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After reading all the posts,and there are plenty of them, of what a business is and what differentiates a “business” from a “job” I thought this discussion would be interesting.
I’m going to, for now, hold my thoughts and yield to the more experienced and knowledgeable. I’m sure the past experiences will be extremely helpful.
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Replies
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It is really quite simple:
Get a DBA in the the town where you live.
Open a bank account in the name of the DBA.
You're in business.
Where you take it from there is up to you.
Ed. Williams
*Bill, Ed is right. That was too easy. A better question is the purpose of a business, or, the preparation for a business.
*It is simple really, a person is either an "employee" or "self-employed/employ others". If you are not an employee you are "in business". From other posts you can see a lot of the things that go along with that.The simple step to starting a new business is to make the decision you are not going to be an employee. The rest all falls into place.For clarity: I know for many folks, including myself, technically I'm an employee of my Corp. But I think everyone should get the picture.
*I think what Bill is getting at is What skills should you have before you go out on your own? Everybody goes out before they are ready. You think that you are ready, but there are just some things that you have to learn the hard way. You know the customer call right as you are ready to leave with your family for dinner or an outing. Decision time. Family or business? This is where the rubber hits the road. But in an ideal world would you apprentice for 3 or 4 years as right hand man to an owner? Get a 4 year degree? Work yourself up the hierarchy of a framing crew? I grew up as a contractor son. I burned trash out back on Saturdays. I saw all the good subs on site and not so good ones next door. You could see someone about to implode from too much work. I also tried to GC but the economy and interest rates in 1980 got me. I got a 4 year degree in Accounting. And drove a truck to work myself through school. Now I find that all of these skills affect my business in some way. What is the skill set you would bring to the party if you had to start over?
*I think the most important thing is to be fair in all your dealings. Square dealin' pays off.
*Bill:Not to be unkind but over the past few months this has been extensively discussed. Please read the archives. If there is a specific question please ask.
*Fred, I've looked in the archives and the discussions I found were more or less about materials and techniques. Please excuse my very limited computer knowledge but I'm going to look again. If you know exactly where please direct me how to get there.On the other hand. How about the unexpected problems or pitfalls encountered starting out just when you thought all bases were covered?
*Bill, some of the threads covering items to be considered by those starting out are below: Are You Ready to Start BusinessHow do We Justify Profit?Small Contractor - Organizational WoesPaperwork is Killing MeAdvice for the YoungOverheadWhat's so great about growth
*What I've found out over the last 5 years is that you need unflagging optimism to get going, despite not knowing where you're going to come up with the cash for a certain job, or how to overcome a shortage of tools. And this optimism in the face of uncertainty can get you far along a path that, seen from above, you might rather not take. But, once down that path, so many opportunities are there for you that the problem is not having a chance at self-employment, it is what path to take to your particular pot of gold.Family health needs brought about my relocation from a exhibits job at a small museum to a town 14hrs away and self-employment and near-homelessness. My mom has MS and high sensitivity to aromatic hydrocarbons and her husband was going in for surgery that was likely to leave him in a wheelchair. When he came through it better than ever, my family and I were no longer welcome! And it was clear he wanted out of the marriage too. Divorce nastyness overcame him, and he got a court to prevent me from doing business from the property (and he called frequently to see how I answered the phone as well as hiring a PI to watch our activities), and eventually he rented a wheelchair for a day to wheel into court a few minutes late, and got my mom and my family thrown out. There was little to rent, and fewer still rentals that my mom could tolerate with her chemical sensitivity. We found a 1 bedroom cabin with no stove or laundry, and the five of us piled in. My wife and I slept on the moldy rug for a while, then in a tent by the creek til the snow flattened it and a cougar kept coming around, then in a leaky camper for a while. The hotplate dimmed the lights, and the 4 psi made for lousy shower. My wife carried our laundry up the trail, across the icy plank bridge over the creek to the kindly neighbours. The driveway was steep enough to toboggan on so it wasn't driveable in winter, which meant that if my mom was incapacitated with an MS attack, it was a problem to wheel her to the doctor. I got a screen tent to tolerate the mosquitos and set up the lathe in there, turning fruitwood limbs into miniature vases. My modest bandmill was operational by then, and I got a couple of custom milling jobs. With a family co-signer and an understanding banker, we bought a serviced 5 acre unzoned property, and built a shop to work in with a bit of space to live in one end. Then we built a 1000 ft wooden home for my mom, and now we're 80% on a residential addition for ourselves.Last year we bought a kiln and a molder to produce flooring, and it is really going over well.Building for ourselves has taken a lot out of the viability of the business, and I've learned to be careful to not overcommit to either work or home. Throughout this time, I've added equipment and gained skills in the business as my family tolerated the dust and noise. Probably wouldn't have if I'd been a workaholic at it. We take time to drive up the lake to the hotsprings; to ride our bikes down to the channel to go fishing.Would it have been easier to get a job and buy a house? Maybe, but the job opportunities around here aren't great. My wife has certainly carried one end of the plank, as Krenov says. Figuretively and literally. Sometimes I'm not sure which would have been better for my sanity: a deadend job on the greenchain or in a nursery; or the trials of low margins/high labour woodworking and millwork. But all in all, I've survived adversity and gained through the process. Now, I can finally look forward to financial reward.
