Nuts and Bolts Business Advice | Hacker News Reader

Nuts and Bolts Business Advice

3 pointsshomberj4 comments

Hi all. I'm currently looking to become self employed. Still figuring out what I want to do, but I know I want to be my own boss.

Trouble is, I lack the basic foundation of knowledge of how the business world works. I've read many business books. They tend to focus on sales/marketing strategies.

Where can I go to learn the basic skills of building a business?

For example: How do you organize a business? What are the legal restrictions/requirements? What are the admin requirements? How do you write contracts? How does accounting work? How do you hire employees? How does sub-contracting work? How do you write a business plan? How do you get a business loan? How do you go about billing customers? Plus more questions I haven't even thought of?

Cheers Shomberj

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The best way to learn about building a business is to start a business of your own.

Fundamentally, business is an exchange of value - your service/product for money (or something of value to you).

For some of your questions, you could go to a business workshop or take a course at your local business centre or university. There are plenty of great resources on the internet as well. Google it. And there are tons of business books that aren't focused on sales/marketing strategies. For example, the Dummies series probably have some good explanations.

However, business is a constantly changing environment and there is no right or wrong way to do things. What you learn in school/course will give you a rough idea but there are quite possibly many other ways to do things. It's up to you to figure it out on your own.

Another way to learn is to get experience by working for companies and learn from them. You'll be paid to learn while you understand what value you're delivering to your employer. There's no reason why you could eventually be contracting/consulting to your employer in the future.

Hey thanks for the answer. Business for dummies book is probably a great start for what I am looking for. Any other book recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Also a quick search for Business workshops in my area came up with "How to Start a Small Business" for $10.00 next Wednesday. Nothing to lose by going to that.

I would like to hear other people's answers to this as well. For me, it took receiving a 4-year business degree just to begin to know the answers to your questions. Furthermore, I intent to spend about 4 more years in school receiving a law degree and MBA as well to help make me a business expert so that I know the answers completely (and I'd get a masters in economics as well if I had the money/time).

I think the most important question is, how do you plan to create value? Perhaps if you are an engineer, you gain enough of a business education to understand the environment, but partner with a business expert to allow you the freedom to unleash your creativity without being bogged down by administrative tasks. I don't think you necessarily want to swap being a value creating engineer with being a business adminstrator, however, obviously the better you understand the theories of business and the administrative tasks that must be had, the better you can create value in the world for others.

What do you want to do in exchange for money?

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