re: Starting Your Own Business: Early questions

I started my business with $30000 from my retirement account and some equity I had in a house I sold. Moved in a rent house. Did not pay myself year one. Paid myself $25000 for two years. That was 22 years ago.

I left a $100K job to do it.

Now I still keep my salary low. I have a small 7 figure net worth that is tied up in the business in things like inventory and receivables. I have rarely been able to take significant cash from the business because I still have the ambition to grow it. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE CASH in a business whose assets are mostly inventory, equipment and receivables as long as you grow the business. YOU CAN NOT stop growing IMHO. So forget cash.

I will disagree that working for someone else is less risky. IT IS MORE RISKY than owning your own business. Ask any 50 year old whose employer decided to exit the business they have been employed in the last 25 years.

It takes a different mindset.

Breweries are a dime a dozen and market share is VERY hard and VERY expensive to obtain. Transportation cost are a very big cost and getting placement through marketing is very costly.

Anyone can be successful in business if they work and manage properly regardless of how tough the business is.

Have you thought instead of making a recipe book of brews you could market to home brewers? or God forbid a film about brewing which you could screw the taxpayers for third of it making it?

(Laugh at the last suggestion if you like but nothing keeps you from forming a LLC to make a film and funding it at $300,000 then becoming an employee of that LLC and pay yourself the same $300000 as salary and getting 35% of that from the state. Use your $300K salary to pay back the money you funded the LLC with. You could do your own editing and as long as you used it commercially---buy cheap time on a local cable station to air it --you would qualify for the film tax credits and be out nothing--you would actually have a profit. You would have a no cost product to sell about a subject you seem to enjoy.)