Photo: Flickr:photomagnon

If you read this blog regularly (bless your heart), you know that in my view, action is the key ingredient to starting a successful business.

It’s tempting to take a class, fuss over your business plan or worry about trade marking your logo, but the fact is that each of these things amounts to mere procrastination. Making your first sale is – by definition – the only surefire way to launch a business. But it pays to think critically about the business you seek to start.
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Photo: Flickr/Gerard Stolk vers la Chandeleur

Knowing what to do is different from actually doing it.

For example, Dave Ramsey, founder of an eponymous personal finance empire that produces books, conferences and a radio show, has some interesting advice about meeting one’s financial goals: he often says knowledge is only 20 percent of the battle; the other 80 percent, he says, is reforming the habits of the person you shave with. All the information in the world will prove useless unless you can change your behavior.

A similar principle applies to starting a business. Unless you can muster the courage to sell something to your first customer (and persistence to sell to many more), all the classes and business-planning software in the world won’t help you.

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Photo: Flickr:Biblio Archives/Library Archives

The desire to create jobs is a big driver for would-be entrepreneurs. Too often, though, new business owners fail to learn the legal responsibilities that come with hiring employees. Knowing whether to report a worker as an employee or contractor is one of the most significant yet least understood of these responsibilities.

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Photo: Flickr/Carl M.

Entrepreneur University graduate Sonja Galyon-Kamonika’s love of transit blossomed when she rode the trains as a girl growing up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Now, after having logged years in the transportation industry, Kamonika has started a limousine company in New Jersey, her adoptive home. Through 4A Transportation Services, the Somerville resident offers rides to seniors living in assisted-living and 55-plus communities in Somerset County.

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