by oldbuddy » 02 Jan 2023, 07:05 I started a plastic molding business by taking out a $10,000 mortgage on my home to rent a shop and buy some equipment and barely had enough to start. I did have potential customers from the last job I had (including my last employer) so I was able to work 16 hours a day to produce enough product to pay the rent and utilities. My wife would bring me lunch and dinner and my son would ride his trike around the shop while she tended the running molding machines and I took a nap.
I can vouch for the fact that it can be done that way, if you are willing to make the committment, but is that what you really want? Be sure it is, because once you start there is no backing out without serious losses. Then you need to plan for expansion to make it grow. As time went by I bought more equipment and expanded into new product areas until very slowly I got ahead of the curve. Yes it worked, I owned that business for 25 years until I retired and sold the building I built for expansion and the used equipment for enough to go into the computer business installing point of sale systems at discount prices to auto dealers and worked my way up to $85,000 a year in salary. But I guarantee you, it was anything but easy and th only reason it worked was I made contacts that led me to the ripe fruit with high demand. Without that, the big guns in the business would have eaten me alive. I was able to develop a system that sold turnkey for $6,500 to do the same job smaller dealers needed to pay $30,000 to big companies for and it is still being sold today on a smaller scale.
