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Or if you want to get personal
20 years ago I was an self employed Accountant who wanted to increase my business.
We used our home equity loan to purchased the business of anther accountant.
The business grew with the help of a telemarketer. Good timing and computers.
LUCKIEST

Great question. We all know the basic risk is risk of losing money because of whatever reason. And no excuse will work here, unlike job.

But in my mind, basic risk of opening small business and remaining small always is losing time of life, losing the time to share with family, losing time to enjoy, losing relationship etc, all the losses are time related. This is a 24 hr job; If the vision is big, and you can grow from small to big where you can set up a process/ system working for you in few years, there the loss is much less than the gain. You regain conrol of life once your system is in place, both in terms of time and money, also security. I definitely understand you still have to work but the intensity will be less and you will have trust-able help. That's what I am tring/hoping to create... let's see...

I did not listen to anyone who said my idea was stupid...and there were plenty. I cashed in my SEP IRA for the first cash infusion to get going. I work all day to pay the bills and all evening to design my domain for the coders.

I understand, some owners not all fortunately, don't appreciate the value of some employees (the hard worker), it is a 50/50 either you create your own business or you find another job.

When I was working in a print shop here in Las Vegas, I did the job of two people, and I remember my manager (not the owner) telling me: I never see someone working like that in my all carrier. I was fast, organized, and not bad at work. Ready to show how a little guy like me from the old Europe doing jobs for our American friends

I was tired with the turnover in this field and worked as a sole proprietor design company, then we've got our son, and switched to another business online with a higher legal structure LLC.

I use all my equiment to take pictures of my products, resize them, added to the data base, upload them, create new pages on my e-commerce via FTP, etc....

So when I say switched business, not really, it is just the continuation of my job through my e-commerce.

The biggest risk i had was putting a ton of money through my amex charge card but in hindsight that was the single most important decision i made. Give me net30 payments and helped me learn to manage cash flow and i got a ton of points to boot

some scary bills but with a little cash management and having checks available from other cards or LOCs to help float those tight months it worked out well and i figured in those costs as much as possible into my pricing.

My first risk was giving up the certaintly of a regular paycheck to become a self-employed/independent consultant.

My second risk was giving up the consulting assignments to trade stocks. I'd say this was a bigger risk because you know that if you accept an assignment, you will earn an X amount, but you may spend the same amount of time researching/trading stocks and end up losing $$.

The charge card was 100% used for inventory/drop shipping and wasn't used for actuall business expenses. The effect was a net30 account without having to pre-qualify to hefty requirements at my major distributors and it allowed me the 5-7 business days of float i needed to collect, deposit & skim off my profit and pay everything off Plus it nilled out my travel expenses since charging 2-3k/day adds up in points real quick. Amex is quick to respond - sometimes negatively to changes in purchasing/spending habits but usually with a little sweet talking they will leverage your purchasing/paying habits quickly into LOC's and other products with more purchasing power and in the retail industry (ecommerce) its ALL about purchasing power