The Jim Moran Institute
for Global Entrepreneurship
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Address, RBB 223
M-F, 8am-5pm
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Phone 850/644-3372
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Four Critical Ingredients to Starting a Business

The Jim Moran Institute often helps people decide if they want to start their own business. The appeal of being in control of your own destiny and out from under the thumb of a manager lures many people to start their own business. Many people espouse starting their own business as a cure for every problem that they have ever had. Just remember some of those late night infomercials that you have seen.

How many times have you thought, I can start a business and do it better than the competition, make more money than anyone else, have time to travel the world, and improve my relationships with other people.

While these are not unreasonable goals, they are not ones that we advocate as indicators of success in starting and running your small business. At JMI we have a list of four critical ingredients that we believe every potential entrepreneur or small business owner should have.

First, an entrepreneur needs to have passion and more passion. Just saying that you want to have a small business is not good enough. You must make a commitment and have that become your passion in order to be successful at starting your own business.

The second criteria is to insure that you have perseverance. By perseverance, we mean the will to keep on going no matter what the obstacles. While passion will get you started, it is perseverance that will insure that you keep on going.

The third criteria that we have for successful entrepreneurs is to have some experience in the type of business they are trying to start. Trying to run a restaurant without any experience, even if you have the passion, is a sure sign for failure. If you have the passion without the experience, the business is not normally going to work. However, there are numerous ways to get experience including working for a similar business.

The fourth and final element in success is money. Many people say you do not need money to start a business. While this might be true for a very, very small majority of the business startups, for most firms you will need some money to get started. As a general rule, you should have between 10 and 25 thousand dollars of cash ready to commit to this venture.

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