Today's entrepreneur is yesterday's business executive, computer programmer, staff accountant, public relations specialist or any of the thousands of job titles and specialties you find inside of corporate America. The changes in the traditional business models, the trend to outsource and off-shore operations, has lead to the outplacement of many of the mainstream business processes.

As a result, more and more individuals are faced with taking a new approach to financial stability/security and to finding the best "career" path for them - entrepreneurship. Setting up your own business isn't a stopgap between jobs; instead it is the first step to achieving a number of objectives:

·  Free Agency

·  Financial stability

·  Control of outcomes

·  Control of work content

·  Work/life balance

·  Meaningful work.

These are just a few of the rewards of having your own business. They don't come easy and the learning curve is steep. Because no "specialist" coming out of the traditional corporate world is fully prepared to take on every facet of the business, every person stepping into the role of entrepreneur embarks on an odyssey of learning. Regardless of the wide variety of responsibilities you have held in the corporate world, as an entrepreneur you have ALL the responsibility

As an entrepreneur, you most likely start out solo or with a few friends or colleagues of like background. Let's say you are project managers. You know how to do everything related to juggling the many tasks and resources of funded project. You can read basic financial reports, coordinate marketing roll-outs, and a hundred other tasks and subtasks. But chances are, you can't generate all of the data necessary for the financial reports, do market research, generate market statistics, produce a prototype of a product, set-up equipment for the production line, and so on.

As an entrepreneur (especially solo) you are accounting, marketing, sales, customer service, and the technical expert. You are boss and subordinate, executive and front-line staff. How well you juggle the roles and tasks determine how successful you will be.

As you start out there are many things you need to think about, plan for, and understand. Here are a few of them:

1. Personal
   1. How much effort are you willing to put in?
   2. How much can you invest in the business? (financially and emotionally?)
   3. How much do you spend each month on your household expenses?
   4. How good are you at establishing your own priorities and following through?
   5. Are you a "self-starter"?
   6. Do you work well alone or do you need others?
   7. Are you going to work out of your home?
      1. If you work from home, will you be able to "separate" work from home life - interruptions, etc.?
      2. Where do you plan to work?
      3. Are you going to setup separate phone, fax, and computer lines?
   8. How long can you go without cash coming in from your business?
   9. How do you think you are going to feel about not having income coming in immediately or sporadically?
   10. What will the impact be on your family, good or bad?
   11. If you need additional resources to live on while your business is getting started, where can you get them?
2. Business
   1. What type of business - product or service based?
   2. Are you going solo or working with others?
   3. Are you actually starting a business or are you going to be an independent contractor working through agencies or both?
   4. What restrictions exist on the type and nature of the work you can do that are holdovers from past employers?
      1. Geographic
      2. Line of business
      3. Business process
      4. Intellectual property
      5. Other
   5. How extensive is your existing business network?
   6. How much money are you going to need for initial start-up costs (legal, tax, equipment, stationery, marketing materials, software, etc.)
   7. What areas of business - excluding your specialty if it is accounting, operations, etc. - are you familiar with?
   8. How much research have you done into legal and tax structures?
   9. How much do you know about pricing?
   10. How much do you understand about marketing, sales, and public relations?
   11. How well known are you in your area of expertise - not at all? Locally? State-wide? Nationally?

Well, you get the idea. There are a lot of personal and business issues to consider. The personal choices and realities impact if, how, when and what type of business you start. You may look at the dollars you need to setup your business and find that the initial outlay is around $2500, over the first year you may need to spend $20,000 on getting the business established. Your personal standard of living may be another $60,000 for the year. If it takes you a year to get to positive cash flow in your business beyond what you need to reinvest in the business, do you currently have $80,000 available to fund your first year?

There is a sense of accomplishment beyond anything experienced working for someone else, when you establish a successful business - built on "you". Coming through the adventure of learning "what you don't know you don't know"; making the mistakes; learning to get not just the sale, but the payment; building the business operations and delivering the product or service; then seeing the first $1 of profit on the bottom-line - that is a reward beyond price. When you work for you, you experience the down-side and the up-side, and the up-side looks great!

So here are ten recommendations for those of you considering joining the ranks of "The New Entrepreneur":

1. Take the time to gather information on legal structures of business
2. Talk to other entrepreneurs - solos and those working with others - at various stages in the entrepreneur process
3. Read, read, read books and articles on business
4. Talk to trade associations, business groups, networking groups and find out what the business climate is, what resources they offer
5. Look for classes (not just the free ones) that take you through the processes you need to understand - accounting systems, marketing, business plans, and so on
6. Interview potential business partners, service providers (CPAs, lawyers, marketers, trainers, consultants, and coaches)
7. Seek out mentors that have gone through the process and are willing to advise as you go along
8. Get good business advisors (at least one "total" business consultant that can advise you on how different options will work for you - this person ideally will help "translate" the advice of CPAs, lawyers, and other specialists and work with you to develop your skills and abilities in running the business)
9. Prepare to make mistakes - you'll learn more from them than the successes
10. Find a network of friends, colleagues, other business owners that you can rely on for support and "connections" (This is especially important for solo entrepreneurs - you need to stay connected.)

There are a lot of reasons to not to start your own business, to not to take on the challenge of entrepreneurship. It truly isn't for everyone.

There are even more reasons to start your own business. It is challenging, dynamic, terrifying, exhilarating and exasperating. In the space of day, you can go from the peak of achievement to the despair of not closing the deal you've worked so hard on. As time goes on and you increase your business expertise, you get more "stable" in that you can plan for and offset some of the worst lows. And one day you may just find that the highs occur more often than the lows and the lows make the highs much better.

Lea Strickland, MBA CMA CFM CBM, President/CEO of F.O.C.U.S. Resources, is an international business consultant, author, speaker, and commentator on business issues and trends.  Her clients include emerging technology companies, not-for-profits, and government grant recipients and contractors for whom she designs funding strategies, management systems, and compliance programs to leverage grant funding into the financing equation.  She is the author of SBIR Basics: The Numbers and Out of the Cubicle and Into Business,  One Great Idea! and Marketing Strategies. She can be reached at 919.234.3960 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or visit the website www.focusresourcesinc.com.