Edward Trimnell’s Online Guide to Entrepreneurship
What type of business should you start?
There is no simple answer to this question: but here is a starting point:
Leverage what you do in your day job: Your transition into entrepreneurship will be easier and more secure if your business is an extension of your day-job skills. Examples include the attorney who opens her own law firm, and the salesperson who starts his own manufacturer’s rep agency.
This often requires some creative thinking--- especially if you are a corporate staffer whose job description doesn’t readily translate into a free-standing business model.
Here is an example from my own life: I began learning Japanese in college. I have worked professionally as a translator, and I used Japanese throughout my entire corporate career. On the surface, the automatic entrepreneurial outlet here would be: translation agency. However, this wasn’t the direction that I wanted to take at this point in my professional life.
Instead, I decided to write books for independent learners of the Japanese language. I also launched a website for students of the Japanese language: Japanese123.com. This business leveraged a set of skills that I had used in the corporate world, but for a different market.
This is very specific example from my life, and your situation will of course be different. But the key point is that you should to utilize everything you can from your professional and academic past lives when start your own business.
If you absolutely cannot leverage your day job in an entrepreneurial endeavor, then you will need to do some more soul-searching: make a list of your skills, your interests--- something from this list can likely be transformed into a business.