Any business success stories in negros

Right, starting off with throwing 1.7 on the table is probably not the best way to get going.

Make it pull its own weight. If there is something to the idea, prove it first.

I'm not sure you should be paying much more than living expenses.

Don't bother with employees until what you are doing is making money already and the employees would expand on that.

Need more land? Sure, is the land that you are using now making money? Would more land make more money?

You should have seen the place Gerry started with for his bar. It was just a crap trash filled space. He built it into a beautiful bar with a ton of help from his brother. Sure, the place wasn't cheap, but it was probably far cheaper than it would have been had he come in naive and wallet blazing.

Just start small. Work your way up. Make the next investment prove itself. Make small bets and lose small money.

As for my own success...

I'm working on it!

It's a slow learning curve, which is what makes these things so rare. As you said, it takes a lot of work over a long period. Some go to college for 4 years. Some are on the multiple decade education.

I picked tech. My investment to lose is my time. My start costs is the food on my table and the roof over my head. Nobody, foreign or domestic, can take my business.

 

Me? I start to get an uneasy feeling about you, digital mind! Your posts are lattely to good to be human, so much insight can not come from a human, you must have AI, you must be a cyborg...

In earnest, your posts are great, man...

 

There has been some excellent and sage advice given in the previous posts. May I suggest a few more.

PRIOR to beginning any business venture, MAKE OUT A DETAILED BUSINESS PLAN aAND COMMIT IT TO WRITING, including all of the following:

what/who is my market---do they have the discretionary income to purchse my product---who is my competition and are they successful, if not, why not---will my selling price point be viable if there is an increase in materials cost---what is my "break even point" and what do i have to sell/produce to get there---what type of govt permits/payoffs can be anticipated---can the business begin small (as Dude so wisely suggested)and BE scaled up from profits.

Do a 1 year, 2year, 5 year plan to define what your success will look like.

Have enough capital to carry you AT LEAST one year so that profits (if any) can be re-invested in the business

Be prepared to focus on that business 24/7 or DO NOT START IT!

All of these questions WILL be answered--either before the business begins or when the owner is "toes-up" and folding his tent!

 

. Lots of OFWs in the US....just have to think of how to exploit them...err I mean target their needs online. lol

Wyre.....

If that's Your idea.....sorry to tell you the Pinoy's ( well in the UK anyway) are already doing it to their own!
Just editted my mention of a certain product.....dont want anyone suing anybody!

 

I believe that for someone to start a successful business they must be a certain type of individual. Entrepreneur's are a very unique breed and most have very limited formal business education. What they do have though is an instinctive understanding of business. Some are lucky, some are smart, some are good, most are a combination of all three. I do not believe that failure of new businesses is limited to Negros.

Five Reasons 8 Out Of 10 Businesses Fail - Forbes

If someone does decide that they need to start a business a little bit of research goes a long way. Starting one in the Philippines as a foreigner is an additional obstacle that needs to be factored in.

 

My issue with a business plan, is that starting out, you may not know what the plan is.

I look at business as being much like the scientific method. You have a hypothesis, you test the hypothesis, you make changes based on the results and then repeat the process.

I was once helping a couple of university professors / researchers build a component for a university incubated business based on technology they were developing. One guy told me that he wanted to get a T-shirt made with the phrase "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research."

As with the scientific method, we don't really know what we are doing. Certainly we can't expect to accurately predict the future. We may be experts in the field we are operating in, but that still doesn't change these basic facts.

For this reason, I'm also not sure I would spend a lot of time doing a lot of reasearch. Just get started and see what happens. Cover your @ss legally, sure. But don't bog yourself down with so many details that you never get going.

Most likely your idea won't work anyways, but often you find something at the periphery which seems promising. Maybe someone uses your product in a way you never thought of. Maybe you came up with some gimmick to sell your service and the gimmick becomes so wildy popular that you find a way to make a business out of the gimmick instead.

You adjust your business to center on these periphery items, and you will continue to find things on the edge that you can try. The center continues to move as your business evolves. You didn't plan it this way, you can't really even control it, you simply ride along with it.

These adjustments are how you find market fit. You don't choose your market fit, you basically stumble on it by this process of locating things on the edge of what you are trying. You may be able to broadly target a market (b2b vs consumer, enterprise vs smb) but even that's not set in stone. You have to keep your eyes open and keep testing.

Let's now revisit the idea of doing things such as researching the market and competitors. Did we gain anything from that? Perhaps, but the business is now a far different one than what we first intended to build. The competition is no longer the competition and we completely missed on what we thought would be our market.

This is why you need to make lots of small bets. Nassim Taleb wrote in "Anti Fragile" that failure is good because failure carries information. You use that information to make changes. Again, that's basically the scientific method. Given that failure is baked into the process, you don't want to be making a huge resource commitment to one bet. As your business changes, those resources may become obsolete liabilities.

But of course, we don't know anything. We are wrong. There will be exceptions to all these things because we don't know what we are talking about. And luck plays a major factor as well. But the basic ideas here keep us from getting into too much trouble with all the fun of trying.

 

You have been following the thread, right? You have been looking at how much effort these business ideas really require?

I'm going to steal your idea.

In doing so, I'm shoving all my own ideas to the side.

I'm going to put myself through hell trying to make it work.

I may do this for multiple years, aging myself 5x those years in the process.

Right, I'm going to steal your idea.

Or your idea will be a sure winner, super easy and make lots of money. Probably not.

Edit: Okay, maybe some of those points are exaggerations. Maybe it wouldn't kill me and require that much effort. But still, there is an opportunity cost. You think your idea is great and you might be surprised when you finally do tell people, they think it's terrible. That means nothing, just that people are more interested in doing their own thing and have their own whacky views of the world. Nobody will steal your idea. It's better to tell everyone you can about it to get feedback.

 

Much good advice here.

I'm one of those cereal, (yes I know it should be serial), entrepreneurs. I've started several businesses, all except one were at least somewhat successful but the one I failed at was the best lesson I've ever had. I read the link that Midway posted and it was excellent. One of the things my wife and I do is to throw our idea out for discussion, (just the two of us at first), and do our best to point out all the weak points of the business we are thinking about starting and why it would not be a good idea. If it survives this torture test we will investigate it further and eventually talk it over with trusted advisors, usually friends that are entrepreneurs also, to get their take on the idea.
There are lots of ideas that we have discarded because of time issues, for instance; A dairy requires 365 days a year milking with no time off, at least 12 to 14 hours a day. Convenience store or restaurant same reason.
I had rather have quick failure than a mildly successful venture.
Being self employed, (I've also done that), is not a business, it is a job that you bought.
I agree with tltravler and Dude about the business plan, both are right although they have differing ideas. A business plan is like a plan of battle, it is always great until the first shot is fired. A business plan is only a guide, it is not chilsed in stone. I tell my wife that is written on paper and can and will be changed at the appropriate time.
Our latest business venture has required us to work for no profit and very little income for six years before it started paying off. We knew this going in and we were willing to make the sacrifice and I can assure you no one else built our business. Today this business is successful and will continue for many years to come with very little input from us.
Most entrepreneurs are "C" students, except for me, I was a "D" student and graduated in the upper 95% of my class in high school. I took a few night college courses to get a real estate license which lapsed several years ago. Most entrepreneurs are not highly educated.
I personally admire anyone that starts a business whether it succeeds or fails. The classes that I've taught on entrepreneurship I tell the students I hope they fail on their first effort. Not because I don't want them to be successful but because the valuable lessons they will learn. If a person is successful on their first venture many times they become over confident and lose it all in another venture. Success is not a good teacher but failure is.