thefed said:
Riiight. BUT, I have the money available, and that's about the most I'd feel comfortable in using....unless it was RE of course.
I have yet to come up with a business plan that seems profitable enough to implement, and thus I'm asking for opinions.
I think Brewer's point is that writing a business plan will force you to take a diligent look at your idea. If you can't write a business plan that would persuade a bank to cough up some cash, then it's probably a big risk to your own money.
I second the construction business, especially electrical & plumbing. Carpentry seems wide open too. Several of our dojang's tae kwon do parents own those businesses, and they're working 60-80 hour weeks. The carpenter tells me that he used to cost out a job, add his "normal" profit, and then tack on 25%. He's still swamped with job offers so he's now tacking on 35% and he's STILL not back to a "normal" workweek.
We've learned most of our home improvement skills in the process of not finding a contractor, which leads me to a second recommendation-- home handyman. It's astounding how a relatively new neighborhood will have most of its faucets start dripping in the fifth year, the appliances go bad in a little later (roughly years 10-12), followed by all of its water heaters (years 15-20). I regularly see ads in our community newsletter from a guy who works full time cleaning dryer exhaust ducts. (His ad shows a dryer going up in flames.) Plenty of people have neither the time nor the interest in fixing these minor maintenance problems and they'd be delighted to pay you $50-$60/hour to fix it for them.
NWSteve, you're still in the printing business? We get two community newsletters that used to be bare-bones Word documents with address labels & first-class stamps slapped on them. Some entrepreneur has been persuading these community associations to let them publish full-color glossy eight-page pamphlets with advertising. The CA pretty much e-mails their calendars, schedules, & input as Word files to the publisher, who adds a couple boilerplate articles ("Be a good neighbor" stuff) and crams the newsletters with advertising before bulk-mailing them to our mailbox. It's the same professional publishing quality as Business Week and it looks a lot better than the local newspapers. You only realize what's going on when you get newsletters from two different CAs that share 95% of the same content. I'm sure that once this publisher works through the island's hundreds of CAs they'll go after the non-profit newsletters and the rest of the clubs/associations.
Personally if I had $50K I'd put it in a money-market account and start looking at rental real estate. Oh, wait, we're already doing that... although it may be a decade before this bubble deflates.
retire@40 said:
I'm going to go out on a limb, but judging by the way you write, you don't have an eye for detail.
Yeah, you sure are going out on that limb. (In a pretty patronizing manner, too, IMHO.) I don't think it's possible to judge the quality of a person's business-management skills by the way they pound an English keyboard. (I'm glad I'm not judged by my sloppy handwriting!) All of those skills you perceive as lacking can be found by working with other partners/employees or, as you've mentioned, lawyers & CPAs.
So who the heck are you to judge? If Fred Smith had listened to his business prof or to your critique then he never would have started FedEx. (I wouldn't necessarily have had the cojones to go to Vegas to make my payroll, either, but I can't argue with his results.) And Kiyosaki's first book about American school systems fell flat on its face, but he sure recovered when he hooked up with Lechter et al. Frank Lloyd Wright was notorious for an entire career of last-minute cramming & sloppy details. If thefed is willing to take the risk then he'll figure out how to work the business... maybe not on the first try and certainly not without some pain, but he'll learn.
