haskindm said:
I heard someone say that if he hit the lottery, he would open his own electrical contracting business and would not quit until he had lost every cent! That pretty much sums up my experience.
Oy.
Something else to mention, and this was my experience up until my last business, is are you a good judge of character?
My last business was a software company that was going to write freight tracking software for multi-modal transportation, freight forwarders, etc. My partner was the "industry experience and capital" partner and I was the "whiz-kid programmer" partner. I had 5 years programming experience at the time (not a lot, but back then programmers were even scarcer ...), but was still fairly young and wet behind my ears. We had meetings with the New Orleans port authority, I spent time working with his clerks, learning how freight and equipment are matched, learning about different types of equipment, insurance, bonds, weird laws, learning how the financial end of the business worked, and then delivered what was supposed to be the first piece of a multi-piece product. The next step was supposed to be advertising that product to other freight forwarders, but when I asked for a budget to take out ads, he balked. I'd acquired used equipment from a client to start working on the networking parts, and had even set up the network and gotten the two machines talking to each other. He'd balked at paying the invoice for that equipment and my client was demanding money or return of the equipment. With no money for additional hardware, no money for advertising, no anything -- except for him having a software product that he could use to run HIS business, things came to a sudden and screeching halt. I packed my things, grabbed my client's gear, and left my partner a note. I've work for someone else ever since.
I later found out that he'd started and bankrupted several other business, screwing the truckers he'd used for transportation out of the money he'd owed them. Suddenly certain things made sense, like, why his wife's name was used for certain financial transactions. Without the knowledge and experience, and the appropriate amount of Spidey Sense, I'd never have known what that meant. Now I do and I'm stupid enough to give the entire "self-employment" thing another go in a few years.
