You Don’t Need to Be Thomas Edison to Start a Home Business
The world we live in is full of myths, and one of the most popular is that to create your own product you need to be an amazing inventor like Thomas Edison or a physicist like Albert Einstein. The fact is that nothing could be further from the truth.Some time ago, I was on vacation with the family in the Thousand Island region near Alexandria Bay, New York along the St Lawrence seaway. We decided to take a tour boat through the islands on a beautiful summer day. For those not familiar with the area, the St Lawrence seaway which connects Lake Ontario with the Atlantic Ocean is littered with well over 1000 islands along the border between the US and Canada.The islands were at one time a very fashionable summer destination for the rich and famous from New York City, and are still littered with multimillion dollar homes. At one point in the tour we passed an unusually large island with a very large mansion on it, and the tour guide explained that the owner of that house was a businessman that made twist ties and bags for packaging bread.It took a few minutes for that to sink in – someone had made many millions of dollars (this was certainly not his only home), making twist ties and bags to package loaves of bread. It was apparent to me at this point that you don’t need to be Thomas Edison or Ben Franklin to be successful at business. I’m not saying that you don’t need to be smart, passionate and driven, but you can clearly be successful without being the inventor of the telephone or light bulb. You just need to sell at lot of twist ties.Since relating that story to several friends I’ve heard dozens of variations on the same theme. A friend recently told me of a local businessman that started by buying one paper shredding truck – that’s a truck designed to shred and haul away large amounts of paper for local companies. He paid off the truck in two years, bought a second and now earns well over $400K shredding paper for a living. Others make good money renting porta-potties, giving seminars on hobbies or managing virtual workers. Who remembers the pet rock (which sold millions) or the book “Everything Men Know About Women” which was a hundred+ blank pages and sold hundreds of thousands of copies?So what do you need to get started? In every case a good business starts with a good idea. Usually the most successful businesses fill a need that either no one else is addressing, or no one is addressing well. It does not have to be rocket science, overly complex or even fashionable. It does have to have an identified need you are going to fill, and you need to be passionate about your product or service.What should you do once you’ve identified the idea? Get started – don’t wait. Test market your product or service, even if it’s only a few copies or providing service to a few strangers. By getting started quickly with a minimal investment you will find out sooner if the idea will work or not. A lot of great ideas don’t work out – but better to find that out up front so you can move on to something else than sink thousands of dollars and hours into a bad idea.
