Business Alone

Here's the number one reason why most people that dream of owning their own business don't ever realize that dream: F-E-A-R

Americans dream about owning a business. 56% of recent survey respondents said that was their great ambition in life. Yet very few ever see that dream materialize.

Most of us work for someone else from our mid twenties until our mid sixties. That's 40 years of our lives, roughly 83,000 hours.

Bruce Judson reports that a Gallup survey of over 1 million U.S. employees found that over 70% are disengaged from their jobs. They have no real commitment to their work or their company. 70%! Wow!

One of the greatest obstacles to man's drive to succeed in his own business (or any other great undertaking, for that matter) is the disdain most of us have for taking risks.

The term "risk" has a very negative connotation for most of us; it suggests a situation that we'd prefer not to encounter.

Why do we dislike risk? As a young child and throughout our schooling we are taught that risk is bad, that we should avoid risk whenever possible . . .

In the past, creating a small business has been a very risky proposition.

You could quit your job to start a new business and not be able to get it back if your business failed.

You could severely cramp you lifestyle if the new business required more time to operate than you expected and didn't return what you wanted.

You could risk losing all your company health insurance benefits, your life insurance, and your 401K.

Let's look at how the Internet, combined with a simple approach to solo business, allows the entrepreneur to control and greatly minimize the risk of creating an owner operated small business.

Risk #1: You could quit your job to start a new business and not be able to get it back if your business failed. A simple approach to online business doesn't require that you quit your job.

You will need to spend time, a considerable amount of time, on your new business; but since it's operated from home (or wherever you have Internet access) you can work on your business before work at your regular job, after work, at lunch, at night and on weekends.

In case you haven't noticed, there is an important trend unfolding in the evolution of modern-day businesses that you need to understand and exploit as a solo Internet business owner.

Years ago, traditional businesses would set up shop in a physical location, stock shelves with the goods the owner expected to be in demand, and lastly open the doors to customers and hope they would buy what was offered.

The solo information business of today is different. No longer does the owner need to make such an expensive commitment to his guess or hunch about which niche is profitable and which products will sell.

A lot of small business owners would reason that because their business is very small and specialized, they ought to try to save money and increase efficiency by keeping all operating functions in-house under the watchful eye of the owner.

Why trust important activities like communications, product development, customer relations, financial management, or fulfillment to an outside firm or several firms that won't have the same concern over these functions that the owner would.

And why pay someone else when the owner is trying to conserve cash and keep operational costs as low as possible?

Here are five good reasons why every Lone Wolf owner ought to seriously consider outsourcing some parts of his operation:

I'm not suggesting anything like copying or plagiarizing someone's profitable business model and products to push them out of their own chosen niche.

Although this very practice happens all the time on the Internet with cloned or stolen and copied products and services, you should never consider such a blatant attempt to shortcut your way to success.

What I am suggesting is that you put on your thinking cap, get creative, and look at the solutions that successful businesses in other niches come up with to solve the problems they find in that niche.

Nowhere has the Internet made a more dramatic change in the existing power structure than in the business world.

It used to be that companies wielding the most power and influence were those that operated from a position of strong cash reserves and seemingly unlimited access to professional service muscle like Wall Street financial advisers, Big Five accounting expertise, and legions of powerful corporate attorneys.

The "Big Boys" could buy their way into business advertising that dwarfed their competitors.