They didn’t tell me this in Start Your Own Business school.

Wait a sec, is there a Start Your Own Business school?

Sign me up!

It’s been 10 years of running and business and I feel like I’m winding things down. I probably feel that way because I am winding things down. I’m cleaning up, getting things organized … you know, stuff you should do when you’re starting your business, not closing it down. Oh well, better late than never!

My sister told me the story of how she was moving out of a house they owned, but they were going to rent it out. They redid the kitchen before they rented it which gave the renters a beautiful kitchen to enjoy. But my sister never got to enjoy that new kitchen. They did at the end what they should have done in the beginning.

Actually, there is something like a Start Your Own Business school, except that I just found it recently. It’s called Fizzle and it’s an online entrepreneur site with classes, workshops, forums, loads of great people and even real-life MeetUps to meet others in the same boat.

I wish I had something like this when I was starting out, but often it’s just that: you don’t know what you need early on. Maybe my sister didn’t have the money or the foresight or even the interest to redo the kitchen so she could enjoy it.

I’m still not sure about the best way to organize client files. But I’m very organized and know that file structure and file naming is very important and I’ve done an excellent job of that. But still, it’s 2015 and a Sunday night and I’m … zipping files and organizing them into Dropbox mostly so they’re only in the cloud and not restricted to a device. In fact, most are something of archives of old clients that are on no devices and reside only in the cloud.

Here’s a good tip for starting a business: pretend you’re going to sell it in a few months.

How would you sell it? What selling points (besides just your product or service) could you focus on? Do you have, ahem, a good file organization of client files? How about clients themselves? Where is there information stored?

OK, I swear I’ll think like this as I start my next business. I’ll get on that right as this one is fizzling down. Oh, that’s now. Oh goodie.