Before you got your business started or when you got it started, did you ever find yourself battling with yourself and trying to figure out if you ‘had what it takes’ to get a business up and running?

If so, how did you overcome that?

Did you find yourself playing a lot of mental mind games that really weren’t helpful?

One member wrote “I didn’t find myself having mental battles, but friends and family did! They told me ‘You’re not as young as you think.
I don’t think you can take the heat.
Do you have any idea of the time commitment you have to do?
You’re retired military, live the good life.’

I have lived my entire life not dealing with problems or threats. I enjoy solving problems so I don’t deal with them, I solve them! Threats, I don’t encounter any more, so I guess I am living the good life.

I know that I have what it takes and look forward to any and all challenges. And, it doesn’t bother me in the least to ask for help. I ask successful people how they solved problems I encounter. I am not afraid to try new things.

Granted, I do not intend to do the labor part for much longer. I am building a team to lead and follow at the same time. I want hands on for all projects, but not do all projects.”

Andy shared “I think running one’s own business is simply mindset, positive thinking. I am the only Entrepreneur in my family of 5, dad was a fighter pilot most of his life. I have no idea why but starting business’s is in my blood and it all started at the age of 12.

Most of my friends think I am full of horseshoes as everything for the most part always turns out and takes of, I have no idea why but I do love what I do and that is key.”

Chuck added “I knew I could build a sucessful business, I just was’t sure how I was going to do it at first. I knew that I needed to find the right avenues to advertise, slogans & company image to use, even choosing the company name tormented me, Though I have a wife, & 2 kids to feed so I didn’t have time to dilly dally. I needed to make it happen & on the 1st crack.

I am not a betting man at all. I suck at gambles. If I am going to an estimate & find the street I have a 50/50 shot of “is this address going to be to the left or right?” I am wrong 90% of the freakin’ time. Seriously!
The only thing I would bet on is me. I have never failed myself. I have never crumbled under the pressure & never not completed what ever I needed to do, especially the times in my life when I was backed into a corner. That’s when it’s time (to continue the fight analogy) to come out swinging & fight hard, when you gotta turn things around & right now or your gonna lose, nobody else can help you. It’s all you, & how much you believe you can do it.

Anybody CAN do this, though most won’t. It takes balls to jump out on your own, to leave the security of a predictable weekly check.

Furthermore, it takes heart to make it actually happen, to make something from nothing, to carve out your own living. Entreprenuers have a spirit that the typical worker-bee employees don’t. That’s ok because both have their place. This isn’t for everyone. I am not saying that many who read this should decide against taking that leap, but if they are truly terrified &/or unsure of themselves when pondering the “can I do this?” question, the answer may very well be, no, your a worker-bee. You could lucky still but if you aren’t SURE YOU CAN….. you have a much higher probability of failure than one is sure they WILL succeed.”

Finally Tom added “I have to agree with Andy that starting and running a business is a mind set. You have to have a positive outlook and the drive to succeed. You have to go the extra distance in dealing with all the challenges and responsibilities of running a business and continue to strive for improvement. There are leaders and followers and you have to be a leader to run a successful business in my opinion.”

So consider all these thoughts when creating your own entrepreneurial mindset. Avoid negative people and seek out those who will be supportive in helping you achieve your dreams.

Here is my take, IT’S GOING TO GET UGLY. Did you ever see the Movie The Matrix? When Neo finally finds out that his entire life he has been plugged into this matrix that took care of everything for him? And once he was unplugged his body went into shock. Well I think the process is very similar.

Full time job to entrepreneur

Being that I run the Gopher Forum and The GopherHaul Lawn Care Business Show, I get a chance to talk to many new business owners or those who soon want to be a business owner. I get the feeling from most everyone who ask me how to unplug from their full time job and go it alone, that they want an answer so they can keep everything in their life the same except now be an entrepreneur. My easy answer to them is the more hardcore answer. It’s quit that lame ass job. It’s sucking the life force right out of you. It’s making you old before your time. If you think you will be able to retire one day from your job and then really start enjoying your life, you are sorely mistaken.

Life is flying by you my friend. Grab a hold of it. Get out of your car and get a motorcycle. Feel the rush of air and pavement race past you. Smile! FEEL ALIVE!

If you don’t want to be too crazy or hardcore, get on my Gopher Forum and read your butt off and ask questions. Start playing with some kind of service you can offer on the side from your home. Start getting paid for doing it. Then scale it up until you feel like you are about to break from the load of it. At that point, unplug from the matrix and go it alone.

Most of us never develop a passion for anything because we don’t have the time to do it. Our brain, body and soul is sucked into that matrix. Start diverting that energy. Start spending more time with that hobby you always wanted to get involved with. Take that hobby and figure out how to make some money with it.

