Sissy and I want to go into business for ourselves and we have been thinking about it for, oh…let’s see…uh, forever now. And we are making ourselves sick about it. We have so many great ideas: making jewelry, making cards, cooking goodies, opening a lunch-box style café, buying stuff wholesale and reselling it on eBay, sewing nifty stuff-n-things, etc. ad nauseum.
How the hell do you get it started?
We get so incredibly frustrated reading these magazine articles, or hearing a story on TV, or NPR, about a person/couple/family that decides to “start their own business”. WHAM! Business is open and successful. But what they always seem to leave out is the HTH – how the hell? How the hell did they do it? It always sounds so simple; one day they were a middle-class 8-5 Monday-Friday working couple, the next thing you know they’ve chucked it all and *POOF* opened a successful business.
A few questions:
• Did you quit your job? What did you live on? Did you have a nice 401(k) that you cashed in and lived off of for six months while you got your business up and running?
• Did you have a well-off relative that conveniently decided to take a dirt nap around that time and leave you a heap of cash?
• Were you sitting on a bus one day, eyes full of tears, and the eccentric billionaire sitting next to you handed you a check and told you to go live your dream?
• Did you rob a bank? Mortgage your house to the hilt and wind up living in your car?
• Do you have the stellar credit rating now required to borrow more than $20 from your local lending institution?
• Who helped you figure out what licenses you needed and what forms to fill out and where to get them? Did you hire someone or get the info off the internet? Did you get the info from Wikipedia or from a reliable source?
• How did you get the health department to allow you to make cakes in your kitchen when it’s the same kitchen you feed your family and 5 cats and 4 dogs out of? Complete with all the hair that goes along with all of them?
• If you were still working full-time, or working part time and going to night school while raising four kids under the age of 2, where did you find the time to manufacture/procure/make your stuff that you sold?
• HOW THE HELL DID YOU DO IT? TELL ME! TELL ME DAMMIT!!!!
Erm…I mean, please would you give me some pointers on how to get my own puny enterprise off the ground without going to jail or owing the IRS my first born child?
Cheers, thanks a lot.
Do they not tell you this stuff because they don’t want you to know that they started the ball rolling on this business back in 1982 and it’s not until now that these people can talk about it without throwing up or passing blood? Is it because they don’t want you to copy them and perhaps harsh on their buzz of success? Or do they just think it’s too boring to talk about and that if you are really serious you will go out and figure it out for yourself because the information is out there and fairly easy to find as long as you don’t have the attention span and corresponding brain size of a fruit fly? Hmmm.
The phrase, “It takes money to make money” keeps rolling around in my and Sissy’s brains. And it’s true. We don’t have a cent to our name that doesn’t actually belong to someone else right now; my credit wishes it was good enough to be called “shredded and thrown to the four winds of the universe”. And with gas currently, as of the writing of this blog entry, $4.30 a gallon out here for the octane level that my Rodeo requires or it will sit on the side of the freeway with its axles folded, a petulant look on its grill, sticking its oil dipstick out a me and saying, “Nyet” (apparently my Japanese import has a masters in Russian – who knew?), life sucks. We desperately need to do something to bring in more money, but we don’t have the money to get anything off the ground. It’s that stupid loop that makes the world go freaking nuts and makes holding up a Starbucks seem like a great idea (it isn’t – so don’t).
And so I lay awake nights, great ideas for businesses swirling through my head while the knowledge that I lack the tools to get any of them off the ground eats through my stomach lining.
Sigggghhhhhh.
Spot me a tenner, will ya? I’m off to go buy lottery tickets.
