But what about if you do not need to earn a living? What if you've saved your money and are now retired, whether at the conventional age or long before it? Why would you start a business?
A business is nothing more than an entity that is paid for providing a good or a service. This blog is a VERY small business. In return for content like this you provide eyeballs for the ads on this blog, and in return Adsense pays me. I also get paid for sponsored posts like this one. Still, for me, this blog is something I write because I enjoy it, not because I plan to get rich from it (not that I'd mind someone paying me really big bucks for space on this blog).
Many people enjoy doing things or making things that other people need or want, and a small business that does not need to make a lot of money may be just the retirement hobby for you. The trick is to keep your expenses commensurate with your effort and goals.
If you enjoy crafting and like to sell your wares at two or three church/school craft fairs a year, with the goal of earning enough money to support your crafting hobby, you don't want to spend a lot of money up front on a system that allows you to take credit cards; however most people today expect to be able to pay with a credit or debit card. In fact, 66% of face-to-face transactions today are made via debit or credit card, and customers, on average, spend 20% more when paying with a debit or credit card. Even the Girl Scouts take credit cards for cookies!
Merchant Account Solutions provides free equipment to its customers and charges fees depending on volume. They claim to have the lowest fees and if I had small part time business whose customers wanted to use credit cards, I'd find the free equipment offer pretty attractive. At least I'd know I wouldn't end up in the hole if I decided being in business wasn't for me.
Every Merchant Account Solutions customer has a dedicated account representative. Most hobby-type businesses don't work office hours and Merchant Account Services understands this and offers 24/7 support.
Different business settings call for different types of card reading terminals, and Merchant Account Solutions offers a variety of them, because the best credit card swiper for one business might not be the best for another.
If you are selling at craft fairs on the weekend, or stopping by customer's homes to walk their dogs, you need a wireless credit card reader.
Someone who is running a web-based store needs a more robust e-commerce solution.
Merchant Account Solutions even offers Quickbooks integration so that your credit and debit card transactions are automatically entered into Quickbooks.
While someone who walks two or three dogs a week may not need that feature, if the business expands and you hire your grandchildren to walk even more dogs, entering all those transactions by hand could get very tedious.
Have you every considered selling a good you enjoy making or a service you enjoy doing? What would you love to get paid to do?
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