What is the one reason you can't or couldn't start a business?

SFC Doug Lee. I am going to suggest the greatest difficulty is attracting investment sufficient to both launch and sustain a business until it becomes profitable enough to sustain itself and provide enough return on investment in a short enough time to satisfy investors and staff. The second greatest difficulty is most military personnel are not trained in for profit corporate finance, accounting, legal affairs, management, and marketing. Any small business requires broad range of corporate management skills not typically available within one or a few troops. That said . . . some small technical consulting / personnel staffing businesses started by our troops are very successful . . . like Blackwater (Xe Academi ) have succeeded beyond belief. For my company greatest difficulty was convincing early clients we could deliver as promised given we had no track record outside of military and intel operations management experience. What really helped was bringing on a CEO / CFO / General Counsel / CMO / Board of Directors with several decades of for profit business development and management experience . . . this opened a floodgate of nondilutive and investor funding. We remain woman veteran owned . . . but the guys put up a good front that supports business opportunities. Political support, operator experience, and connections were helpful. It quite frankly takes a lot of nerve to start a new business when you can far more easily work in another business. Warmest Regards, Sandy

p.s. Maybe the question should be what helps business. . . rather than why businesses fail before they start.

CPT Aaron Kletzing LTC Yinon Weiss MAJ Joseph Parker CMDCM Gene Treants LTC Stephen C. SGM (Join to see) SPC Jeff Daley, PhD CPT Richard Riley MAJ (Join to see) SSG(P) (Join to see)

Initiative, start up capital, experience, skills... It's a combination of problems. You can get a lot of good education about the way the military works, but it isn't so good at providing translatable skill sets to the civilian side.

After I retired I bought a snap -on tool franchise. I was self employed but had strong corporate support I was a snap-on dealer for almost 20 years. If your are a self starter and a hard worker this is not a bad way to go. I retired as a snap-on dealer in June of last year. My week now consists of one Sunday and six Saturdays.

Money

Preparation, overconfidence, lack of planning AFTER opening your doors and funding (too much or too little) can be some big culprits to failure. I am a big proponent to learning. And that does not always need to be in a classroom.

Find as many competent places to learn from as possible. Get hold of a great mentor. Read. Read some more. There will come a time to pull the trigger and if you have done your planning ahead of time, it will make a huge difference on the level of success you achieve.

But be ready to "pivot" as things will change and you need to be willing to adapt. Your customers will adapt...so if you don't, you won't have any more customers. And a business without customers is a hobby!

http://vetlaunched.com/best-time-start-business/

I'm tempted to say that capital would be the main reason, however a close second would be risk. If I could afford to lose the money necessary to start a business... I think i would be starting them left and right.

Lack of confidence. Opportunity, money, everything follows confidence. Failure follows misplaced confidence.

Yes, it's really that simple.

I have started several, some that have done well, and some that floundered. The easiest part of the business is starting one up and winding one down.

There are about 27 million business in the U.S. and about 80% have one person or more. A small business is considered one with less than 500 employees.

I am at 60 employees right now and quite a bit of work! usually the top reasons why a business fails is lack of financing and the inability to monetize a business idea.

I highly recommend the lean-startup principle. It is about testing, then investing. You create a minimum viable product (MVP), launch it, get feedback, make it better, and then repeat. It is extremely easy to start a business nowadays with technology. and the advice you can get for free.

Try not to spend too much money upfront or start a business with high overhead. That killed me in one business venture. I had to bring in at least 60k a month just to break even and was way too much. Great learning experience. here are some business ideas that are less than 5k.

http://artofthinkingsmart.com/need-business-idea-55-less-5000/

SFC Doug Lee , this is a great question! RP members are often posting questions or ideas about starting their own businesses and trying to drill down to some of the root causes that might prevent them from doing so could be a big help. For any RP members thinking about starting his/her own business get in touch with RallyPoint's partner Matthew Thornton Thornton. Matt runs The Transition Center which is a FREE service for our members to help them gain a better understanding about how to start their own business and what kind of business to start. You can check out The Transition Center on RP here: https://www.rallypoint.com/organizations/the-transition-center-the-transition-center-llc

My wife said not just no but hell no