Dawn Rivers Baker has an excellent blog on microbusinesses that pointed me towards a post on bootstrapping that I thought would be worth sharing.

Tim Berry sat down with his wife recently and came up with 10 lessons they've learned over the last 22 years of running their business.

At the top of the list was learning from your mistakes. It got me to thinking how much we learned a couple of years ago from a failed attempt to video tape and sell footage of local parades. We lost money on the deal, and spent a lot of time producing each product, but those lessons gave us some confidence and we were able to translate what we learned about marketing to our next business idea. The contacts we made along the way also helped to introduce us to the area and the people.

Looking back now I can clearly see how those early failures were necessary steps in the quest for a microbusiness that fits our lifestyle.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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