Ask yourself what exactly that you want from your business. Do you want to turn your back on the world and just paint to your heart’s content? Do you want to make a lot of money? Do you want freedom? Do you want to be your own boss? Do you like the idea of being an entrepreneur? Do you want lots of people working for you? How about taking month long vacations? If any of these things appeal to you then read on.

What do you need to know to start? If you say not much, just a ladder and a brush, you will be in business for only a short time. Do you need years and years of experience as a painter? That will make you a good painter but not a good business owner. What about having knowledge of business practices? You definitely will learn business procedures by just being in business, so why not learn these things early on? What about salesmanship? If you want to be like most painting businesses that fail, then don’t bother to learn anything about sales. How about having management skills? An absolute necessity is having management skills.

Now another question for you is how do you learn these things? Do you ask the clerk at the paint store, who probably will bend your ear about starting a business? It’s too bad this chatterbox doesn’t know anything, and a dead giveaway to the clerk’s lack of knowledge of the painting business is the fact that this clerk is standing behind the counter and not running his own businessVideo on youtube.com. Or even a painter who works for someone else but has never had the courage to venture out and actually try standing on his own. I could go down a list of those people who will tell you what you need to operate including the little old lady down the street who hired a painter once to paint her cellar, and is not an expert on the business.

Before you risk poisoning your mind with garbage from people who have no experience running a paint business, and will tell you all their thoughts on this subject, take some time to slow down and do a little research. Only absorb the information from someone who has succeeded for more than ten years. Why ten years you ask; because the majority of paint contractors fail in the first ten years. So someone who has serviced and prospered for more than ten years has good things to tell you.