*Thanks Sonny
*david.. u make soap operas sound like fantasy land..keep up the good work !
*Read "The E-Myth." Possibly the best book ever written on small business. When I read it I felt that the author had been peeking over my shoulder and reading my mind for years. Every mistake I had made this book predicted I would make. It was both scary and inspirational. I would tell you who wrote it but a friend wont return it.
*I read the E-myth several years ago, when I was just starting out. I thought it was a poor book. Now, that I've got some experience, I read it again. Now I get it. Good Book.
*I read the e-myth a couple of weeks ago, and thought that, although the philisophy is generally really good, there were some shortcomings too. In order to have an operation that's highly systemetized, you need to have the capital to set up your physical plant the right way. No jury-rigged dust collectors, rickety vehicles, or defective makes of bandsaw blades. I agree that the process of compiling the operations documentation forces you to look at your operation to work these things out. But I believe that we usu know which things are holding us back without going through this.As far as covering the bases for all possible contingencies, I don't think that's anywhere near possible. For example, employees are often whacked out with personal problems to the degree that their work is affected, and they usu use people at work as their therapist. That's good too, if the workplace is scrubbed clean of socialization, people won't last long there. I'm not saying that you shouldn't systematize operations, but that things will be continually coming up that are outside the realm of the most comprehensive manual, so part of your company's culture should also be a philosophy of thinking on your feet.The part that turned me off was the pitch for the Gerber Development Corporation services at the end of the book. Made the book seem like demo software that doesn't work on real files.
*The pitch was throughout the book.Maybe the reason I agreed with the book this time is I started reading it soon after I decided to really work on my business.I'm now trying to find the time to work on my business but I'm so busy working at it. I gess I could stop working, stop making money, and stop paying my bills, and stop eating for a couple of months while I got my business organized.
*Sometimes that is EXACTLY what you have to do. Well, maybe not quite in that extreme. It's like a savings plan - the more investment you can put in up front, the better the payoff. Consider scheduling a block of time each month to handle some segment of your operation. 1 day a month would be less than 5% of your working time based on 40 hr work weeks.
*I'm an avid fan of the E-Myth and it's author. I view it as a blue print, a business course set in book form. Gerber has provided us with the information. It's up to each of us to use it or not. As Ken said, 5% of our time. Even only one hour per week once you have put your priorities on paper. One hour per week is 52 hours per year. That's the equivalent of taking off 6.5 days in a row. In three months you could have done nothing, or you could have accomplished 13 hours worth of work into setting up your own systems.I figure we have three questions to ask ourselves;1. What do I know?2. What don't I know?3. How do I propose to find out?But, you can't answer question #1 until you answer question #2. But you can't answer question #2 untile you answer question #3. Then there is another problem. When you ask yourself the above 3 questions you're presented with another set of questons. 1. What information am I seeking?2. What information is applicable to me?3. What information is usable and what is not?4. What information is priceless and what is worthless?Upon answering those questons we will be better able to answer questions #1 thru #3.The question should not be when do I have the time? Like anything else, you "make" the time.Or, one can be like the wife who routinely gets beaten by her husband. Her attitude is that it's a lousy life, but she's "used to it" and "changing" it is more of a hassle than the existing lousy life. In other words, maintianing the status quo is the lesser hassle of the two options. Guys that have been out of work for over 2 years go thru the same mental change. They eventually get so used to the life of being unemployed that they stop looking for work. The psychiatric profession has a name for this mental state of being "resigned" to one's current situation in life.
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After reading all the posts,and there are plenty of them, of what a business is and what differentiates a "business" from a "job" I thought this discussion would be interesting.
I'm going to, for now, hold my thoughts and yield to the more experienced and knowledgeable. I'm sure the past experiences will be extremely helpful.