So far I've only noticed one severe drawback to being an innkeeper in the north woods.

I appreciate the clarity, JMich, however your emphasis of "not mutually exclusive" is merely addressing the title and not the experiences of the participants. Which is odd because your examples are revealing the basis for the different experiences with the same title. It seems to me like you realize this, but your emphasis of that phrase gets me thinking you aren't interested in the differences. Which is odd because it seems like that's what this thread is about, the different experiences. Anyway, nice examples otherwise.

Thanks, there was lots of encouraging information, albeit it probably varies a lot depending on the country. I keep hearing Finland is not the best place for entrepreneurship, at least if you already are in a steady well-paid job, or recently laid off. Becoming an entrepreneur would mean you forfeit all kinds of social security to which you'd otherwise be entitled (in case your business doesn't fly after all). Heck, even if your spouse is an entrepreneur can cause that, because the powers that be might decide that you must be working for him/her, a family business. This happened to e.g. my wife's friend whose husband owns a car repair shop (or two, albeit I heard he might be closing the second (newer) one as it wasn't making money), she was declined certain unemployment benefits due to that.

That causes that e.g. recently unemployed, or unemployed who are getting certain extra benefits like a housing benefit, feel discouraged to start their own business as then they'd be jumping to the unknown and saying goodbye to social security.

That dilemma has been discussed here quite heavily recently, the whole social security system here needs an overhaul (but it is quite hard due to unions etc.).

All very good advice.

I would add that finding good suppliers is really important, that's something we've really struggled with because of where we are and the fact that we are still quite small and don't order a lot of stuff (so lots of companies won't deliver to us). So try and find some decent reliable people to supply whatever products or services you need.

Work twice as smart, not twice as hard.

One of the common mistakes people make is thinking that you need money to make money. They don't think about their business model and invest into something that puts them in a hole to begin with. People who get into business debt or take out mortgages generally have no concept of money or business. It's rarer that someone actually knows what to do with cash injections.

Owning a physical location isn't that great of an idea. You have to pay a lease on the building plus a lease on the property. Expecting to make $20,000-$30,000 a month out of the gate with no prior experience is silly. McDonalds made it because he discovered one amazing trick (you won't believe it!) - buy the property first, then build your franchises on top of it. It's the difference between climbing a mountain or standing on an escalator.

The last thing you want to do is to have a product that relies on a 3rd party. You have to look no further than GOG - it was developed, the developers left, and the current staff has no clue how to fix or change the site (according to their word or someone claiming they said it). You could say it's the root problem of everything on GOG.

Another example was these 2 guys who invested in a security platform. They paid around $50,000-$150,000 to get a developer to make it for them and all of their money was going to this guy. If the guy left their product would die. Your product/service should always be something that YOU control, not just own.

I can definitely vouch for this. Having a good relationship with our vendors definitely encouraged them to go the extra mile for us, when we were low on something, or something got left off a truck. Frequently, the rep would throw it in their car, pick it up for us and run it in. It's the things like that that made me want to continue to do business with their companies. They'd also buy back things that didn't sell, frequently give us new items they were carrying on promo, and if they didn't sell, they'd buy those back, as we supplied with them marketplace research. Finding good reps that know their business, know your particular market and sometimes even frequently have experience running their own businesses and can offer advice can be a godsend.

Hah, that sounds delightful... unfortunately not much like the experience we have :/

We're in a bit of a backwater and choice of suppliers is limited so we just have to go with what's available, it's only luck that we can get half of the things we need...

They are the Dark Lord's now.

XD VERY GOOD!

But what happens if he left the light on?

Interdimensional volt rot.

I could never get around having to deal with the likely myriad of problems having employees these days would entail...things like: Doing one's best not to do/say something they could take as an offense and sue over, having some employees try to sue for being x race/y gender after being fairly fired while claiming it was an unfair termination, rights groups complaining if you don't employ enough members of the favorite marginalized group of the month, etc.

Good luck with that....most people like the card usage at such places over using money/tokens/etc.

Fabio, my role model. :)

People should start running their own business once they have enough savings to fall back on if the business fails.

Yes I always wondered how buisness owners deal with suh issues and keep sane at the same time. I'm not surprised if they get 'mental health' issues as a result. People try to sue over all sorts of things i'm sure even for a small buisness as well as the fact that sometimes you have to sue in cases another buisness steals your property. And yeah people do get offended by a lot of things and take it pretty seriously. There may be rightful reasons for people to take action but yeah more problems.

Well yeah if someone has a legitimate case they should sue(or try to work things out with the owners first if it's a lesser slight and the owners didn't mean to offend/etc) and whatnot.....but in today's world many many more are getting more and more sue happy and outrage prone.