How to Start a Business With No Money

Posted On: 2006-04-11Length: 60:00

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Well hello! This is Anita Campbell and welcome to Small Business Trends Radio. I'm so glad you could join us today. We have a fabulous show coming up. The topic is, how to start a business with no money. Gary Schoeniger started a business dead broke, in debt, with nothing more than a ladder. Before long it was a multi-million dollar business. And Gary's going to be with us in just a short while to offer tips about what worked for him, and what didn't. So, just stay with us. It's going to be absolutely wonderful.

But first, before bringing Gary on the show, we have our Today's Trend segment. Now Today's Trend is about leading the elusive dream of easy money behind, and bootstrapping our way to success. Anyone who became an entrepreneur before or during the dot com boom days of the late 1990s and early 2000 soon became aware of all the easy money. Or so we thought. Who among us has not heard a story that goes something like this: An entrepreneur scribbled an idea for an Internet business on a sheet of paper, or maybe on the back of a napkin, and managed to get some venture capital firm to invest millions in it. Not that I personally know of anyone who successfully used the back of the napkin business plan, but it does make a great story. And of course it's become an urban legend.

Which brings me around to Today's Trend. It seems that for a period of several years we were all fixated on venture capital. VC money. Other people's money. And it seemed like money was there just for the asking. All you needed was to be aggressive enough to go out and get it. The dot com crash in 2001 taught us otherwise. Suddenly those VCs were not as friendly anymore. The flow of new funding dried up, the market for IPOs, or initial public offerings, which is the end game for most VCs, dropped out. And reality set in. Today with the benefit of hindsight we see that time as an aberration. Yes, there are still technology companies that are getting millions of dollars, but they're few and far between. For instance, according to 2002 figures from the Kauffman Foundation...