Over last summer, I worked for a guy who was starting up his own digital imaging company.
Now, I'm an engineering student. I haven't taken a business course in my life, and I haven't even taken an economics course in years. But it seems to me that a sucessful startup owner should:
a) Be the first one in the office and the last one to leave.
b) Hire employees who took whatever job they were assigned seriously, and not be afraid to fire them if they didn't.
c) Be willing to do whatever needs to be done, grunt work or not.
d) Market themselves well, and provide the best possible product or service they can.
My employer did none of the above. He became backlogged with work because his first wave of employees (mostly high school kids) didn't do anything they were assigned to do while still picking up paychecks, then after they left (he didn't fire them, which he should have) he had to find new employees and get them to do the actual work. On his first job he barely broke even when he should have made tens of thousands in the first 6 months. By the time I showed up to work for him, he was already behind the promised delivery date, had no reliable system to backup the masses of information he was storing, his office had all the appearance of a sweatshop, and he hadn't found a new client for the next job after this one was completed.
In other words, be ready to break your back working, because unlike a canned job, your ass is really on the line when you start your own business.