You can do this. It is do able. You are going to change in the process. You won’t be the same person you once were. But if you are reading this now and thinking about doing this, you are saying you don’t want to be that same person. You want to change. Change can have an enormous effect on all your relationships, so look out! It’s gonna get more interesting as you go.

Get on the Gopher Forum and tell me about your journey as you go. It’s a support group for the hardcore unemployables.

Starting a tanning salon

As we got into the discussion a little bit it quickly bubbled up that this was not going to be a walk in the park. His previous job paid him over $90,000 a year. Along with that salary, he had acquire some pretty high expenses as well. Over $15,000 a year in property tax on his home. A $3,000+ a month mortgage and the list went on and on.

What could he do to help stop the bleeding? That is the question he asked me. It’s a great question with a simple enough answer. Sell all that you don’t need now. The tough part is, he is underwater with the house and if he sells it, he would lose any equity he had in it.

In an ideal world, we could all one day wake up and decide today was the day we are going to be our own bosses and quit our job. Then we could pick some kind of business to start and we would be up and running within a week and be making the same amount of money.

The reality of it is when you step out of your full time job and decide to open up a new business, you can expect to not make any profits for years, if ever! Most business that are started fail. Why? The simple answer is lack of capital but the larger answer is you just didn’t give yourself enough time to pick up the pace and learn about your new business before you ran out of money to support it.

You can’t start a new business and carry on expenses you acquired when you had a full time job. It’s simply not going to work. To make your new life work, you are going to have to shed all the dead weight and only then might you have a chance.

If I were him and I wanted this new business to work, I’d sell everything and live in a tiny room in the back of my tanning salon for a year or so until it started producing a profit. Give your new business a chance to survive. Rid yourself of as many of your expenses as possible before you start.

What’s your view on this? Join this discussion at the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum here.

I ordered a bunch of food the other day and I know the bill was gonna be around $40. When I get to the pizza place, there are two employees with a guy about 18 or so running the cash register. He can’t find the price for this item or that item. He is looking through the menu and then just types in whatever numbers that pop into his head.

Expanding your pizzeria

When he has finished ringing up the order it comes out to $24.00. My jaw just dropped. How the heck did he figure this out. So then I say to him, that can’t be right. I go through the order list and he forgot like half of the items. The total ended up being $38.00.

My gosh! Can you imagine you are thinking you are going to expand your pizza empire and rent all these locations and then not have any checks and balances to make sure customers are paying for what they are ordering?

If this employee does this on every order, he is basically giving everyone a 50% discount on their food! If in general 30% of the food price is the cost to buy it, another 30% covers overhead and the last 30% is the profit, this employee just blew the profit and more than half of the overhead costs!

These things really need to be thought out before you just let anyone have free reign over the cash register! Don’t expand your pizzeria business if you aren’t going to be able to implement some checks and balances otherwise you would be better off running one location where you could keep an eye on things. One profitable pizzeria would be more worthwhile than four money losing pizzerias.

She had tried to get two previous businesses off the ground but couldn’t get traction on either one of them and thought this might be her last chance at being an entrepreneur. Her father had lent her some seed money and she got started. Selling cookies she made on a small scale wasn’t that profitable and she needed to work cleaning homes to help subsidize the business. At first she was selling her cookies through her website and local stores. Then she added gift packages like a lunch box with cookies that had kind of a retro feel to it.

As the show went on, she was feeling more and more desperate about the state of her business. She felt she needed to do something bigger and started looking around for commercial space to turn it into an ice cream / cookie shop. Pricing commercial appliances she found a commercial oven started at $7,000 dollars. Keep in mind her budget to do this was $0.

I think it was fascinating to see her thought process on all of this because I think she was representative of many new entrepreneurs. They get this feeling like they need to either go big or go home. So in her mind, if selling cookies on a small scale wasn’t bringing in the kind of money she wanted, then she felt she needed to go big and rent commercial space and go into the restaurant business.

I am so glad she didn’t. If someone were to have lent her money to do that, my guess is, that she would have lost all the money.

Ultimately, she was able to find a commercial baker that would create her cookies for her and that allowed her to leverage her own image and sell herself and her cookie company to larger distribution channels without having to be in the kitchen most of the day, making these cookies.

I wish her the best in her new business.

Ultimately when you are experimenting with business. Take small steps and scale up. You will learn a lot as you go and you will improve your chances of success. Just because you are making cookies and you aren’t finding the profit margins you wanted, that doesn’t mean you need to get into a totally different business (restaurant) and try to learn that complex industry to try and sell cookies. There are many other easier ways of going about it and it seems she is well on her way.

You can join in on this discussion further at the Gopher Small Business Forum.

They focused on a bunch of businesses and talked about how they got their start.

One of the companies that was spotlighted was this company called Feed Granola. http://www.feedgranola.com

What a great story. Two guys who were models by day, would cook up this granola feed in their apartment kitchen and sell it through local stores. They initially used small brown paper coffee bags they bought through Staples and printed out stickers to say Feed on them.

