Most of my posts on this Shoestring101 Blog revolve around the fact that it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of MONEY to start up a profitable Bizness… and that’s true. But today I’m going to concentrate on the fact that it doesn’t take near as much TIME as you might think, either.

I got a recent question from a Facebook fan: “What exactly does it mean to have a Shoestring101 Business”?

Fair enough. Lots of good answers to that question, actually. But here’s the one I’ll use today: “Start by having a garage sale. Take about half of whatever you bring in and use THAT to launch your small business idea. Then you either have a winner or you don’t. But you haven’t really anything to lose by trying, do you?”

Now that’s starting on a Shoestring.

“Start by having a garage sale. Take about half of whatever you bring in and use THAT to launch your small business idea.”

Don’t believe it can be done? Why, shucks… I’VE done just that a number of times. So have many, much more successful people. See, the biggest myth that the Shoestring101 Blog is meant to dispel is that it TAKES big money to MAKE big money. That just isn’t true.

What it takes is knowing how and where to find folks that want to swap their money for something else… and providing the means for ’em to do it. Plain and simple.

Success in Bizness… as well as in life… is less about how much time you use as much as how you use your time. A lot of folks dream about founding a business of their own but never get around to it because of fear: they imagine that they would have to quit their full time job in order to build a business from scratch. They fear that period of transition during which they would be spending a lot of time, money, and energy while not making enough money to pay the bills.

I gots a question… WHO ever said anything about QUITTING YOUR JOB??

Out of dozens of millionaires that I’ve interviewed, and many more whose life stories I have read, very seldom do I ever come across one that quit their job ‘cold turkey’. Almost every one maintained a ‘day job’ while at the same time working on their Bizness. The most common path I’ve seen, over and over again, is that each self-made millionaire worked at one job very hard for a steady paycheck. With their material NEEDS taken care of, they then worked overtime on their DESIRE, a passion that they believed in enoough to work at without necessarily being paid a lot.

The Path of a Shoestring101 Entrepreneur

The path of the Shoestring101 Bizness Owner is this: Take something that fascinates you enough for you to want to do it for free… something interesting enough to you that you might even PAY to do it… find others in the same boat as you… and  help them to do it too.  Shoestring Steps One through Five then take you from ZERO to HERO:

Step ONE. Get OFF Your ASS.
Step TWO. Find Out The W’s.
Step THREE. Learn To Create Value.
Step FOUR. Measure Everything You Do.
Step FIVE. Now… Write Everything Down.

At first, your hourly rate of pay may be .01 cents. Or less.  But at least you’ve done Step ONE.

When you learn how and where to find your customers and give them exactly what they want better than anyone else… Steps TWO and THREE… then you’ll start bringing in some extra bucks. You do this with very little or no cash invested by hanging out with others that want what you have and offering them more of the same. If you can’t find folks that want what you have, well shucks. Start over. You haven’t wasted more than a few hours of your time and half the proceeds of a garage sale, right? 😉

But say you DO find a niche that you can serveThen, your Shoestring101 Bizness may tip over from ‘hobby’ to ‘a good side income’. If it does, you now know that you just may have a winning idea that deserves more of your time. GRADUALLY commit more time and resources (during Step FOUR) to your already-profitable Bizness and it may become a full-time income.

Then commit to spending more time working ON your Bizness than working IN it and your per-hour income will approach infinity. Think about it: with well-documented systems, procedures and plans in place, you may be able to outsource everything. With others doing the work, but you getting to keep some of the money… your pay per hour is, well,  immeasurable. This is because you can’t divide by zero 😎

“That’s nice,” you say. “I’d love to take some time on the side and work toward gradually building a full time income from my own Bizness. But what if I just LOST my job and I need to make some money right NOW?!?!”

Heh… I’ve got an app for that.

Look on my next post for how to generate a full time income IMMEDIATELY if you happen to be in the shoes of a lot of Americans right now… between jobs or nervous about being ‘downsized’. I’ll tell you about how I INSTANTLY created a full time job for a Project Manager at a major corporation when he got laid off. He was able to save his house, rental properties, and enjoy a good level of income by Shoestringin’ it.

In the meantime, leave me your thoughts on THIS post. What do you think of the proposition that one can make a million-dollar Bizness, or at least a full time income with part time work… starting with just the proceeds of a garage sale? Be honest and give me your feedback!

Keep Stepping,

Kurt