start online businessThere are many things to consider when taking the leap and deciding to start your own online business.

For many people, the transition to becoming an entrepreneur happens during upheaval in their lives…a change of career, being let go from their job, going through a major physical or emotional health challenge or simply being fed up with where they are in life.

Still others (a growing number today) are starting their own businesses right out of school.

The challenge is knowing what business to start, what market to target, what type of enterprise they should build and how to balance an interest or passion with their own commercial interest.

In other words, where do you start!

With the benefit of hindsight (after nearly 25-years of working approximately half of which was for small companies in senior positions and the other half building our own group of businesses) we can share out own experiences with you hopefully saving you years of searching or making mistakes.

In fact, we also have a huge testbed of thousands of entrepreneurs that we have helped and coached through InfoMarketer’sZone, from this testbed we summarize these 4 critical pieces to any successful business.

4 Most Important Characteristics To Consider When Starting Your Own Business

1) Leveraged income…meaning as much as possible I want to get multiple times more out of my effort than I put in…meaning that if I spend a month putting together a product (ebook, training product, etc…), I can get many, many times return from that product than the value of my time I put in AND I can use that extra time to build another, and another, etc…

2) It’s a market, business or product that I enjoy building, offering or seeing people buy so that “working” is actually fun and not really work at all

3) Something that builds “equity”, that I can sell for multiples when I do decide to exit that business.  Not many biz-opp marketers think about this, but it really is the key to building leveraged income AND eventually giving you other options (retirement, lump-sum to invest in something else, philanthropy, etc…).  Your consideration of equity means that having your own products, your own duplicatable processes are extremely important in setting the ultimate value of your business to someone else when you decide to “cash-in”

4) FUN...building anything of value takes tremendous energy, commitment, drive, determination, sacrifice and persistence…I have talked with many entrepreneurs that spent massive energy building a business only to walk away BEFORE they saw big return because they hit a point 1, 2 or 3 years in when they found it hard to get out of bed in the morning.  They just didn’t like their business, the people they worked with, their customers or anything about how their business ended up anymore.  There was little wrong with the business, it just wasn’t a passion anymore and therefore not something they wanted to devote 110% time and energy into.

YOUR TAKE…

Do these online business characteristics line up with what you think is important in your own business?  Do you have another consideration you think is important…leave a comment.