How to Completely Ruin Your Life Trying to Start Your Own Business

Tired of working for the man? So tired and miserable that you’ve been driven into a masochistic frenzy of such deep self-loathing that you’re prepared to torch the shambles of your fractured soul by attempting to start your own business? Well then you’re on the right track, because 90% of all businesses fail within their first two years, leaving their proprietors financially and spiritually crushed amidst their smoking wreckage.

Success Stories

Other websites dedicated to selling the pipe-dream of starting a profitable business will invariably emphasize the positive of this nearly hopeless endeavor by citing any number of success stories – from the guy who used his technical and entrepreneurial savvy to turn the small computer repair business he ran out of his garage into a billion dollar company, to the stay-at-home mom selling millions of dollars worth of organic soap from her living room when she isn’t basking in the satisfaction of not having to delegate the rearing of her children to cheap immigrant domestic labor while she punches in and out at the bucket factory – but such cases are exceedingly rare, were accomplished by individuals vastly smarter and more resourceful than you are, and are being touted by another such person who’s making a comfortable living running a website frequented by suckers.

As for the other 90% whose businesses are catastrophic failures in the first couple of years, their significantly less inspiring stories are rarely heard because, according to a study by Gardner Business Solutions, most of their former owners cannot be reached. Many are presumed dead, others homeless.

Where To Start

Are you emotionally distraught, self-destructive, and extremely dissatisfied with your family and social life? If not, starting your own business probably isn't a really great idea. If so, then you’re ready to proceed towards your undoing.

The first step to becoming a ruined former business owner is deciding what kind of business you want to fail at. What are your interests? What are you at least somewhat passionate about? To really obliterate your will to live, you should choose a business that will motivate you to work really hard in order to maximize the devastation you feel when it inevitably tanks.

For a business to work, it needs to not only make money, but make sufficiently more than it spends to support you, which is where everything will go wrong. Start digging your hole by doing research on your potential industry. Find out everything about the market, products and services, suppliers and customers, and the established competition that will eventually pulverize you. Then, once you've squandered this valuable time, waste a valuable monetary sum paying all your registration fees, and for a business consultant to compose your business plan, since you likely don't have a fucking clue how to even go about starting one.

If the person who draws up your business plan is semi-competent, it should be plain as day at this point that your proposed business doesn't have a chance in hell of succeeding in the long term, let alone ever make a single dime of profit at any point of time within the context of a rational universe. Therefore, you will have to rely on "unconventional" means of gathering the capital required to launch your enterprise - i.e. your own life savings and/or other non-bank manager types, hence ensuring a penniless future in which you've become estranged from all friends and family who were dumb enough to give you money.

Your Grand Opening

Before you can officially go out of business, you must have a grand opening. To enhance the humiliation of the latter during the former, be sure to tell everyone you know of your intrepid embarkation upon the perilous seas of private business ownership. Really let yourself get carried away. Surrender to maniacal, misplaced exuberance. Accept your friends' contrived congratulations and dissembled predictions for your imminent success with aplomb. If you have a spouse, counter his or her noisy accusations and tear-filled entreaties with recriminations against their lack of faith.

(To Be Continued)