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The Most Expensive Business to Start
It’s entirely possible to start a new business on a shoestring. We know this, because every publication worth the paper or website it’s published on tells us so: Forbes, USA Today, Entrepreneur, all of them. It requires time, grit, determination, attention to detail, great word-of-mouth – oh – and money! More about this in a minute. The truth is – the concept of starting a business on a shoestring depends on the size of your shoes and therefore, the length and strength of their laces. It certainly doesn’t hurt if they are made of solid-gold, and you can sell them for your seed money. If you hear a sarcastic edge in this post, it’s for good reason. It’s born of frustration, the feeling that I’m shouting into an empty cave. I’ve just heard from one more person who has closed up her advocacy practice because she can’t afford it anymore; this on the heels of a conversation last week with one of our APHA Mentors who asked me, “Why do people think they can start an advocacy practice with no investment? Why do they think they can do it for free?” Good questions. GREAT questions. And sadly, representative of too much reality and too much failure. And, for today, it means I’m going to try to provide this reality check one more time. Let’s look at that shoestring for a minute. Starting a business on a shoestring does not mean starting it at no cost. And some of those costs can be quite high! It can cost hundreds of dollars for the legal paperwork, thousands of dollars for insurance (business or liability or both), hundreds or thousands for marketing – and more. That’s not free. Wait! (you say) – I can do all those myself and save myself all that money! Really? Let’s look at that idea – from some different angles. We’ll begin with the concept of billable – vs – non-billable hours. It’s easy enough to understand the idea that a billable hour is one you get paid for; a non-billable hour is an hour you work that…