by Gary Maclean

Created on: July 19, 2008   Last Updated: June 01, 2011

One of America's biggest promises; anybody can own his or her own business. All you have to do is be willing to work hard and have a good idea and you can own a business. Our country is full of people turned entrepreneur who have made that promise a reality. It doesn't take a lot of money or a new building or a warehouse full of inventory. Anybody can do it with just a bit of initiative and hard work. I know from personal experience; we have owned five small businesses. For the most part all you have to do is tell yourself you are in business, hang out a plaque and go to work.

The rewards are great even though the challenges are plenty. You really don't need a lot of investment up front, other than your soul, but you will need some capital. Capital can always be a problem. It may be difficult to scrape together enough money to make your first mailing or to get yourself to your first client's location, but this certainly will not be the hardest thing you encounter.

There will also be a big obstacle to overcome when it gets to finding your next customer. By now you have a mailing list and have made a couple of contacts but suddenly the demand for your services seems to have dwindled. What do you do? How do you find that next lucrative contract? Where do you look? This can be hard but there are harder things coming your way believe me.

The allure of owning your own business is enough to make most of us chase it until we finally catch it. Sometimes we don't really know what we are in for, we just know we are tired of working for someone else and we want to work for ourselves for a change. That knowledge is enough to set most of us out on our paths until we find our true destiny. Much of the time however, we really don't have any idea what our true destiny should be.

We have owned our own business for ten years now. When business started slipping we started looking at other things we could do. We found several other small businesses that required next to nothing to start and we kept going. It still was not enough to replace what we were making when our first business was in its heyday so I had to go to the public sector and join the ranks of the employed once again. Even this wasn't devastating.

Losing our own business, the one that gave us so much for at least eight years running, was very difficult. It was hard to see our own business gradually diminish into nothing more than a sideline. But we had a good run and even that was not the hardest thing to endure.

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