I wrote a whole thing on this that dissapeared when I hit post so I'll try again lol. I wanted to share an experience I had with starting a home based business 3 years ago, it was called The Hideaway Ramona. A tiny house bed and breakfast. I have a 6 acre property where I live so I arranged a deal with 5 tiny house owners to park their unit here, I would do all the work associated with renting them out nightly on Airbnb and we would split the money 50/50. Passive income for them, a side job for me. 3 of the houses came to me unfinished, so I remodeled them to completion on nights and weekends for the owners. Which was kind of enjoyable besides being a lot of work. So when they were finished, we listed them and travelers and tiny house enthusiasts came. We started making between $6-800 per week, all I had to do was change the sheets, clean the unit, dump the composting toilet and get it ready for the next group. I'd invested a few thousand dollars into running electricity and water for the hookups, and furnishing the houses with all the necessary stuff. TV's, kitchen appliances, couches etc. Everything went according to plan, we started gathering momentum and had great reviews. Things were looking good, I started building my own tiny house. Had plans of replacing the units with my own houses now that I knew it would work.
Well...it was short lived. 7 months into it one of my neighbors filed a complaint with the county. The county worker came onto my property when we weren't home and took all the pictures he needed to shut us down. The county wanted us to pay for a major use permit. $14k to start the permit process, non-refundable of course, and could cost as much as $300k by the time it was finished. So we had to close up shop. There was no way we could afford that, the thing wasn't bringing in that kind of money.
All that work for nothing, depression set in. It was a real kick in the *****. Felt like an idiot, literally lost quite a bit of money. Didn't even consider trying to start anything for about a year.
Then the idea for business number 3 came up, create a Farm Table Rental business for weddings and events. My wife and I went over the idea for a while and then we went for it. I spent a couple months building the tables, benches, wedding arches, portable bars and other stuff in my wood shop, she spent about that much time building an awesome website and marketing to people in the wedding industry. We launched and it really has taken off, we are getting a constant flow of visitors to our site and regular bookings for weddings. It's worked out perfectly. All the expenses of building have been paid back from the weddings we've done Nobody can close us down and its fun to do.
Failure is part of trying new things. Don't be afraid of it, if you fall down then learn what you can from it and push forward again. In this day and age anyone can start a business, make a website and if you can solve a problem or provide a great service that people want, then the sky is the limit. Do you have an experience with persistence paying off? What happened and how did you get thru it?