Hello all. I signed up to this forum to see if I can get some advice which will aid in some pretty serious life decisions I need to make. I know that none of you can provide me with an answer because it is my decision, but would really appreciate your thoughts and sound advice. I apologize for the length of this post.....
First off, a little about me. I've owned three micro businesses over the course of my lifetime. None of them were really successful but all of them taught me something.
The first, a small flower/gift shop in my early 20's that I didn't intend to own. I graduated from technical college, was broke and unable to find a job right away and my mother suggested I come work for her in her flower shop. She had one FT employee at the time. Using all the money I had left, I convinced my husband to move from the city - where there were jobs - to this small town with limited jobs. Long story short. Three months after arriving my mother decided to divorce my dad, how did I not know? It's a long story. I discovered the full time employee she had was stealing her inventory and having plant parties, so my Mom fired her. But she wanted to close the business due to the divorce, so that left me - having just moved there, broke and with no real options - out in the cold. My father decided to provide a revolving loan so I could continue the business on my own. At first the business was doing well. I am a Jill of many trades and picked up on flower arranging easily. Life seemed like it just might work out; but the thief inherited a bunch of money, decided to open her own shop and undercut me till I couldn't sustain the business any longer. After a year of struggling I went and got a full time job, hired someone to run the shop but eventually had to cut my losses and close it down. Needless to say, I felt like a true failure, but chalked it up to experience, continued on with my job and moved on with life.
In my early 30's I continued to feel trapped in a life which did not seem like mine. Always trying to make everyone but me happy. I'd been hearing - follow your passion and you will be happy. I wanted to be, amongst other things, a professional songwriter. Since my job paid pretty well and I had some disposable income I made an album and tried to market it for a couple of years. But well, as you can imagine, I didn't win the songwriting lottery and so continued with my survey career.
If life wasn't hard enough I had the opportunity to emigrate to the USA and took it, even though it meant leaving everyone and everything behind and moving somewhere I had no connections. For the first five years I continued to work at my survey job which paid excellent, required me to travel and was seasonal, so I would spend half a year in the USA and half a year in Canada. During a project in Texas I met my current husband. After we got married I decided to try another business - wedding videos. I only pursued this on the weekends, and although I loved it, I couldn't make a living at it. Why? Mostly because people aren't willing to pay for that service, they will pay a photographer, but the idea of a videographer wasn't really catching on, and today - well every digital camera you buy has one built in, so cousin Joey will do that for free.
Another dream I had was to have a restaurant. I can see you all rolling your eyes.... Yes I know it's a silly dream but I worked in restaurants for about 10 years and thought I would be successful. I created a business plan, monitored my competitors clientele, determined what my menu would be and after about 8 months of red tape, used equipment purchase decisions, recipe testing and lease negotiations I finally got the business open. The restaurant was in an old mall which had been taken over by a large tech company. The future looked bright. After three months I finally figured out how to order product only once a week and was making enough profit to pay my overhead and have $1500/mth left over. The tech company was supposed to ramp up to 1500 employees and if that had actually happened, all five of us serving various items in the food court would have made it. But, that didn't happen. Instead they started ramping down, cut their employees lunch hour to half an hour and shortly thereafter only two of us remained. I was working about 80 hours a week on average and could see the writing on the wall and decided I had to get out. One of my regulars came in one day and told me that a co-worker of his felt that I was running the restaurant all wrong and felt that he could do a better job. At first I was a little upset, but then the light bulb went on - that person was my ticket out of there. So I found out who this person was, convinced him that he could do a better job than me and sold the business to him. I broke even in the sale and was thankful that God was looking out for me and I was able to get out my lease! I still felt like a failure, even though I knew it was a tough row to hoe.
Fast forward 12 more years. Since then I have gone back to school, obtained a degree and have been struggling to find secure, full time employment. I graduated in '09 and the economy had pretty much tanked. My husband is 59, has a pretty good job that he is happy with and it would be really hard for him to start over somewhere else - but (bless his heart) he is willing to move if I want find that dream job elsewhere. If I pursue my career, I will be able to find work just not where we live now. I've had three positions over the last three years; a contract position, an internship and was just laid off due to lack of work a month ago. All of these positions required living in a different town than where we own our home and I have been spending a third of my income supporting a second household and rarely getting to see my family.
So - this is where you all come in. I have always been ambitious, hardworking and possess a strong desire to be self employed, but now that I'm 48, I'm really a-feared. These other business ideas didn't require a lot of capital, but I still spent nearly everything I had. The big difference between then and now. I wasn't afraid. I was gung-ho. The thought of failure never entered my mind, cause somehow I figured I could handle 'it', whatever 'it' might be, and looking back, I did okay and learned a few things. But now I'm really scared. Call it maturity.
Even with my day job I'm always trying to think of that next invention where I can make my first million. I have come up with several ideas over the last few years, but the last one I'm working on now I think is a pretty good idea and am pursuing building a prototype for my product. There really isn't anything like it out there - but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. I've done quite a bit of research and plan to sell it on-line. Conservatively I estimate there are 12 million people who could afford my product. Without hard numbers, cause there are no stat's on this, I'm estimating 20% of those would have need for it, or about 2.5 million and further conservatively I'm estimating about 1% of those would buy it from me online. That's about 24K people. With a profit of $150/unit and working from my home I only need to sell about 5/week to make the same wage as my last position. I haven't worked out all the bugs, would need a professional website, some product and market testing etc. I think that I can swing it so that I can get a job locally and try to work through any potential issues, but it won't be a job in my career field. We're 100K in debt in student loans - another long story - have only a small amount of savings, and maybe, if all went well, could swing the start-up of this business without cashing in our 401K's -but they aren't worth much either. So in an effort to try and decide what to do, lots of blogs say to make a list PROS versus CONS. Here's my list.
Pros - Stay at home with my family; work in the basement to start so basically no overhead; be my own boss (which is huge); potentially earn a pretty decent income if I can figure out how to market the product effectively. Could sell 20-25 units per month from the basement without employees, but after that will need to ramp it up.
Cons - For the job - have to uproot my family, sell our house, run the risk of potentially getting laid off again after moving or worse - my husband having to work somewhere he hates and start at the bottom of the ladder again, if he can even get a job at his age; For the business if it doesn't take off, risking potentially all our savings trying to get it started, spending another 2 years of my life trying something that could fail and then having to try and explain to an employer what I've been up to for that time, feeling like a failure yet again.
So..... I expect this is a new story to any of you on here but I hope you will be able to provide me with some advice.
Thank you so much in advance.
via Small-Business-Forum.net http://ift.tt/1ffZXau
