In today’s post I am going to briefly touch on the first question from the Junior Achievement’s list of 20 questions from the previous post about things to consider before starting your business.
Am I prepared to spend the time, money and resources needed to get my business started?
First, you should consider the time it takes to run a business, then ask yourself these three questions:
•Do I really want to give up baseball, hockey, soccer, basketball, football, dance, piano and voice, or hanging out with my friends to run this business?
•Will I have to work at running my business every day or just sometimes?
•Will my family help me out?
It is important to remember that building a new business even if it is based on something you already know how to do, takes time. One of the lessons in my previous book, 31 Powerful Lessons: Empowering Teens and Young Adults to Develop an Entrepreneur Mindset, is about finding the time for your business. Finding the time is one of the hurdles that you need to find a way over if you’re going to have your own business.
You have to conduct research to see if there are customers, find out what the competition is doing, how to price your product or service and so on. If you are going to have an internet based business, even if you already know how to use a computer and are on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites, you will have to learn how to use those sites for business and create a social media marketing plan. There are many other steps involved here.
This is the point where you might want to find a mentor, someone who already knows these things and can help you make good decisions and move forward if that is what we decide to do.
Your main task before you can truly answer this question is to find out what will be involved in starting and running the business you decide on. Once you have all the information, you can make an informed decision.
Are you prepared to put in the time to gather all the information you need to make an informed decision? Are you willing to even put in the time it takes to do this?
The Getting Stuff Done Tool might help you organize the things you have to do to find your answer to these questions. You can get that emailed to you by entering your name and email in the box with the red arrow at the top right side of the page.
