Lesson 1: Before You Start
Advice on establishing good credit, dealing with severance packages if you've lost your job, cataloguing your strength and weaknesses, matching those to what is needed in your market and getting it clear in your mind what you will be offering and to whom.
Introduction
Anyone can start a small business and many who do will find that their small business fails before it ever gets anywhere. Some people insist that if you throw a young child into the water, he'll know how to swim by the time he hits the bottom and then surface and swim around quite happily. Unfortunately that often doesn't work in business and that's why many of these new small businesses don't make it - the owners haven't learned how to swim.
That's what we're going to do here. We're going to find the pond, lake, river or ocean that's just right, study the water a bit, look for a nice, calm place where we can get in at our own speed and then decide which stroke we're going to learn first. But, before we even start, we're going to have to do a couple of things that will make it easier to float.
In 1994 I had been working for the big multi-national, Siemens, for twenty years. By then I had a good management position and had been responsible for getting some of the biggest orders the company had ever received in North America. I was working hard and earning a good salary but I didn't feel I was getting anywhere and the office politics were getting on my nerves. Yet, I couldn't get up the nerve to just quit.
One day in June that was taken out of my hands. My boss called me in and told me the company was getting out of the business my department was running and the department was being disbanded. I got a good severance package and six months of support from one of these companies that's supposed to help you find another job.
Since then, I haven't looked back. I work for myself as a computer consultant and control how much I want to work and how much I earn. Everything I do builds my business and I'm concentrating on the parts of my business which I enjoy while phasing out the less interesting bits. Most of my customers are small businesses so I have had a ring-side seat on what works and what doesn't.
What I'm going to do in this course is tell you the best ways to get started, what to look out for, what you need and how to make sure you meet realistically set goals. In this lesson, we'll look at what you can do before you actually take any concrete steps towards going into business.
