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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Would-be entrepreneurs love coming up with excuses to postpone starting the businesses of their dreams. Money – or a lack thereof – is usually the culprit: they fear that unless they can secure a big bank loan or generous investment, the success they seek will never materialize.

Dreamers like these should talk to Intersect Fund clients Mike Ivers and Casey Ruff. The two founded BTM laundry – a New Brunswick-based company that picks up customers’ dirty laundry, has it washed or dry-cleaned, and returns it the next day – on a shoestring budget in 2007. After expanding BTM’s customer base to include thousands of students and families in the region, Ivers and Ruff bought a Laundromat – in cash – last August.

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