Work At Home Start Up Guide: How to Avoid The HUGE Mistake I Made

9/23/07

How to Avoid The HUGE Mistake I Made

Making mistakes is an everyday part of life and an opportunity for growth. It is a natural part of being human and a natural part of the way to be trained. Mistakes are very important lesson, at any time of life, but certainly the earlier the better! We all make mistakes as we grow up, and not only is there nothing wrong with that, there's everything right about it! While making mistakes is good, repeating them is definitely not. To avoid repeating mistakes in the future, it helps to ask questions and to learn from others mistakes and stay focused on what is important.

In the last post I told you that,

"I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone before...”

First, let me tell you a true story.

My very first successful home based business, was doing odd jobs for people around my community.

I was 14 years old at the time.

I advertised in the local paper. If I recall correctly the classified ad said, "I'll do anything you need around the house. Clean, pick-up trash. Anything. Call XXX-XXXX"

I got calls right away and lots of jobs. Mostly jobs no one wanted like cleaning out garbage from rental apartments or backyards full of trash. I charged by the job and made some pretty good money that summer.

When I needed help on a bigger job, I'd enlist the help of some of my friends and we'd split the money.

Then I got busy with something else and stopped doing it.

My next home based business was a publication my brother and I put together called "Cars".

We took pictures of cars people wanted to sell and put them in the publication with 3 lines of text under each picture.

Most of the advertisers were local car dealers.

My brother sold the ads and I designed the pages, took the pictures and 'pasted up' the publication for printing.

We got a small newspaper in a near-by community to print the 10,000 copies we distributed. Believe it or not it cost us just $175 for 10,000 copies of our publication, with color on the front page!

The publication was a great success. The car dealers loved it - so it was an easy sell. It was another way for them to promote their cars.

My brother’s daughter got really, really sick and he had to stop the business so he had time to take her to clinics and specialists so we sold the business (for peanuts).

My next 'business' was a graphics biz. I has some artistic talent and had painted a larger-than-life picture of big bird, from the Sesame Street character, on my nieces' bedroom wall.

It looked great! And she loved it!

My brother said, "It's a great small business startup idea! Why don't you make some money doing this?"

So I placed another classified ad in our local paper that said something like, "I paint cartoon characters on walls. Great for kid's bedrooms. Call WallGraphics XXX-XXXX"

I got calls and lots of people wanted me to do other things besides kids bedrooms - I got jobs doing 'wall graphic' designs in kitchens, living rooms and recreation rooms.

I had a problem with one customer and decided to stop the business and moved on to something else.

The next home business I started was the one I told you about a couple of posts ago- the 'walking duck' manufacturing business.

What I didn't tell you was that after a year of making 'ducks' I started focusing on other things and let the business die a slow death until there was no more business.

One of the things I learned over the years is that you can have a great small home business idea and actually start making money in some little hobby or small business then, for whatever reason, it just dies because you give up on it or you get rejected a few times and suddenly it's not 'fun' anymore - so you quit.

Of course, the businesses I described above were all started before I was 20... so maybe it was just inexperience on my part.

But there were two very, very important reasons I never took these businesses as far as I could have and these are the two things I never shared with anyone until now ...

These two reasons may save you from a huge mistake in your own business.

#1 Reason:

I never had anyone I could turn to for business advice. Except for my father, who was not a businessman, I had no one to talk to if I ran into a problem. I had no encouragement at all. In fact, when I was successful in some business my parents thought it was nice, but treated it as a hobby and as something to do until I graduated from college.

No one really sat me down to encourage me to continue it, expand it or make it successful in anyway.

My life would have been much, much different today if I had someone to turn to for real-life business advice.

I didn't need anyone to hold my hand, but meeting with someone once a month who knew what business was all about would have really helped me.

#2 Reason:

I was totally unfocused and distracted. I found some success, took it for granted and went on to do something else before I fully realized the potential of the business I started.

Each of the businesses I started, made money... some I liked, some I didn't like (like the cleaning jobs). But I could have easily hired someone to do the jobs I didn't want and I could have grown them into substantial enterprises!

But, I was totally unfocused and it cost me a lot.

Then, life happened... I went to school, got a job, a career, got married, had kids …

Obligations, responsibilities put my entrepreneurial instincts on hold... until the Internet came along 20 years after my last business was started.

For 2 1/2 years after starting my business I struggled... almost to the point of bankruptcy.

What I've written about in the last few posts I hope will keep you from ruin... and if you're on the brink of it right now (as so many subscribers have told me they are) then take what I am about to share with you in the next post to 'heart'.

In the next post, I'm going to share with you the absolute truth, like you've never heard it before, about how to ‘think’ about success based on my own personal experience.

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