Every Wednesday, we publish our “Investor Toolkit” series on TSI Network. Whether you’re a new or experienced investor, these weekly updates are designed to give you specific investment advice on the widest possible variety of topics. Each Investor Toolkit update gives you a fundamental tip and shows you how you can put it into practice right away.

Today’s tip: “The odds may be against starting your own business, but those who do it right can enjoy a huge payoff.”

You can still get rich as an employee of a company—ask any highly paid executive of a Canadian corporation. However, high-paying jobs are hard to find. Most corporate structures are pyramid-shaped, with a few high-paying positions at the top and many lower-paying jobs down below. Moreover, the slow economic recovery and relatively high unemployment means that many people continue to vie for jobs—especially those that pay well.

Your best chance of getting rich is by putting your money in your own business. But this can be risky investment advice. Many new businesses wind up failing. As many as 80% go bankrupt or simply shut down in their first five years, according to a number of surveys. Many owners of failed enterprises lose their life savings, and even their homes and marriages.

Today, we’ll look at the risks of going it on your own—and then at the path successful entrepreneurs follow when they start up a business.

Why new businesses fail:

• Owners underestimate the amount and variety of work. In a small business, everything is your job, until you hire somebody to do it. And even then, you still have all of the responsibility.
• Cash flow: owners run out of capital to pay their bills before the company’s profits begin to flow.
• Some “bright idea” businesses fail because there’s no real demand for their product or service.

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How to improve your chances of success:

• Keep your job and run the business on the side until it starts making money.
• Make sure you have adequate capital. Apply for loans, lines of credit, merchant charge-card accounts and so on before you need them.
• Choose a “me-too” business over a pioneering one. Improve on existing products or services, or buy a franchise.
• Make it your life’s work. Learn all you can about the industry, and keep learning. Plan on working long hours for many years without supervision or immediate rewards. Above all, stick with it. Many entrepreneurs go broke two, three or more times before they launch the business that makes their fortunes.

Here’s an extra piece of investment advice: the odds against success in your own business apply just as much to shares in start-up businesses that trade on the stock exchange. If anything, the odds against publicly traded start-ups are worse; that’s because some publicly traded start-ups are created by stock promoters who merely go through the motions of building a business: their real business is selling stocks to the public.

That’s why it pays to downplay junior stocks in your portfolio. Instead, invest most of your money in well-established companies with a history of sales and earnings, if not dividends.

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