He shoots..... he S.C.O.R.E.S.!

Please excuse the bad pun in the title of this entry.  I met with a counselor from SCORE (Service Corps Of Retired Executives) to get some advice on starting my business.  It took a couple of weeks to meet up with a counselor but I finally did meet up with Terry.

He's a great guy that was very helpful in getting me headed in the right direction with regards to my focus on marketing and business structure.  While I had some ideas on how to proceed it is really nice to be able to bounce those ideas off of someone who has "been there, done that" with regards to business.

One of the things that I need to overcome, is that my experience with business ownership is mostly growing up with my dad spending six to seven days a week at work trying to keep the doors open.  Not good memories.  I know that this doesn't have to be the way it works, but I struggle with that image when I hear that "it takes hard work" to start a business.  With a wife and two kids that want to spend time with me, I have to be very careful to balance family time with job time and business time.

Terry, my SCORE counselor tells me that he hasn't spent more that 40 hours a week at any of his businesses after they have been established.  Since I'm trying to build this business without any debt, I know that I'm going to come to a point where the business will require more time than my job and family will allow.  When that happens I'll have to decide what things look like and see how we want to proceed.

In the mean time, I'm working on the business plan with Terry's help.  The business plan is one of the tasks that I really dreaded.  All the examples that I've seen look like someone is justifying their business to a banker in preparation for asking for a loan.  Since this is not what I'm planning on, it just doesn't make sense to me.  Terry had a good suggestion that the business plan should be what expresses me and my business.

I could go on, but I need to get back to writing the first draft of the plan.