start a business

Today, my friends and I had a ‘training session’ to orient ourselves on the nitty-gritty of crafts production. We engaged the services of a low-fee training institution-the kind that had courses on everything from starting a restaurant to repairing computers-to help us out.

It was a fun session, though I had to leave earlier because I had to render overtime at work. But we learned enough of the basics to decide how we might go about the operations side of the venture. The next thing we plan to do is research on what’s out there—what sort of opportunities are open for us and what kind of competition we’re facing.

Must not run out of steam do early in the game.

So a day after our meeting, my friends and I decided to prepare in earnest our business. It’ll be a small-scale crafts venture that’ll require a small amount of capital. The potential isn’t really that fantastic since there are so many such businesses in the field, but we’re not really in a major rush.

While we’re learning the ropes of production, we’ll prepare the operations and marketing plan. Crossing my fingers that the business starts running beginning next year.

My groupmates were hoping to start earlier in time for the leap in the holiday demand, but I put my foot down and said that it would be unwise to start something immediately without any of the systems in place. I didn’t want to rush into things unprepared. I’d rather be slow but sure than dive head-first into a bed of concrete.

So I met with four of my friends a while ago to brainstorm on the home-service massage business, and ended up throwing that idea out the window in favor of a relatively ‘easier’ one.

I know, I know. There’s no such thing as a really easy business, but the fact that most of my friends have full-time jobs (like me) and have kids of their own prompted us to think up something that could be done in the sparest of spare time, to build things slowly until we’re ready to go for it full time.

Wish us luck.

A friend of mine called me up, asking me if I was interested in joining a “dial-a-massage” home massage venture. Still mulling on it…looking the the figures, the market, the potential… we’ll see.

I want to start a business, but I don’t know what kind. I work fulltime and have a few side projects. Is there a web-based business I could pursue?