Posted Under: Business, Planning, Small Business, Startup

The title may make it sound like however, for the record, I’m single… This is one of  the questions I come across very often, so I thought why not just write something to put some basic guidelines together. In this post, I’ll try to give some points which one should take into consideration before starting a business for someone else (including his wife) 🙂

¢1 – Do not set-up a business for your wife unless she is interested in that business and she wants to do that. A small or home based business is a challenge and it needs 100% commitment and she’ll not be successful unless she’s passionate about it. If you just want to open a store and she takes care of it that’s a little different story but still she needs to be passionate about it and have the desire to do that business fulltime. Because as simple as a store looks like, there’s a lot of work that goes on the back end including but not just limited to inventory & vendor management, store management, book keeping, cash flow and all other functions of any small business. Unless she is passionate about the business she will never be ready to go that extra mile which all entrepreneurs go, that is to learn functions that they have absolutely no idea about.

¢2 – The best way to start is to contact the SBDC (Small Business Development Center) of your area (consultation is FREE) and they can sure help you with getting your idea into the shape of a full fledged business plan. All the Universities with B-schools have SBDC so contact the nearest University and work with their SBDC. Also, I’ll suggest to hire a couple of first year MBAs or senior year BS kids to get some help as SBDC and the school will be very open to help if they see you are giving a project to their kids. You can pay them if you want or can keep it an unpaid/ experience oriented project/ internship whichever suits your budget.

¢3 – And this is the most important – get some outside help for incorporation, business planning, bookkeeping, and taxes, unless you are a master of all, yourself. There are a number of paid and pro-bono resources available who would be glad to assist.

Best of luck!