Part of the American Dream is the ability to start your own small business, work hard and become successful. To give yourself the time and resources to experience life the way you dream of. How you go about starting your business really depends on your point of view.
There are those few people out there who have a passion for doing something and just decide to take the plunge and see if they can make some money out of it. These are the creative people usually. The inventors. The artists. The cabinet or furniture makers. They usually start out part time and build from there.
There are those people who have learned a trade or skill who are fed up with trying to find someone decent to work for and decided to strike out on their own. They want to build a firm that can rival those they have worked for before, but do it their way. The plumbers. The electricians. The landscapers. Some succeed. Some find out that running your own business is a lot harder than they thought and go back to work for someone else.
For both of these types of dreamers, we have written the Foundation Business Courses to give them a head start on building a solid foundation. It fact, the knowledge in these lessons would help anyone throughout their working life.
There are those people that need structure. What kind of structure you use depends on how much money you can come to the table with. There are hundreds of franchises in almost any field of endeavor that interests you in all price ranges. If you believe this is something that interests you, check out our primer on franchising.
There are those people who need a system. They are usually the people who are not sure what field they want to get into, but need to bring a little extra money into the household. Some would eventually like to grow it to a full time income to replace a job they hate.
These people are the ones who are drawn into Multi-Level-Marketing (sometimes called Network Marketing today). Over the last forty years hundreds of thousand of people have lost millions of dollars trying to build these type of businesses. Most fail because the business structure of these plans is inherently flawed in favor of the owners. There are also just a handful that last for more than five years once people find out the numbers just don't add up.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently completed a review of one of the MLMs that has been around for a long time called Herbalife. They were required to make a series of changes to their business structure to stop these MLM abuses. The FTC is preparing to make these new rules mandatory across the entire industry. This will, unfortunately for the people involved, cause a lot of these companies to go out of business when they can no longer sell over-inflated priced products or require people to stock-pile products. We have written a article briefly discussing MLM structure and changes that are about to come to the industry.
For these people that need a system, there is a better alternative called Consumer Direct Marketing. It is often confused for MLM systems, but it certainly is not. In fact, it passes every single one of the new restrictions the FTC is about to implement. So that you know the difference, we have written a comparison on MLM vs CDM. Whether you have ever been involved in one of these types of business before or not, this information is definitely something you need to know the next time someone approaches you.
No matter what type of business you what to build, we have tried to provide you with the information you need to start your journey and succeed.