As they grew and reached out to more and more local stores, they wanted to get their product on grocery store shelves too. In order to do that, they needed a nutritional label on it and had to cook the product in a commercial and health department approved kitchen. At this time they found a commercial kitchen facility they could rent by the hour and this allowed them to cook more product in the same amount of time as before.

The product’s reach continued to grow thanks to their ability to get out there and sell it. Through trade shows, cross country drives to promote their product and being available for media interviews, their story is reaching out to more and more people.

I love it because I love seeing people be able to start such business from scratch with very little money down. Think about it next time you are looking to start your own business that involves a food product. You can do it! Start it out of your own home and reach out to local people in your area. Then scale it up step by step.
Don’t spend any more money than you need to and learn as much as you can as you experiment. You can do this!

Join in on this discussion at the Gopher Small Business Forum here.

This is another great business you can start from home with very little money. If you are at all interested in this field, which I think is a great business, do some research on how to make stained glass and experiment in your home. What makes this business great is the fact that it is useful and unique. I don’t know of anyone who makes stained glass windows but I know I see a lot of stained glass windows. The average person isn’t going to know how to fix these things when they break. Home Depot won’t be able to fix them either. So this could be a great money making business for you.

If I were to start a stained glass business, I would do the following. If you need more ideas, jump on the forum and ask.

How to start a stained glass business.

• I think one of the things I would do is create a website with different pictures of the stained glass projects I have made.
• Then I would advertise weekly on craigslist that I could repair stain glass windows. I am sure stained glass windows are constantly being broken and it takes a skill to fix them.
• I would give each of my customers a magnetic business card.
• I would also get a paypal account and offer for sale my stained glass projects online. Maybe I would even sell them via ebay too.
• I would contact the local library and see if I could put on a display of my stained glass projects. This could then be promoted in the local paper to get your name out.
• Then I would also offer to host a stained glass class at the local library. This could be promoted in the paper most likely for free as well.
• I would do a youtube video on the creation of your different projects.
• I don’t think you would even need to register a business name. Just have check payments made to your name.

What are some of your ideas? Get on the Gopher Small Business Forum.

I made a post about this so you can join in on the discussion at the Gopher Small Business Forum here.

This is a business that can totally be started from your home. I think if I were going to get started in this, I would get an older car to fix up and I would make a website of the process.

I would experiment and create fiberglass molds to bolt onto the car to make it look really sweet. Things like hood scoops, fender flares, fins, whatever.

Home business car product design idea.

Then I would sell these after market parts.

Maybe I would even create after market fiberglass body panels. Over time I would add more vehicles to this and create an online catalog.

I would also host a hotrod night at a local parking lot. Maybe have it once a month.

Why not form a custom car club as well and create a forum for members to get together and talk about this topic.

With the ability to sell products on your website and have a paypal button to accept credit cards, it becomes so easy for you to reach out to people and sell your products, right from your own home with little money invested into it.

First off no one knows for sure what is or what is not going to work. Especially when you are just getting started. One of the reasons why I like the lawn care business so much to get yourself into the entrepreneurial mind set is that you can start it with a limited amount of money and a limited amount of time.

When you start on a small scale with a service business, it’s pretty simple. You see how much you are making per hour and you can calculate your expenses to get a quick idea of your profit. Service businesses are wonderful ways to get started in the entrepreneurial world.

When you come up with a product you want to design, fabricate, market and hopefully sell. No one knows if it’s going to sell. That is part of the exploration you are to take. If you hit on something that sells, then good for you and scale it up to meet the growing demand.

If you don’t hit on something, that is ok too. I would venture to guess that most business ideas aren’t going to work. Trying something and throwing it out for the market to decide if they want to buy it or not, is what it’s all about. If something doesn’t sell, that is ok! It’s ok if it didn’t work. The beauty of it is that you are building an understanding and an infrastructure to create, design and sell a product.

What you don’t want to do is bet the farm on it and say it’s all or nothing. Why? Because if it doesn’t work, you aren’t going to get another chance at it. One of the secrets to success is giving yourself as many opportunities as possible to succeed. That means having money in reserve to experiment with the next idea. If your first one doesn’t work, play with it. Add something or subtract something from it. Experiment with the ingredients in your mixture and then present the new idea.

The most important part of it all is to not give up. You will be amazed at what you can learn when you give yourself time to experiment.

If you have a thought on this or a story you have gone through, I’d love to hear it. I am sure it will inspire others. Please jump onto the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum and get involved in the discussion.

If you have found you can’t work for anyone else and you need to call the shots, maybe you too are Hardcore Unemployable. If so, this site will help you how to figure out what most people will never share with you, how to actually do it.

As with all of the articles and stories that will follow, you can take part in these discussions and conversations by meeting with us on the Gopher Forum.