Jason D. Barr

Man, this one is a big deal.  I’ve heard it said that a business partnership is much like a marriage, and I believe this to be very true.  Not only do you need to enjoy the person(s) you’re partnered with (you’ll be spending a lot of time with them), you need to be compatible with them.  By that, I mean you have to have the same values and morals.  You’re going to be making decisions with this person that will influence your financial well-being (conversely, you could also be making decisions that don’t put you in jail for fuzzy math).  It’s so important you’re all on the same page when it comes to those big picture issues.

Everyone approaches this issue from a different angle, really, so there’s probably not one true answer.  Personally, there are a few reasons that I can think of that motivated me to seriously pressing forward with starting my own company.

First of all, I wanted a little bit of diversification.  Everyone is familiar (I assume) with this concept; don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  Even Warren Buffett (he of the statement, “put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket very closely”) admits that diversification is the best strategy for 99% of investors out there today.  If you have two sources of income (or more), and you lose one, it doesn’t hurt as much as if you lost your only source.  I have a job for a company in an industry that’s facing some serious downward pressure from the market.  Things may not go well at some point, and I may be out of that position.  If I have alternate sources of income (like the teaching I do on the side, or this business that I’m creating), then the impact of losing one stream of income is lessened.  It doesn’t hurt my family as much and it provides me additional time to find a way to replace it.

Secondly, I wanted to do this because it’s something I’m interested in.  I did the exercises I mentioned in my last post and I determined that I have this area where my interests and skills intersect (and that meets a need in the marketplace).  This is not true at my day job.  I may be moderately capable at being a financial analyst, but I’m no longer remotely interested in it.  It causes me physical pain to wake up and make the trip into the office on some mornings.  So, for the sake of my sanity, I really had to find a creative outlet; something that challenged me and I found enjoyable.  If there were no market for my services, it’d be a hobby.  However, since I believe that people will pay me for it, it will become a business.

Thirdly, the diversification and having multiple streams of income will allow me to have control over my own schedule and practice some creative lifestyle design.  By not having one place I have to be, day in and day out for nine, 10, 11 hours a day (or more for some people), you can be flexible in your schedule and in your committments.  If you have one position that pays all the bills, you have to be devoted to that one position.  However, if you have two or three or more, you can do a little of this and a little of that.  To me, that’s appealing.  I can change what I’m doing when one thing becomes too tedious, focus on something else for awhile, and come back to the original challenge refreshed and renewed.

Those are all I can think of right off the top of my head (I don’t really plan these posts out much, and don’t revise them hardly at all).  However, those strike me as three fairly good reasons to start doing something new.

Obviously, this is going to vary from person to person.  Everyone has different motivations and goals when starting a business.  You may be coming to this decision from what I consider to be a position of strength; you’ve developed a new product (or improved an existing one) or you’ve got connections to provide something that the marketplace sorely needs.  That’s pretty much a no brainer, and you don’t even need to be reading this.  Move on to step two.

However, if you just know you want to get into business for yourself, but you don’t know what to do, I’ll define the way that I came up with the idea for my business.  Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle, dividing it into two columns.  Label the one on the left “Skills” and the column on the right “Interests”.  Now, start listing anything and everything that fits into those two categories for you personally.  Yes, you do have skills; don’t sell yourself short.  Once you’ve got a good list on both sides of the paper (at least 10-15, but more is better), start drawing lines between the first item in your “skills” list to all the “interests”.  Connect the two and see what you come up with.

For example, say you’re good at teaching.  That’s a skill you’ve developed to the point that you’re at least moderately proficient in it.  And, on the interest side, you’ve got the outdoors and reading and baseball and biking and cooking and any number of other things.  How does the skill of teaching mesh with any one of these interests?  Could you teach a class on bicycle maintenance?  How about starting a baseball skills camp?  Could you begin to tutor high school kids in a subject you enjoy?

Keep doing this through your whole list, until you matched ever single skill you have with all of your interests.  This should provide you with a good starting point for potential areas where your skills could intersect with something you’re passionate about (or, at least, that you enjoy).  All that’s left is to further develop these areas into something someone would pay you to do for them.  It’s really pretty easy.

So, the end result of my ruminations on this site (working through some exercises from What Color is Your Parachute? and then thinking hard about what came out of it) is that I’ve determined that I’m not really going to find a job that I truly enjoy.  There’s just too much baggage that comes with a job that doesn’t really work for me.  I don’t like taking orders, I hate having a set schedule, I don’t like “face time”, I’m not really interested in corporate ladder climbing for ladder-climbing’s sake, etc. etc.  For instance, if I had the job I have now, but didn’t have to go to a cubicle every day and punch the clock (even though I’m a salaried employee, I’m expected to be around from 8-5), it’d be bearable.  It wouldn’t be interesting by any stretch of the imagination, but I could live with it.

The thing is, I could totally do the job that I do right now from home.  I’d even be willing to pay for internet access, a cell phone and a computer out of my own pocket to be able to telecommute.  My boss and I talk face to face at least once a week, but it’s rarely ever more than twice a week, tops.  And, the things we cover could just as easily be handled via email or a phone call (or video Skype).  It’s simply the culture of the company that I work at that requires me to be in my cubicle for eight or nine hours a day.  I can see needing to come in to work one day a week and accomplishing all that I have on my plate that requires a physical presence.  Everything else is totally superfluous.

So, I’ve decided to start a business on the side in the hopes that it will quickly replace my current income and allow me some freedom to engage in creative lifestyle design (living life and earning a living on my own terms and in my own way).  If you’ve not heard the term “lifestyle design” before, google it.  You’ll find some pretty interesting things to read that will, if nothing else, provide some fodder for keeping you occupied on this slow week prior to Independence Day.

So, in much the same way that the Parachute series of articles wasn’t meant to be illuminating to anyone but me, the next few articles are mainly going to be a journal.  I’m planning on using this space to document the process that I go through to create this business entity, from initial conception to operations planning to the minutiae involved in getting a small business off the ground (accounting, setting up logistics, determining the right legal entity for the business, and so on).  If you don’t get a whole lot out of this, I’m sorry.  Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not really doing this for you.  I only get about 1 hit a day or every other day on this website, so I’m sure I don’t have a big audience to disappoint.  Just for posterity’s sake, I wanted to clarify why I’m blabbing on.  It’s not that I’ve got knowledge to impart; it’s that I want to keep a record of what I do, so that I can look back and laugh at my mistakes.