The First Step
It sounds like a great idea to go into business for
yourself. Some of the best advice we can give you is to get
free training. Even better than free training, in fact, is
to get paid for being trained yo run your own business. How
do you do that? You get a job.
You might think we are not listening, or we are just
nagging you, like your parents or grandparents, who have
probably told you to get a job 487 times, if they are
anything like we are with our children. We are serious as a
heart attack.
Maybe an example will help. In our business, we need to
understand contracts with the federal government. These
include indirect costs, budgets, scheduling, pricing, to
name just a few points. We learned about these topics by
working for colleges and consulting companies. Here is
the key point. If we had started our own business first
without that experience, we still
would have to have learned about those topics, but no
one would have been paying us while we were learning all of
those things. So, we would have put in all of those
hours for free.
Just as important, and maybe even more costly, we still
would have needed to know that information. So, in all of
the time we were learning, our business would not have been
running as well as it could have been, because we would not
yet have learned many of the skills we needed to know. In
short, we would have been working more hours, doing a worse
job and making less money. Does this sound like a bad idea
to anyone but us?
So... if you are interested in running your own gift shop,
for example, get a job in a gift shop. Learn about
ordering, inventory, advertising and everything else. Learn
what sells and what doesn't. Learn when people buy, what
kind of sales pitches work and which don't.
The next step (and don't even think about skipping the
first step!) is to educate yourself all you can for free.
Coming to this workshop is one way, and congratulations to
you for being on the right track. There is also an amazing
amount of information that can be found on the Internet.
Click here to go on to the second step.