Every now and then one of my friends comes to me with a business idea that he considers his dream job. He an buy the tools and there's Mony in it.
As a good friend my job is to crush his/her dream and send him down a short depression spiral. It's harsh, I know, but it's better than letting them invest all of their money into something that is doomed to fail at some point.
Usually the one thing they fail to consider is their own time and how much of their time this new business venture would cost them in form of money.
You need to add the value of your time to your expenses before reaching any conclusions, for example:
Imagine you want to start selling peanuts on the street, you're buying them for $1 a big bag and you're splitting it into four bags selling those four bags for $2. Sounds like a good profit right?
But you can get at least $10 per hour working a minimum wage job, that means your time is worth at least $10 per hour, even if you sell 40 bags per hour your not making any profits and that's just the selling tome, you still have to spend time splitting 100 bags of peanuts every day.
Of course there's many ways you can utilize your time by doing something else on the side since selling peanuts doesn't need that much attention and is mostly waiting for the next customer. But many other jobs don't even give you that option
You can easily calculate how much you could make if you where doing the work you're skilled at, and next time you had an idea or a friend came to you with a business proposal, you can find out if it's worth your time or not with simple math.
Image source: it's just a thumbnail from Google
