@yinandyang I have a small company that does a trade in the outdoors -quite a physical one with some risk. Its not clever, its not innovative. The gear has changed and still evolves but people have been doing it since the stone age.

What I would observe to a young man wanting to start out is that what trade you do is more important than you might think if you want to run a business that scales. My trade is a poor fit actually. I probably picked it for less than perfect reasons -it grew naturally out of my hobbies, it was physically challenging and other men on a site respect you when you arrive and sort out something, particularly if its dangerous. These are poor reasons to start a business and my trade is actually hard to scale because it involves a lot of gear -and the consequences of messing up can be serious -so you need at least one man on a gang to be very experienced and sensible.

At the end of my road lives a man who is almost the same age as me. I chat to him when I meet him out running. At one point we had daughters the same age and same name in the same school. He is a landscape gardener. He has a large successful business and He is also booked up a year ahead by clients who will wait for his reputation. He can hire young men with no more skills than a strong back, give then cheap tools, put them in a second hand van and send them to do most of the work, while he visits sites, draws up plans and pays bills and one or two experienced men oversee things. He has been known to go abroad for months with his family.

Who is paid more per job and has more respect from men on sites -me. Who earns more and has an easier and more scalable business -him. All he started with was some hand tools and a bike as a jobbing gardener.

Look for something solid that deals with a need that will not be designed out by technology. Learn to do it, get clients and scale up. Check its low regulation and cheap to scale up. Plumbers are a good example -van and simple tools are all you need to scale. Heating engineers are OK but more regulation makes it harder to scale, even if it pays more per job. Tax company -risky choice because of uber and driverless cars.

@SamuelAnders If you can do it at least as well as your rivals and you can grind harder than most, you will be OK, pretty much whatever the business, so long as you start small enough. Start too big and you can find that a simple error in your assumptions of how the future will go can ruin everything no matter how hard you grind.

It really helps to have a good future proofed niche to work in or else you need to be be able to read the future well.

Its a lot better if you have only your own money in the business. Everyone has his own agenda. That includes investors. When agenda diverge, investors need to take their money back. Sometimes no one is at fault.

Where at all possible, start small, grind hard, adapt till you know what you are doing. Invest only when the business is there. If that means you lose the first business you could have had in a new area, no worries. Smart adaptive effort is by far the most important thing in starting a business.

Remember that its all about the people -your staff and the clients. Make lasting relationships with both and you will save yourself a lot of time and money. Try to offer them real value for a fair deal and business gets a lot easier. I have not advertised for almost 2 decades. I turn away 90+ percent of enquiries. I could be upscaling big time but I want an easy life away from big state's regulation. I got to be able to have one because I put delivering value at the heart of what I did. Do that and the customer will return.