Starting a business for the sole intent of making money without any prior education is risky. You will end up failing, or going down the path of the hated corporate CEO of many businesses.
You must be prepared to study and educate yourself before you even start to investigate how to start your business. This involves reading or listening or watching many books, audio books or podcasts and documentaries and video courses. I do not recommend institutionalised education. You will learn bad habits that only perpetuate the current climate of problems. You will learn to fail along with every one else. Can't be done? Read all of Richard Branson's books. He practically failed his entire education. And I tell you now, you will be reading a lot of books. If you can not read books or articles, you will fail.
You must study these aspects of yourself and the world around you:
* Personal management, control and discipline.
* Finances, personal and on an macro economy scale.
* Your applicable business and tax law
* Basic structure and management of a business
* Create a business empire
If you are not ready to sacrifice time and energy to improve your personal management and discipline, you will have difficulty in dealing with people and running a business. Considering a business is literally just people doing things for other people, it is a core requirement. You must learn to understand yourself, take control of your life and learn to deal with people. To start with, I recommend the following books:
* The 7 habits of highly effective people
* How to win friends and influence people
* How to stop worrying and start living
Your next step is to understand money and how it literally controls everything in the world. If you wish to take control of your life, regardless of if you want to own a business or not, this is where you start. Everything you are taught in the western world is designed to make you spend and waste your money. They withhold basic finance from everyday education in order to ensure you do not learn how to control your life. If you can not understand the principles in the books below, you will not get far:
* Rich dad poor dad
* The richest man in Babylon
* Think and grow rich
* Spin selling
The next step is to understand how to actually start and run a business in regards to legal requirements. This includes understanding business entities, understanding how taxes effect everything, understanding registrations and required licenses and understanding what the government expects from you. It is during this line of study you come to learn that almost every western government is set up to ensure businesses get a better deal than the average person. I can not suggest any reading material for this as every country and state is different. It is always best to find your related government tax website and read all of it. Read and study through regulations and legislation. If you have an industry in mind for your business, look up the departments that regulate that. For example, in Australia you are required to have a number of registrations to produce and sell food. There is a food regulator department website that provides all the information you need and if something is not clear it is easy to contact them. If you do this you learn that you must have your processing (kitchen) site certified and registered to certain standards. Your business must have a person employed that has gone through government approved food safety training. You must understand what sort of food you are allow to ship to what states and countries. You must understand if those states or countries have import laws and what sort of tax you must apply to your products.
You must now consider the basic structure for your business. How will you start? Will you look for funding? Where will you run it from? Will you hire people? How will you hire them? What business entity is right for me? You can learn this in many places and a lot of these questions are answered in institutionalised education. You are able to learn these on your own however. But you must be wary of any education on how to start your business, as it will most likely be in the same line of the current modern business model. Which is failing. The books listed below will not help you to start your business, but if you read them while you consider how to start, they will assist in making sure your business does not run the same way as every other failed business out there.
* Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier
* Start with Why
* The pheonix project
Once you have considered the foundation for your business, it is time to consider how to sustain your personal life and the business. The motto for my primary parent business is "business for people", but I did not start there. I started with "business for myself". You can not help people and your community, if you can not help yourself. You must make your business or investment projects sustainable to your own life, with extra to invest in the lives of others. Consider foreign aid given to poor countries. Hand outs do not help the country fix themselves. All it does is keeps them ticking for a bit longer before their lack of infrastructure means they need more handouts to survive. Do not start your business thinking you will save the world, before it is able to save yourself. Once your business is large enough to provide you with a livable income, you can consider how to make your employees happier and how to distribute the wealth. To help you get there, I recommend the books below.
**DO NOT READ THESE BOOKS UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THE REST IN THIS LIST** Also make sure you read them in the order they are listed.
* Four hour work week
* Millionaire fast lane
With these books, you are on your way to knowing the basics. If it was hard to read these and you can't read anymore, you will not get far. Every day you must read more books, research articles and absorb as much information as you can. Even if it is remotely related to your business or personal improvements. The thing that makes the common person poor, is that they refuse to understand why they are poor. Every one says knowledge is power and if you learn something new every day, you become more powerful. When you have power, it is time to share it to make the world a better place.
AnmanIndustries ago
This is true. But a modern business' success is rated on its profit, not its revenue. A good large business has a very large gap between profit and revenue. Take two companies, same size, same industry, almost identical. Both have the same revenue. One is large profit, the other doesn't. Two things can be guessed from this. Either one is poorly managed and has more expenses than the other, or one pays its employees more or invests more into making them comfortable. Obviously, the latter is better and what we should strive for.
goatboy ago
I agree with everything you said. However, business start ups often focus so much on the minutia of profit they forget or miss multiple revenue stream opportunities.
AnmanIndustries ago
This is true. I would relate this to inexperience or lack of education. Which is why I always stress the importance of continuous education. I can't remember the figures, but there is a distinct difference in success rates of people who successful start a business and those who do not. The chance of getting a business of the ground was always greater if that person had already successfully created a business. A person who failed to start a business and is trying again, had the exact same chance of success as someone who was starting for the first time.
I recently bought stocks in a company that is brand new. However the team is made up of people that are of the likes of old school microsoft high ups. It is very unlikely that they will miss revenue streams.
If your startup fails due to focusing too much on squeezing profit and not sourcing new revenue, they will most likely fail. If they are smart, they will try to learn from their mistakes, learn more about their industry and methods and try again. Not much can be done about these events.
goatboy ago
Great ideas don't make great businesses. Great revenue streams make great businesses. Never confuse the two. There are millions of people with brilliant ideas, but very few ever generate an income. Meanwhile there are countless bad ideas that have great revenue streams- think pet rocks or "as seen on TV" shit.
Perfecting your revenue streams should be what you think about when you lay in bed and when you wake up in the morning. Perfect as many revenue streams as you can and everything else will fall into place, as long as you're not an idiot.
AnmanIndustries ago
As per my other comment, but I am intrigued by the comment of "unless youre an idiot"
How do we define the idiot here? The billionaire big pharma owner for example. Is he an idiot? Is he an idiot when he jacks the price of medicine by 1000%. How can he be? He has all the money and his customers do not. Revenue stream is not everything.
An example from a transport company that in 2008 suffered from the financial crisis at the time. Prior to this they looked after their staff very well and they were very loyal. They suddenly had half the revenue streams. A regular business would fire half the staff. The company knew their staff would want to work through this and offered them half shifts until things pick up, to which they all agreed. This costs more than just firing staff. With half the revenue, they are actually taking more loss from managing the same number of staff. Only an idiot would not consider alternatives to firing well looked after staff over revenue.
goatboy ago
Idiots are people who lack fiscal discipline or are unable to impose cost controls on themselves and their employees.
AnmanIndustries ago
So, are they idiots or are they uneducated? A small mom and pop store that started out of desperation due to lack of employment eventually becomes successful amongst all the stress and hard work trying to put it together. Before they realise it they have 10-20 staff and maybe another store. Who has told them that they need to learn more about money and management better? They are successful as they are, why should they learn to be more disciplined? The other mom and pop stores around are doing things the same way. Why should they be different?
Why should a large corporation become more disciplined, when they can just cut back employees wages? These are the differences that need to be considered.