Can I be an entrepreneur?

paddyland

Can somebody with no great innovative ideas and no money to invest, but a good sense of business logic and a will to work, become an entrepreneur?

I have an apartment, mortgaged to the hilt, and other loans, but no money or assets of any kind, so can bring nothing only myself to anything I might start. I have no qualifications, other than life experience, limited previous managerial experience in a doomed company, a credit rating due to defaulted mortgage payments two years ago, and an ability to quickly understand most things I read or learn.

I long to work for myself, am good with people, and hate, above all else, working for somebody else. If I had a good business idea, I know I would make a good, efficient, tightly run, but customer and staff friendly business. But I cannot come up with any idea for a new business that is not already being done by someone else. I also fear greatly being sucked into a black hole of banks and insurance companies and tax bleeding me dry before I had a chance to get on my feet.

Everywhere I go, everyone I talk to, I hear of employers mismanaging good businesses, and demoralising good staff by treating them with complete disrespect, and not taking good advice on board. So many people hate going into work today, it is unreal.

Where might I go for inspiration, who might I talk to, what might I read, and have I any hope of finance or assistance with no money to bring to the table? What are the good lines of business for a budding entrepreneur to focus on?

Darragh29

Here's what I do to come up with an idea... Well I'm telling a lie here, I think up about 1 business opportunity a day, but to really think about it, I go out for a walk on my own with the dog up the mountains and spending an hour or two or three mulling over it without any distractions and I have a notebook and pen in my jacket pocket. Over a week, I might concentrate on a particular idea or I might jump from one to another.

At the end of the day, you need to be able to attach yourself to some idea that you can put your weight behind. I don't believe with your experience that you can't come up with one idea that you could just start teasing out. There is so much opportunity out there, my biggest problem is stopping myself thinking up more ideas and concentrating on one at a time! We are all creatures of experience/habit, so look to your past and think back to when you were doing a job that could have been done 10 times better, had you not had a bad manager preventing you. Did you never have one of those experiences???

The best thing that ever happened me was to have absolute terrible direct managers in every job that I had, it drove me out of PAYE jobs and forced me to think the way I do now, although I think I always wanted to be my own boss from a very young age...

Trojan

Your first step should be to attend a "start your own business" course.

They're run by all the county enterprise boards, as well as by people like Brian O'Kane (great guy) who literally wrote the book ("Starting A Business In Ireland").

Second thing I'd recommend is to read books, and listen to audio seminars/tapes, from the likes of Brian Tracy, Anthony Robbins, Dan S. Kennedy, and other business gurus. You might not get direct ideas to implement, but listening to these guys is motivating and inspiring.

Darragh29

Trojan wrote: »

Second thing I'd recommend is to read books, and listen to audio seminars/tapes, from the likes of Brian Tracy, Anthony Robbins, Dan S. Kennedy, and other business gurus. You might not get direct ideas to implement, but listening to these guys is motivating and inspiring.

+1, Books are your brother! There is a very good book in Eason's at the moment, called "Anyone can do it", by Duncan Bannatyne. You should read that to fire you up a bit for a start!

adrian.s

Interesting thread and nicely worded OP.

For the last few years or so I have been nurturing a little idea that I thought might be something that I could potentially start a business with. I took the Start a Business course mentioned earlier and it was great. Not so much from the point of view that the content was always good, but that it got you into a room with a bunch of other people who also thought they wanted to start a business. First night was very interesting, we were all terribly protective of our ideas, but as the weeks wore on we all came to realise that it wasn't just the idea, it was a combination of the person, the idea, the market and a whole bunch of other things. There were even people on the course who didn't actually have an idea, but went along any way. It was just they felt there might be a market somewhere and wanted to see what was involved in starting. So don't hang everything on the idea.

So April this year, I wrote the resignation letter and handed it in. I didn't have a huge amount of money to bring to the idea, but I was lucky in that I had worked with Enterprise Ireland for a while prior to resigning so I was able to get some funding. It's tech based and meets their High Potential status so I was able to cushion the blow of leaving full time employment. I'm now on the Hothouse program you see referenced here from time time. Reality really set in sitting at the opening meeting of the Hothouse program where you realise "S**t! I've just quit my job and now I really have to start a business.... this is serious!". That was the scariest day of my life!

6 months or so in, and I haven't looked back. There's something about the freedom, the ability for you to truly work to your best capability, about the fact you can't take anything for granted any more that makes this route appealing to some. I can also see what it terrifies others, but there you go, we're all different I guess.

This is just my 0.2c worth based on a relatively short amount of time out from the PAYE circuit. But best of luck with it Paddyland, I guess if you're an entrepreneur, the fact you've a mortgage, loans etc. is just part of the challenge you face and not what stops you from making the move.

A.