A few days back I attended a course run by the Business Enterprise Centre in Southern Sydney. Heavily funded by the Government, the purpose of the purpose of the course was to help people like me figure out how to start up their businesses. Six hours later I walked away severely intimidated by the entire thing. This surprised me. After all, I have been in a senior management position in a large organisation for about a decade. Why be worried?<\/p>\n
Risk. Personal risk.<\/p>\n
Suddenly I realised that the buck well and truly stopped here. Fail at this and I could lose my house!<\/p>\n
The second thing was that I had gone in with a clear idea of what I was offering: over three decades worth of information design and management skill. I figured that selling this in an affordable manner to small business should be a sure fire winner. The convener thought otherwise. Lots of competition out there doing the same thing.<\/p>\n
I am different, I thought. I am better and can personalise and will care about my clients. I will listen to them. Nurture them.<\/p>\n
But let’s face it, I will always be quite expensive if I do that and small business tends towards cheap options (rightly or wrongly).<\/p>\n
My mate Glenn (the one who is using my graphics in Paris) thinks that I should focus on medical graphics. It really is a great idea. I just really wonder whether the demand is out there in a large enough volume to support my business. Should I just go for it anyway and do other things on the side as they arise?<\/p>\n
Sigh, sigh, sigh.<\/p>\n
What direction to take?<\/p>\n
Meanwhile still writing.<\/p>\n
Greg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few days back I attended a course run by the Business Enterprise Centre in Southern Sydney. Heavily funded by the Government, the purpose of the purpose of the course was to help people like me figure out how to start up their businesses. Six hours later I walked away severely intimidated by the entire thing. This surprised me. After all, I have been in a senior management position in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["entry","author-gnlong","post-2422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life","clearfix"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/IMG_1076.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2422"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greole.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=2422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}