Your Family Enterprise
February 16, 2008
One of the greatest mistakes our schools make is the lack of focus on finance. Not balancing your checkbook or managing your charge cards, but how to create wealth. When someone complains about the economy or the job market, what are they complaining about? They are complaining that there are not more individuals that are skilled at creating businesses, jobs and wealth. All business starts with individuals.
Family Entrepreneurships is one solution to this problem. We do not mean family entrepreneurship as in starting a family restaurant. We are talking about setting off on a journey to learn how to be entrepreneurs together.
First let’s look at the word Entrepreneurship. It is not the same as business owner. An entrepreneur is skilled at creating wealth. A business owner should be skilled at managing. If you are a family of entrepreneurs, you are using your skills to produce wealth, but not necessarily opening up and office or hiring staff.
This is an important distinction. My first attempt at family entrepreneurship was my 8 year old starting a business. She had a lot of fun, but the difficulty of building a business instead of focusing on building wealth hurt our success.
Start Simple and Learn Together
The first step to creating an environment is to start very simple and grow. Your primary goal is wealth creation, even if it is $50 a month.
There are plenty of business plan templates online. Write a business plan that focuses on wealth creation – but keep it to only a few pages. If you need more pages, the idea is too complex for your first idea.
Your business plan should answer the following questions:
- How will we make money?
- How will we find customers?
- Why would customers by from us?
- What are our start-up expenses?
- How much time does each person need to put in?
- What are each person’s responsibilities?
- What do you currently spend money on that could become a business expense?
The benefits of having a while family involved in a successful enterprise are big. There are substantial tax advantages, there is the learning your family is getting, there is freedom if you build your business to the point where it becomes a reliable cash machine and you are building and investment for the future.
The key thing to remember is you are going to have many more benefits if it actually has some income. Don’t start something that is going to take a year to see a dollar unless you already have other money making ventures running. Simplicity and an income focus are what is going to sustain your energy and contribute to your family entrepreneurship success.
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I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Mike Harmon