Do You Know how to Swim? Then You Know how to Start a Biz!

I'm not sure where the idea crept in that goes something like this-

I want to start a business. I should bite the bullet, quit my job cold turkey and start one!

Or, I'll wait until I get fired and get so desperate, I'll do something about starting a business then.

As if there is a greater air of legitimacy when one is stepping out in blind faith, hoping against hope that things will be all right for no good or apparent reason.

The art of starting business is controlling risk.

That's a stupid risk.

When you learned to swim, I bet no one violently threw you, kicking and screaming and horror stricken, off the side of a fishing boat into a deep murky lake, did they?

(For those of you living in Louisiana and Arkansas, forgive me. I hear that's how y'all learn.)

I'm asking you now, to go back in your mind and think about how you learned to swim.

Go ahead. I'll wait...

Of course you did!

You just said to me, "I learned a little bit at a time."

That, boys and girls, is the very, very same way you're going to start a successful business.

A little bit at a time.

Entrepreneur Chick's mother was a beauty queen.

Here's how beauty queens teach their daughters to swim.

First of all, there's absolutely no getting wet.

Getting wet will mess up your hair, it will mess up your make up, and everyone knows a swimming suit is only for looking hot and sexy, certainly not for swimming.

Elizabeth carefully spreads her beach towel by the side of the pool.

She lights a cigarette. Adjusts her sunglasses. Exhales with a certain unidentifiable annoyance and says to me~

"Okay kid. Here's what I want you to do."

"Okay!"

"First of all, hold your breath like this- and stick your face down in the water and hold it there a few seconds."

"Like that?"

"Yeah, like that. Now I want you to stick your face in the water but lay down in the water on your stomach and move your arms like this..."

"Like that?"

"Yeah, like that. Now I want you to stick your face in the water, lay down in the water on your stomach move your arms like I just showed you and kick your feet like this..."

"Like that?"

"Yeah, like that. Now you know how to swim. Don't bother me any more; I'm reading."

Are you ready to start of business?

Here's what Entrepreneur Chick wants you to do.

Write down a few business ideas that you have.

Go ahead, write them down.

Don't edit yourself, just write.

If you have ten, write ten.

If you have one, that's awesome too.

Now leave them in the comment section or email me, and next time, I'll show you how to, a little bit at a time, get started using your very ideas.

Let's make some cabbage, guppies!

Don't Cheat on Your Husband, but Definitely Cheat on Your Boss

Or his boss or the boss in general.

It would be amiss for one to line up an extra spouse, you know, just in case the current one doesn't work out.

However, I wouldn't think twice about lining up some side action when it comes to a boss.

In case things don't work out.

Because, I don't want to be the one to tell you this but someone has to-

things seldom work out.

Perhaps in the 1950's there was such an animal as "job security", but those happy golden days are long gone the way of poodle skirts and bobby socks and gold watches given for twenty five years of loyal service.

Times, they are precarious, no?

Entrepreneur Chick has exprienced the happy good fortune of doing what was right even though, at the time, I wasn't aware of how good my choices were relative to this cheating idea.

August fifteenth, two thousand and three, was when my husband actually walked away from his job that he was most certainly bound to lose anyway.

Why was he bound to lose it? Was he a bad employee?

To the contrary, after significant downsizing in his company and after they had fired over two hundred people, and kept but one-  my husband was the one they retained.

However, the handwriting was on the wall and we knew it was only a bleak matter of time.

Unbeknownst to Entrepreneur Chick, while her husband was hard at work, she was also hard at work, quietly building up an asset base- to the end that, when the day came to make the inevitable break,

because of the income stream still coming in from the asset,

we could transition to paying our bills, have someplace to live, and keep up that pesky eating habit of ours.

Since that time, I've understood more clearly the reasons why it's important to have something else going on and have focused on that.

The biggest risk you can take these days, is not to take a risk at all.

People ask me all the time- I want to start a business, I think I should start a business, what should I do?

My answer?

Take any sort of positive action to that end.

You can always modify it later.

As I don't know you, I don't know your situation; but I do know the job market.

I'd lay odds you can come up with something much better than that hill of beans if you put your mind to it.

More next time about how to break into owning your own business!