As part of a series of posts I was going to do about the vagaries of being without a job, I’ve been looking into what it takes to set up a small business here in the Bay Area. In fact, I started looking into that possibility for real more than a year ago, when the project-based research unit I worked for started laying off student workers and encouraging regular employees to consider other options as well. Some sources of information and training resources
I immediately enrolled in a short weekend course about going into small business, held at what was then my local adult school. Now that I live in Oakland, I have easy access to Cal State East Bay’s Small Business Development Center. It’s part of a Northern California network of such centers. (Cal State East Bay used to be called Cal State Hayward, in case you’re wondering.)

Now, I’m pretty cynical about these classes, and about the kind of help that volunteer folks–and even paid folks–at small business centers give you. That cynicism rests largely on the experience I had with this go-round first time around back in New Zealand, when the whole of a half-hour appointment with my “mentor” was spent sitting in her office as she gave a live radio interview about how useful it was for a person starting out in business to have a mentor.

One way of encouraging self-reliance
In the early ’20s, the NZ government gave unemployed people the option of taking their unemployment benefit tax-free if they used it to start a business. (”The dole” is funded entirely by taxpayers through the government there; employers aren’t expected to pay into an unemployment insurance fund.) The tax-free arrangement would last for six months, during which time you had to report monthly to your mentor. At the end of six months you either flew alone or you dropped to the ground like a stone.

It was an incredibly worthwhile experience, and my self-reliance made leaps and bounds. I wasn’t totally successful in the business I started for myself–public typing–but in the process learned some hard lessons about human nature and found some excellent clients, eventually ending up working full-time for one of them.

A reason for doing it
I’m really not the entrepreneurial type, but it strikes me that many people who are working in companies in highly paid jobs, and are as bored as hell, would benefit from the challenge of starting a small business. And it would be one way of mitigating the effects of both the recent local layoffs and the coming influx of folks from the Gulf Coast, who’ll be looking for work.

It’s tempting to think of that kind of immigration to California in terms of either the harrowing times of the Dustbowl era or the boomtimes of WWII, when the population of Richmond–one of the local centers for shipbuilding–jumped from 27,000 to 100,000.

But we are not in a boomtime now, and already you can sense the competition that will be forthcoming for low-paid jobs. A few days before Hurricane Katrina hit, WalMart opened a store in Oakland with a workforce of 400 chosen from more than 11,000 applicants.

Get started right now
If you’re thinking of perhaps freeing up that office chair you’re sitting on so somebody else can have a job, and at the same time creating a small business that might employ one or two people, then already you’re putting into motion a solution that will mean three or four people have the means of sustaining themselves and their families through employment. You totally deserve a medal. And whatever tax breaks local, state, and federal authorities are willing to give small businesses to help mitigate the enormous negative effects of Hurricane Katrina.

Want to do something right now? Buy, borrow, or liberate the NOLO publication, The Small Business Start-Up Kit for California. Preferably buy it, because NOLO is a small publishing company in West Berkeley, so it needs the sales! The front-cover blurb from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce calls it “The perfect one-stop publication for any group or individual that wants to start a business.”

Obviously, some sections of the book need constant updating to keep up with the local tax requirements and other changes, but you’ll find the latest information online at the NOLO website. Where you’ll also find very good free advice about going into business for yourself, and many of the other topics they publish books about.