Into all lives a little rain must fall. When you look at the things that have made my life there are three events that I consider to be the most catastrophic events I’ve had to live through. The first was the death of my first son. The second was filing for bankruptcy and closely aligned with that is the divorce from my first wife.
Having and keeping a small business running is one of the hardest things in life to do. I’ve learned a lot about small businesses and the principles of running them. When I worked for a short time in the early 1990s for a navigation installation company I often thought to myself about how I could do things better. I had been working for my in-laws small business in Naples Florida for a time, but found myself working less for their business and more for anybody else just about anywhere.
There are a few things interesting about small businesses. They seem to have cycles where they rise and fall. I’m inherently a risk averse individual. Yet I’ve still made a few leaps of faith in my life. One was leaving law enforcement and relying on my in-laws (at the time) to provide for me. That didn’t work out so great as my later bankruptcy on very few dollars would attest to. Since that time I’ve been even more fiscally conservative.
As such I look at the leap into small business with a very skeptical eye. The evaluation of what a business will do and how it will do it is very much a risk equation. Whereas, relying on my consulting ability is much less risk in my mind. Various people state that you own your destiny when you own your business, but that destiny is definitely not for sure a good thing. As such I continue to move through higher education and attempt to gather my thoughts together as I evaluate what I will do with my future. One thing I know is that the more education I have, the more likely I am to remain employed. This is not a given, but it is an important piece to being flexible.
What I do know is that being in debt sucks. As such I will do my best to not be put into that kind of position.