franchises in the same field, not just the kind you're thinking about signing up with. Maybe there's something better, which your research can uncover.

You want to keep in mind that some types of franchises have a failure rate far greater than others.

And you want to keep in mind also that some individual franchises are economic horror stories-and that includes well-known names. They charge too much for you to get on board, and often they don't do the advertising or other commitments that they promised they would.

If you are in a hurry, and you don't want to do this homework first, 'cause it's just too much trouble, you will deserve what you get, believe me. You will rue the day.

How to Flourish in Your Own Business

Finding employees or vendors: With the Internet came globalization. And this changed everything for the self-employed. In this global age if you're operating on a shoestring, and you need, let us say, to have something printed or produced as inexpensively as possible, you can search for an inexpensive printer, vendor, or manufacturer anywhere in the world, and solicit bids. All you have to do is type in the name of the skill-set you need, plus the word "overseas," and the word "jobs"-and see what you can find.

Finding clients or customers: You now have a much larger market at your disposal where you can sell your skills, knowledge, services, and products, worldwide.

There are also some very successful strategies that the Internet offers you, to build up your business. There are a number of books to guide you in doing this. My personal favorite is a gem called Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed, by Patrick Schwerdtfeger. Following Patrick's suggestions, here is how one man went about finding clients for his new business. ("Which business" is irrelevant, as these strategies apply to almost any self-employed person I can think of.) Patrick advised our friend that the basic strategy for building up your number of clients consists of the following: 1. Develop your own website.

2. Get people (drive traffic) to your website.

a. Identify your ideal customers.

b. Figure out where they're accessing the Internet: what raging rivers, as Patrick calls them (websites with tons of traffic) they visit.

c. Throw appetizing bait into that river (give valuable demonstrations of your expertise) such that they will hunger for more. Always, always link back to your website, which will-incidentally-increase your Google PageRank score.

3. Impress them once they get to your website.

a. Build trust first. n.o.body is going to buy anything from you unless they first trust you.

b. Provide value.

c. Divide what you have to offer clients or customers into three categories: beginner, intermediate, advanced. Give beginner content away for free, ask for information in exchange for intermediate content (request an e-mail address, for example), and sell the advanced content.

With this basic strategy firmly in mind, our friend proceeded to do the following: 1. He set up a website of his own, using Wordpress (he Googled how to set up a Wordpress website easy).

2. He built up an initial mailing list by going to his local library and accessing the free lists at ReferenceUSA (www.referenceusa.com). He put these names on his computer.

a. He set up an e-mail autoresponder, using aWeber (www.aweber.com). Alternatively he debated using Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) but went with aWeber in the end.

b. He got people to subscribe to his mailing list (subscription was free, and he guaranteed they would receive one e-mail tip every week for a year). He put a link back to his website, at the end of each e-mail.

c. Before he began, he created an outline (only) of what he would cover, for the fifty-two weeks.

d. What did he cover? Well, basically he pretended he was a teacher, and asked himself, what would I most like to teach my readers? What is my value to them? He identified not just what problems his potential clients were facing but from among those, which of them was causing them some kind of pain-physical, psychological, mental, or whatever.

e. He wrote three articles before he started, then wrote another one of the fifty-two articles, weekly, just staying three weeks ahead of his first subscriber.

f. He quickly learned that people needed to see his e-mails seven times before they remembered his ideas, and recognized him as an authority.

3. He set up an audio podcast course on iTunes.

a. His basic maxim, learned from Patrick, is that people trust video most, audio next, photos next, and basic text the least.

b. On Patrick's advice, he bought a $50 microphone, ignoring the built-in one on his Mac, because he wanted better sound quality. For this reason he also bought a stand for it, and a $10 buck "pop filter"-which looks like a large foam-rubber ball, that goes on the end of the microphone.

c. He signed up for a RSS hosting account on a site called Libsyn.com.

d. For basic recording software he used the GarageBand app, which comes installed on Macs-and he was working on a Mac. Had he had a PC, Patrick advised him to could use Audacity for PCs. He paid attention to audio effects such as compression and ba.s.s boost, to improve sound quality.

4. In addition to his website, weekly e-mails, and audio podcasts, he decided also to publish his own free educational articles and relevant photos online, using every outlet available, including Google+.

a. He put posts on popular online forums related to his field and area of expertise. He tried to post on the most popular, trafficked ones, which he found by Googling his favorite keyword(s) plus the word "forum." He found that the most popular forums usually rise to the top of a search engine's list; that's where he wanted to enter his posts.

b. He further searched for the most popular blogs by going to Technorati (http://technorati.com).

5. He tried to always ask interesting questions, or to offer a list of resources.

6. Finally, he set up a channel on YouTube, and regularly posted three-minute videos that he shot in his kitchen, using an inexpensive video camera he picked up on sale.

It's a whole new world with the Internet. As I have ill.u.s.trated here, if you want to start your own business the Internet offers you an abundance of resources for finding customers and growing your business.

I wish you the best.