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, just as an introduction to what’s going to happen on this blog after its hiatus (I graduate from b-school in two weeks), I’m going to be running through the exercises in the book What Color is Your Parachute ?. I bought the book a little over a year ago, but didn’t really go through the exercises. I’m seriously thinking about how to go into business for myself, but I’m not entirely sure what I want to do, you know? I’m just to the point where I can’t hardly stand working for someone else anymore. I don’t like the 9-5, I don’t like having to show up at the office, I don’t like being in a place where I don’t want to be. Honestly, if I didn’t have to do that, I wouldn’t be too upset about having a job. It’s just all the other stuff that goes with it, you know? 
Anyway, there will some serious introspection going on around this joint for the next little bit. Don’t be concerned. By the way, as another caveat, I’ve recently gotten my first teaching job. I’m an online instructor for non-degree executive education certificate programs (talk about some qualifiers, huh?) at Thunderbird, my alma mater. I’m currently working on two certificates (Global Management and Doing Business in China), but have the potential to move into more. I’m hoping to leverage this into some other, more responsible adjunct or assistant professorships at community colleges and such. So, I have some idea of what I may want to do, but I think I could do more than just teach. Hopefully, I’ll find this out through these exercises.
“Physician, heal thyself” is a quote you may have heard before. It refers to dealing with your own issues and difficulties before you go about trying to solve the world’s problems. No one wants to take advice from someone who hasn’t done what they’re teaching. Entreprenuership professors who’ve never owned a business, coaches who never played the sport, etc. What’s the point, right?
Granted, I can’t be expected to teach something I’ve never done myself. But, what if I’ve done something poorly, infrequently, or only once? Can I teach then? It seems to me that, in my experience, I’ve learned an awful lot by teaching other people. You only need to read one chapter ahead in order to know more than your students, right?
If both you and the person you’re teaching approach the relationship with eyes wide open, I think that teaching something that you know very little about can be a good thing. First of all, you as the teacher need to be willing to go the extra mile to make sure you’re studying relevant sources and gaining expertise from credible experiences. Once that’s assured, however, you’ll reinforce what you yourself are learning much more thoroughly by sharing your newfound knowledge with someone else.
Of course, if given the opportunity, it’s always best to learn from someone who’s done what you’re trying to learn how to do. Who would you rather learn how to throw a football from: Joe Montana, or your grandma? But, in the absence of opportunity to get close to a true subject matter expert, and concerted effort to learn all you can, and then impart it to someone else, will get you far down the road toward becoming a true authority in your new field of study.
