TL;DR - What you get when you combine all types of small business consulting/development, investment groups and start-up incubators. This "firm" would be actively investing and taking equity in small businesses as well as the contract work it has consulting to clients. The heads of each department would be entrepreneurial spirits, with business ideas/aspirations and the business would take extra cash and R&D new business ideas taking the financial risk off a person trying to make a business work.
I'll do the TL;DR first to hopefully entice you, as the idea is relatively simple but many complexities in the details and this post will likely be long.
So my issue is I have a notebook of business ideas, some small, some big but I have literally a dozen or so ideas that I think could be viable legitimate businesses if I were to tackle it, but like most problems in this world my biggest issue is I don't have time and I don't have the money. Young family, recently graduated, little savings and lots of payments and bills that aren't going to stop. So what's somebody suppose to do with all these possible viable business ideas.
This is where my idea stems from, I run my own accounting and bookkeeping firm so I've taken the first step. I want you to envision a law firm and the structure of that. You have your senior partners, junior partners, associates and supporting staff and etc. This would be the same way. You would have your senior partners of the firm, they would all own equity and have to "buy in" at a prescribed rate. These senior partners would be all different, they would each be the head of a different department, marketing, accounting, IT, lawyers, graphic design, web design, programmer etc, etc. Then within each of these departments they would have people below them helping out with the workload just like any consulting firm that scales beyond a one person shop. The added benefit of this is 2 things, added client base and a trust for past services received. For example instead of me just marketing my skill set as accounting and bookkeeping to whoever I now can cast a wider net and try and retrieve business with any number of the services offered. On top of this, say I have a client I have been keeping the books for a while now, he knows the work we do is good and proper. He wants to re-brand and market to bring on new revenue streams himself. Without having to research another company he can just use the company he already knows and trusts. Also by already working with him the other department would have a heads up about how he operates, there's no "getting to know" the client as hes already a customer.
The biggest twist to this company is the investment side. We take the profits earned within the company and inject it right back into investing. We as the senior partner team would make up the perfect investment team, we have every department the big guys have at our disposal, we can see businesses from every angle that a single person just can't. We could have a small business come to us that is cash strapped, we take a look at the idea and potential and if we think its a good fit we do work for equity. Now the firm has a vested interest in making this business work to generate positive cash flow back into the firm to reinvest again or maybe the senior partners are looking for a nice dividend payout come years end for all their hard work. There are tons of small family businesses out there that take a little work and they can grow into multi million dollar ideas and be sustainable. Event the simple and time proven idea of buying small cheap business spending a few years growing them and then selling them off for a profit.
The other side of this is the senior partners actual business ideas. Say for example I have an idea for a product. At monthly senior partner meetings I could pitch this idea, saying for this idea to get some traction it will need $5,000 in R&D and "x" months to get somewhere. If a certain majority of the shareholders agree its a good idea then the funds are set aside for the project and off the senior partners go trying to make this business work. If it works then it goes off and provides further cash flow to the firm to reinvest in new projects and other businesses; if it fails it goes under R&D expenses and written off on the company books, no loss to any individual personally.
This is a very broad picture idea, there would be tons of detail things to have this happen within a firm, there would need to be procedures and rules put in place to keep everything honest. This gives you the just of it.
For me this leads to letting go of the fear of failure, if I knew that trying my business ideas wouldn't lead to possible financial loss I would be much more willing to take risks. Lets face it the number one reason we don't/can't do something is money. There's other ways around that problem but this creates a sustainable flow of money for partners to decide what happens with it.
Let me know your thoughts. I'm not a very good writer so if something is unclear let me know and I will try and clear it up, i'm also sure there is grammar issues, again my apologies. If you can poke holes even better, best thing we can do with ideas is talk about them. If your interested in being involved some way shape or form let me know as well.
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