intothefog.com

I lost the link but some site suggested writing down why you want to start a business and decide if your reasons are enough to pull you through the process. So here is my attempt at it.

Why Do I want to start a business? I don’t know yet.

When I fantasize about owning my own business I generally am imagining being at the head of a successful entrepreneurial establishment. So my first guess as to my reasons is simply that I want to be rich. Even armed with my considerable powers of rationalization I cannot justify pursuing as daunting a task as starting a business for motives of mere childish greed. Fortunately there are other themes in my fantasies to analyze.

When I am not buying a nice house or flying my whole family up for Christmas I am outside the theater asking people waiting in line movie trivia and giving free tickets to those to answer correctly. Or I am admiring my newly finished kitchen; it is comprised of used equipment scavenged from failed restaurants, but I am beaming like a new father. Every once in a while I imagine myself up late on the computer, finishing up the accounting for the month when my jaw drops as my eyes find the number that indicates the theater has just posted its first profit.

There is some good there. While all those fantasies involve milestones of success they are about the process of building the business. That means at the very least I know there is work involved and my head isn’t in the clouds thinking only of the reaped benefits.

I am also casting a slavering eye towards the lack of monotony that I hear comes with the job. I know I would very much relish the large number of disparate tasks. To wit, I also know that I would do well in that environment. Whenever I have only the one task at work I lose interest; when I have many at once I do very well. I think often about how my day would go: Attending meetings or running errands all over town and spending some time at the location either putting the place together or checking up on the renovations (depending on funding and what tasks are being done). This aspect of entrepreneurship is exciting.

At the end of the day, however, in a handful of years I want to be able to look at something I created and be proud of it. Or at the very least be able to look back on those days when I tried.

You have to have a business plan. The few people I know in the business world all say so, my own limited experience says so and, most vulcanizing, Google says so.

I’ve done some research on business plan writing and stumbled across the SBA guide to writing a business plan. Surely it will result in a business plan akin to a Microsoft Word Template Resume. In other words, it will seem remarkably amateur. Still, I imagine it would provide a very decent springboard.

It is December 2007. A couple of years ago the seeds of entrepreneurial ambition were sowed in my mind and I’ve been fantasizing about it since. By this point those seeds have taken root and bloomed into a sort of non-committal curiosity. However that curiosity has enough wind in its sails to spur me into researching what it would take to start that business. I do have an idea, for a specialty movie theater. I’ll go into depth on that later.

To quote Heinlein: I am but an egg. How little I know about starting a business borders on the vulgar. At the very least I do know that ahead of me lays a long, rocky path at the end of which failure will most likely be my reward. I need to learn many things: how to write a business plan, how to research my market, how to get funding, the laws of owning a business. The list goes on ad infinitum.

I’ve decided to blog this entire experience. That way anyone can follow along my progress and hopefully avoid the pitfalls into which I will most certainly fall. I am also going to post any resources that have helped me along the way. The end result will hopefully resemble a nice resource for someone who is considering starting their own business.

I named the site ‘Into The Fog’ for the obvious reasons. Eventually maybe I’ll rename it to “Out of the Fog” or “In a Bright, Sunny Field”. But for all I have is the fear of the unknown.

I hope this site finds readers it can help.

-Alfonso