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

Part of the process to answer the topic question is to discover the answer to three other questions, which are: (1) Who am I? (2) Who do I want to help? (3) How do I want to help?

Step 1: Who Am I?

Discovering who you are is not necessarily an easy task, but it is often an important step to determining what work you will find to be meaningful and enjoyable for your life's work. If a business is started before this step is attempted or accomplished, the entire project may become for more overwhelming than it would have ever been otherwise.

Step 2: Who Do I Want to Help?

Who is that group of people that my mind can not thinking about that I want somebody to help? Have I narrowed down the specific identity of the group? Do I know what their primary and secondary needs are? Does this group have an identification of what they need in good and services?

Step 3: How Do I Want to Help?

Do I want to provide good and services in an all inclusive way as a non-profit organization or concentrate on one issue at a time? Does my desire methods include multiple business entities or only one? Do I want to have a for profit business, a non-profit or both?

Step 4: Consider the Opposite

With each of the three steps above, consider the opposite of each conceptual thought process. In considering who you are, consider also who you are not. Your business or non-business project has to fit in the structure of who you are as a person in your thinking. If you pick a business that requires interaction with people and you are a shy person, you have to be willing to change or pick something else. You have to be honest with yourself about what is possible at this point in your life.

Asking who you want to help can also imply the opposite. This is one of the personal within yourself discoveries. If there is a group that you are not comfortable dealing with, do not build a business around that group. Start slower or address helping in a way in which you are comfortable.

Helping is helping. If your way of helping is to donate to a group that is already servicing the group you want helped, then start there. Stay at that level as long as it is needed or wanted.