Starting a business is always more expensive because you have no cashflow, no customers, no residual marketing, no name recognition, no products, no procedures, no scripts, no employees… And it costs a lot of time and money to get those things. Generally it’s a lot easier (particularly when you’re getting started) to fix existing businesses that have some of those things but with a little improvement can drastically increase profitability (and therefore value). Keep looking for business and telling everyone you’re looking to buy/run a business. Sometimes you can get ownership through sweat-equity partnerships when you’re starting out but read my blog on partnerships before you go down that path. Best of luck and I look forward to more comments (whether you agree or disagree)!

“Good deals on businesses in Belgium”: actually I’ve never seriously considered buying a business. I thought: why would I pay a boatload of money for a bakery with limited upside? No, then I’d rather start my own business from scratch. Then I read that you do it and recommend it [buying a business] and then I realized it could be a good idea and some of my assumptions (expensive as in a million bucks, no upside) were wrong. But I’m not at the point yet where I have found good deals. Something I recently learnt though is that family businesses across the board tend to be cheap here, because Belgians excel at writing off personal costs as company costs, which means a lower company profit in the books and the company will sell for less than it would have otherwise.

What kind of businesses are you finding good deals on in Belgium?

I beg to disagree, in part. But let me first congratulate you on your blogs. Some of them are really terrific, such as the one about the 2 types of employees (I do recognize myself ENTIRELY in one of them – guess which one!). I’m looking forward to more of your writing. Especially a look on your ventures, if you think you can afford to do that. Why? I’d love to learn from a guy with the same entrepreneurial interests (not to mention same age and education) who’s doing what I want to do one day (build a business).

So I said I disagreed. To some extent, yes. To me, the law of attraction makes sense in that it visualizations keep the fire in you alive and hence makes you focus (obsess), put in effort, see and grasp opportunities. It’s not hard too see how each of the successful people you mentioned might have applied that themselves. Likely they hadn’t heard about visualizations or the law of attractions, I just think it’s the natural thing to do whenever you have an ambitious goal. As for the UCLA experiment you mentioned: the outcome shouldn’t be a surprise if you agree with my interpretation of the law of attraction. Visualizing will lead, given enough time (which is not given here!) to a vivid desire to get over the hurdle, which will lead to action (analyzing and solving the problem). Which is exactly what the successful group did. No wonder they won. It’s late at night so I want to keep this short, but I hope my point has come across. Greetings from Belgium!