People often get into a particular type of business with the idea of pursuing a passion while earning a living. This is a good thing. Having passion for what you are doing can make it much easier to persevere through difficult times. It makes going to work every day a pleasure instead of a chore. No more Sunday evening stress about Monday morning because you love what you do.

Unfortunately, many people have a passion for the activity the business does and not the business itself. This is well illustrated in Michael E. Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. He writes of a woman named Sarah, who had a love of baking pies. She started a business called All About Pies. Before long she was completely run down and even had even started to hate baking pies. She didn’t have a proper system in place to deal with all aspects of the business and she was running herself ragged trying to keep up with everything.

If you think that you’ll start a business based on your hobby just so you can get paid to do what you love, you are misleading yourself. The “business” aspects of running a business have to be dealt with and because it’s a small business, you will be the one who will have to deal with them. You won’t be able to afford to delegate all of the “business stuff” to others. Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. You need to be in charge and make the strategic decisions that affect the direction of the business. You need to manage your business to make sure that your vision is implemented.

It will be up to you to wear all of these different hats to make sure that your business is successful. Gerber’s book does a good job of explaining how to do this. I recommend that you pick up a copy learn about what you are getting yourself into before you begin the business planning process.