This is a question that I’ve been making myself lately, specially now, when I’m 2 months away from losing my job and getting my severance.
In Mexico, when a person is fired, without a justified cause, the worker has the right to get at least 3 months of salary + 20 days for each year fully worked. We call this compensation a severance.
I’ve been thinking lately, that maybe is time to use the money I get as severance to open a business and no longer work for company, and during this time I’ve been analyzing some potential businesses. When I see one that is interesting, the first question I make myself is: Is this a good business? And then I start analyzing the profitability, the demand, required capital, etc. with the purpose of finding out if it is a good business or not.
However, I think I hadn’t taken in consideration another question, which is: Am I the right guy for this business?. I guess this question is even more important than whether a business is good or not, and I guess I have some experience on the consequences of not analyzing this carefully.
Around 4 years ago, it occurred to me the idea of breeding Hamsters. I saw on the Entrepreneur magazine, that a guy of Mexico City was promoting a”franchise” to setup a Hamster breeding business. As I like pets very much, specially dogs and cats, I thought that a Hamster would be pretty much the same thing. Analyzing their nature a little bit, I realized that their pregnancy period lasts just a few weeks and that a mother can have up to 15 to 20 little hamsters at a time. I did the math and the growth was basically exponential, and I immediately saw the business potential, and I went over to Mexico city to buy around 200 hamsters, most of them females.
I found out very soon that I had jumped to a business without doing my “due diligence” first, and I paid this mistake at a very high cost. I never analyzed my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, in a few words, my SWOT analysis.
I live in Guadalajara, but the breeding business was in Ocotlan, that is around one and a half hour away from Guadalajara, so I had to hire a boy that could help me to breed the animals during the weekdays. This guy, just went to take a look at the hamsters every now and then and when I was working there on the weekends, time wasn’t enough to just fill in the bottles of water.
Due to this, the animals started to die, and I didn’t have enough time to sell the few hamsters that were able to survive. Besides, I realized that hamsters are not dogs or cats, and I started to hate them very soon.
Is breeding hamsters, a bad business? No, absolutely not. What happens, is that this business was not for me. Besides the fact that I realized that I didn’t like hamsters, I didn’t have the necessary time to run the business in the right way. Any business, if it is not managed properly and with the wrong people handling it, it is destined to failure.
So now, I have to be very careful, and I have to make a detailed analysis before investing my hard earned money, in order to make sure that the business is good and that I’m the right guy for it.





