What Color Is Your Parachute?

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The Business Owner’s Idea Cafe

www.businessownersideacafe.com

Great, fun site for the small business owner.

Small Business Marketing

http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-small-business-marketing.html

(If you want a shorter version of this url, try http://tinyurl.com/6nvox9.) The Wall Street Journal brings its considerable resources to bear on this site for the entrepreneur. Many articles, how-tos, advice, and resources for the business owner, with some focus on women business owners.

Free Agent Nation

www.fastcompany.com/online/12/freeagent.html

Daniel Pink, before he became famous for such books as Drive and A Whole New Mind, was the first to call attention to how many people were refusing to work for any employer. This is his classic work, written in 1997, on the site of the popular magazine Fast Company. It’s still regarded as timeless, though of course its statistics are outdated. His basic thesis: self-employment has become a broader concept than it was in another age. The concept now includes not only those who own their own business but also free agents: independent contractors who work for several clients; temps and contract employees who work each day through temporary agencies; limited-timeframe workers who work only for a set time, as on a project, then move on to another company; consultants; and so on. This is a fascinating article to help you decide if you want to be a “free agent.”

Working Solo

www.workingsolo.com/faqstarting.html

www.workingsolo.com/resources/resources.html

Working Solo is a good site for the small business worker. The first url, above, is a series of questions to help you determine if you have it in you to be an entrepreneur. The second url gives you a whole bunch of resources if you decide Yes.

Nolo’s Business, LLCs & Corporations

www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/business-llcs-corporations

Lots of helpful legal stuff here, about how to form an LLC, and other stuff you’ll really need to know.

Entrepreneur

www.entrepreneurmag.com

Entrepreneur magazine’s website. It has lists of home-based businesses, start-up ideas, how to raise money, shoestring start-ups, small business myths, a franchise and business opportunity site- seeing guide, how to research a business opportunity—and more.

World Wide Web Tax

www.wwwebtax.com/miscellaneou s/self_employment_tax.htm

Wow. If you’re going to be self-employed, you really really want this site. One of the banes of being self-employed is dealing with taxes; this site has more than 1,300 pages to help you handle all of that: articles, resources, links, downloadable tax forms (going back ten years!), in PDF format, of course. The site is selling something (e-filing tax returns), but it has a lot of free information about what self-employed people have to do vis-a-vis taxes, in the United States at least.

WHEN YOU’RE OPERATING ON A SHOESTRING

Finding clients or customers: With the Internet came globalization. And this changed everything for the self-employed. You now have a much larger market at your disposal where you can sell your skills, knowledge, services, and products, worldwide.

Finding employees or vendors: 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. For example, if you try “overseas cartoonist jobs” this will turn up a list of sites to try.

There are lots of books and magazines that are filled with ideas for home businesses. The best books on home businesses are written by Paul Edwards and Sarah Edwards. Their most recent one (2010) is called Home-Based Business for Dummies. Earlier works include (2008) Middle- Class Lifeboat: Careers and Life Choices for Navigating a Changing Economy; (2004) Best Home Businesses for People 50+; and (2001) The Best Home Businesses for the Twenty-First Century. For other titles, browse the business shelves in your local independent bookstore or Barnes & Noble, or go online at Amazon.com.

DOING YOUR HOMEWORK, DOING YOUR HOMEWORK

With this research behind you, if you still want to go ahead with the idea of your own business, then the next step would be this: once you’ve decided what kind of business you want to start, you must go talk to other people who have already done what you are thinking of doing. You must pick their brains for everything they’re worth. You must avoid stepping on the same land mines that they did.

One job-hunter told me she started a home-based soap business, without ever talking to anyone who had started a similar endeavor, before her. Not surprisingly, her business went belly-up within a year and a half. She falsely then concluded: no one should go into such a business. Ah, but Paula Gibbons created “Paula’s Soaps” very successfully twenty-two years ago in Seattle, Washington.[33] Someone is already doing the work you are dreaming of. The key to your success, is go talk to them. 

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. And you intend to do the research I am recommending, I know. All you want is just some guidance as to how to go about picking other people’s brains. Okay, here it is: the key lies in a simple formula:

A – B = C

You have a great idea for starting your own business. But you want to interview others who have started