The Start
People often ask me to share my experience to know what were my experiences in starting a business. Business means “business,” nothing else. Saying that, you probably want to know what’s the goal of going to a business? Roughly speaking , you probably are doing the business now. For example you are either working for somebody, or a fresh graduate want to start a business right away because you already saved money from your parent’s given pocket money and saved some money from that, and/or your parents are wealthy who can finance you partly or completely, or your wife is working and she can carry on your next 6 months on her back. The bottom line is you have a cushion for at least 6 months doing nothing but work without having to going to borrow from a “bank” to invest yourself in the business. Clearly your labor whole or part should be your investment.
Keep records of your time invested (converted to $s) because at the end of that period you should decide going ahead judged by he hope for next year or so. That’s what I did. I received a commitment of $5,000. from NASA. That was very nice. But remember my investment was a Full Time Equivalent (FTE) of me. None of those days were 8 hours day.
How that money came to my pocket? I had, before that, worked with a few programs for NSSA establishing a track record of innovation is a very meaningful way and NASA program managers were very pleased. Actually they figured out that hiring me alone (with the banner of my company, Software Corporation of America) was less expensive for them that pain a high management fee for Raytheon a large business. Bingo!
All this is kind of general knowledge are available on the US Small Business Administration (SBA) site.
Expansion of business
The $5,000. contract I received was procured by NASA in a urgent and opportunistic fashion. The Opportunity opened up in a very interesting way. Depending on time and pressure of the time (my program was a directive to NASA from the White House) the government procuring Program Managers (PMs) have various tools they can use which are above the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) rules. In my instance the White House mandate really worked in my favor. But remember if the PM had no idea hat I existed it would not have happened. The advice is keep your card in the front of he PM (period).
By the way, the Program Acquisition Managers (PAMs) are the door openers of the PMs. Therefore you have to establish a relationship with these folks.
Question?
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