Any Entrepreneurs out there??
 

anyone on this forum an entrepreneur?? either successful or unsuccessful?

I'm curious to what businesses you may have started and how things worked out?

I am an independent publisher. Though I set the bar high when it came to quality, I set very modest sales goals. I consider myself successful. Several of my author friends who were traditionally published last year are now sorta stressing because of low sales figures. Well, their low sales figures are close to how I performed in the last 12 months, yet I have a lot more media coverage and special events under my belt.

My goal was not to get rich, but to get my foot in the door. In that regard I was pretty successful. Sure, I wish I had sold more novels, but so does every first time author.

I also used to have a proofreading and editing business that kept food on my table when I was in between substitute teaching gigs.

I don't know when I became enterprising, but it helps keep me busy, challenged, and rewarded.

Have once been an entrepreneur kind of - LOL my sorortiy sister and I once had a tutoring business- but it wasn't that successful I kind of did it on the side years later by myself and it helped when I was in between jobs. I am thinking of making that move to an entrepreneur eventually but on the side- first. I am not quite ready to give up my day job just yet! Hope to delve into the publishing field myself as an author one day or into the field of real estate!

I'm in the process of starting one now. Well, my old manager is starting it and I'm helping out where I can! Its a supplying company, he has connections to a factory in Main Land China, and after we're all registered, have websites set up, etc, we'll begin contacting US suppliers to hopefully manufacture some clothing items for them!

I really had no idea how much work goes into this stuff though...like Blue Angel said, do it on the side while you still have another job/income!

so your gonna be selling clothing? intersting stuff

Kind of...its more a matter of calling up a retailer, like Kmart or something, and trying to find out if we can make something..say they need brown dresses, then we could make them for them. We're like a middle man between the factory and a store, but we're not REALLY a middle man, because the factory is ours! I'm still learning a lot of this, I got involved with it to help out with the website, introduction letters, cold calling, etc, so I'm far from knowing it all yet. Our website should be up by next week, we're in the middle of taking pictures and whatnot now, I'll show a link when I get it.

yah i would like to see that. i'm going to be tinkering with a web project over the summer too. Thanks!

i'm in the process of starting up a web-business myself, though mine is much smaller in scale. i'll be selling custom greek-related decor & para. my original plan was to open it exclusively to members of my sorority until i got enough positive feedback to widen my service offerings, however a friend of mine (who is in another sorority) has expressed interest in collaborating with me to offer the same services to her organization. we're hoping to be able to expand quickly to our closest related organizations and then work outward from there.

well,

a sigma lambda beta runs greeknation.com

:)

and i want to do a greek store tooo... doh haha

I would love to start an obscene t-shirt business, lol.

i got a supplier if you got the idea ;)

so not the type of thing I want to do...
I'll post up some pictures of the kind of things i do once I've got it together... definitely more on the *unique* side

I've been researching the whole greek store thing. Its amazing how many major organizations have licensing before any store can sell their products. And its pretty expensive too, making it hard for startups to get into the industry.

I ran an online magazine. I'd consider it a modest success. It was worthwhile and engaging for a while, but I realized how little time I had to devote to it, so I sold it. I am a writer by profession so I always imagined something like that would be an absolute dream come true - but to be perfectly honest, it was just okay. There's more to me than the ability to regurgitate a press release in pretty language (which is basically what I was doing), and I wanted to give that side a chance to shine.

Right now I'm in the midst of opening a copywriting firm. I am so fond of picking apart grammatical and spelling errors that I thought I may as well make some money doing it. I'm going to be writing copy for web sites, company products, business plans, brochures, press releases, and perhaps more. This is no frills business writing, which is fine with me. I don't have to be fancy with it, but it's certainly more fulfilling than what I was doing with the magazine.

PM me when you get a chance, I'd like to speak to your supplier. If you don't mind that is!

Also, I've had several projects, some current and some in the past and the vast majority have been very successful. I've purchased two taverns (sold one for a decent profit) and I'm in the process of purchasing a third. I've done a small real estate thing that turned out pretty well and a few friends and myself are thinking of doing a little land development with a nice chunk of land we own in the midwest.