Do any aspies here own their own businesses?
auntblabby
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Joined: 12 Feb 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 114,729
Location: the island of defective toy santas
I've run my own business for the last 12 years, and earlier also spent my years at uni working as a freelancer in the software industry.
Yes that's true. Especially the face to face networking that is sometimes required can be a real challenge. I'm lucky, my wife handles all the bookkeeping and compliance.
Finding a good salesperson in one of the toughest aspects. I've had very negative experiences. Now my business is a partnership with another couple of colleagues, and we all share the sales workload. Each of us sells services related to our collective capacity and capabilities. This seems to work better than having an expensive mediocre sales person on board who does not deliver.
Absolutely. I collaborate remotely with my colleagues, and only need to visit customers perhaps 3 days a month. This work environment is ideal, much preferable to employment in a cubicle farm.
I'm working on a startup at the moment. We're not up and running yet, but investors are very interested.
I'd say the most important thing is to recognise where your strengths and weaknesses are, and put together the right team with the skills you need. Business is a team sport - very few make it on their own.
The other thing to remember is there's no single right way to go about it. Being an entrepreneur is about devising your own rule book.
It's not for everyone. Starting and running any business is all about overcoming obstacles, however big they seem. There's always another way, and in this respect, those with asperger's may actually have the advantage, since they see the world differently, and come up with different solutions to the problems.
The continuous struggle faced by aspies in daily life can even be seen as a kind of training. To be successful in business you need to consciously study your customers and learn what drives them, what their needs are, and then build a system that addresses those needs - not all that different to what aspies spend their lives doing just to get on in life.