How To: How Do You Know if You Can or Should Start a Business Part 2 of 3

Starting a business has to involve a desire to benefit someone else other than you. If all your reasons for starting a business are to benefit you, chances are good that you have missed the big picture. At least one reason you have to want to stat a business needs to be to help someone else. Either use proceeds from the business to help a charity of your choice or to solve a problem or provide a solution to a need for the target group that your business serves. Focus on one issue to start with then expand with other issues that are related to the same target group or charity. Choosing a charity that addresses an issue related to your target group is also helpful. As more research is done on the issue, charity or target group that is the focus of your business project, you may come closer to the subject of your underline passion.

You must have enough passion, concern or zeal for your business project to believe that it actually needs doing. You need a true purpose to get from start-up through development and into growth. There may be a possibility that you have to pay your contractors and your employees first. At the very least, you may make less money as the owner of a start-up business than you did working for someone else. Do you have the faith in your vision, mission and business plan to support your business until it grows enough to support you? In addition to making less money in start-up, you may also find it necessary to work longer and harder than you did as an employee.

Contractual workers do get the best of both working environments. There is the possibility that a contractor can slowly add more clients and slowly adjust contracts and compensation to obtain more control over the working environment for which they agree. Even if this advantage is obtainable, it is smart to remember that work agreements should make sure that the clients get what is needed from the contract and what is a desirable win-win arrangement.

• Luchrista Cobb