I Started a Second Career - You Can Too!

I had always wanted to own a business and I finally took the leap several years ago.  Ah, the joy ... Oh, the hard work and long hours! 

It wasn't really the hard work that was challenging, I'm a self starter and hard worker.  It was the unknown factors that kept popping up.  I had done a lot of planning and calculating, but there were so many things that were unforeseen and they had to be handled as well.

When my wife and I started our first business six years ago, we were doing all the work ourselves.  So if a job was going to be done, we were going to do it.  Sales, accounting, marketing, prospecting, business planning, contracting ... you get the idea.

I had experience in sales and marketing, from my days working in the corporate world.  However, from a small business perspective, marketing is a far different game.  It was the most intimidating task of all the things we had to accomplish as new business owners.

Every business owner must learn enough about marketing to be comfortable with it.  Once you are comfortable, it can be a lot of fun and certainly rewarding.  In fact, for most businesses, marketing is the one thing that an owner must be involved in; it's just that crucial to the success of the business.

I spent 20 years working with excellent companies and I acquired a wide variety of skills that I know are extremely useful in my business today.  In fact, it is probably fair to say that I take them for granted to some degree.  So the time I spent in my first career was not wasted time, it was an education, and a good one at that.  I'm sure it prepared me for a home based business as a second career.

However, if I had it to do all over again ... well that's another story, and a pretty long one. 

Look around on this blog - it's where I share all the things I learned starting new businesses and especially how I learned successful marketing for home based businesses.