Everybody who starts their own business has high hopes and plenty of reasons why they should succeed. Your idea may be the best of the decade, and you may have all the funding you think you’ll need.
Then, out of the blue will come a problem you never expected. For one business, their advertising budget ran out right before their service caught on with customers.
For another business, sales came in so fast that they had to hire lots of new employees. The hope was that the BIG expense of all those employees would be met in the near future by constantly rising business. Instead, business started to decline, leaving the owner broke and paying big fees to the state after she was forced to let her workers go.
Even the mighty Amazon-com almost had to close its doors during its first year, when money ran out before substantial sales started coming in. Amazon was nearly history before it began.
The good news, as the government’s Small Business Administration attests, is that almost all small business owners pick up the pieces and begin again. Often their next venture succeeds. And economists point to that fact as one of the reasons our American...