My wife and I got married young. I drove to Beaumont,Texas with her by my side. We were dreadfully in love. Life was fantastic. She was lovely. I was a young good looking kid.

We attended Southeastern Louisiana University together. We had plans. I had my sights on teaching History or becoming a lawyer. She wanted to be a school teacher.

We studied together. We made high marks on our exams. We wanted spending money so we decide to build a fruit stand.

The only thing we had was gasoline in my mom's car. We traveled the back roads on country roads. We gathered palmetto leaves near ditches, cut them down and stacked them up in a station wagon.

When we finally gathered three car loads of the exotic looking hard fan like plants we began building a hut. We used old hog wire that was lying around in the yard.

We gathered limbs , branches, natural tree poles by cutting down small trees in the woods. That was for the frame and stuff. For the roof I found some very old tin sheets from a torn down shed.

Our place of business looked like a hut that was unique. It looked like a natives hut sort of from Hawaii.

I was good at painting free hand. I painted every piece of wood I could find.

We sold fruit in the beginning, and then made hand made candles. We sold watermelons, and artificial flower arrangements.

We made money. While we attended college we traveled to the New Orleans French market and haggled over prices with the old veteran marketers on the streets.

We bought our cases of apples, pears, bananas, grapes, all kinds of great an delicious fruit.

It was for all to see. I painted pictures of fruit everywhere. Tourists took pictures of my art. We had spending money while at college.

If you want to have a business when your young and without much money, then remember that a business is mostly advertisement.

You have to have supply and demand. You have to have the ambition to want to make money.

My suggestion for a beginner is to paint a sign. Look for a piece of wood or a board. It does not have to be beautiful. Find a cheap art brush, the cheaper the better. Your intention will be to sell a item. Do you have a item you do not need that you never use. Sell it. Pick up some money for it.

Do you have a item in your mind that you can make for very little money that someone else might need or can use ? You would be surprised what people might buy.

For a beginner I would not suggest selling a perishable item unless you have a definite market for the product.

Do not sell the item for nothing. Sell it for what it is worth. If you sell it for the price you desire you will be happy for making your first sale.

Have a few regular hours you can devote to talking to customers.

Remember that a business is nothing without products ,or good advertisement.

Demand is important. Is it something someone needs?

Have fun in the beginning. Do not invest much money in the beginning. Never mortgage your home no matter how great you feel about a business investment.

Be careful about buying into a franchise. My brother-in-law just lost eighty thousand dollars and a sister-in-law forty thousand.

They took the word of a shrewd foreign businessman with a pizza franchise. If they would have spoken to my wife Jo Ann or I , they would not have lost a penny.

They could have purchased their own building, or built it themselves. Start small. Get the feel of the business. They did not come to us for advice. They lost their savings. That saddened me.

Jo Ann an I are relatively wise at starting a business with nothing. We had two businesses. They lasted almost forty years.

A business is advertisement. Do not mortgage your home for a business. Absolutely do not mortgage your home for a business because business is a gambling venture always.

Our businesses did not grow very well. We had to use too much money to drive our crippled child to therapies. A lot of gasoline station owners received many of our twenty dollar bills almost every day for thirteen years.

It takes a lot of money to raise a crippled disabled child. Unfortunately we had to stop attending the university to take care of our crippled child. This is how life is sometimes.

No complaints. God helped us make a lot of sales. We had a lot of customers in life. In our spare time I paid for home education for my wife. She took courses at home and took care of the baby while I worked a hundred miles away. She learned Bookkeeping and Accounting and tax preparation in home study courses.

She did tax work for clients while I worked out of town in far away jobs.

Gas stations received a lot of money from us. They received three or four hundred dollars a month from me, and about two hundred dollars a month from my wife that took our baby long distances away from home for therapy.

I learned how to make items from plywood and scraps and string. I gathered empty wine and whisky bottles from the back of bar rooms. I learned how to cut glass. Jo Ann and mom would put flowers in glass bottles. They would use clay and artificial green grass or real moss from oak trees. They decorated bottles with ribbons.

My job was to cut the bottles open carefully with a glass cutter.I used a line cutting device, a candle, and a bucket of water.

We sold ribbons, hanging flower arrangements, fruit, vegetables, home made sand candles and ice candles scented or non scented.

We made everything under the sun. If we saw a item we liked, we took it apart to see what made it tick. If we could make it ourselves we did.

I repeat again, advertisement is your business. Put a sign out by the side of the road. Leave it there long enough. Someone will stop to ask you about the item. Put your phone number on the sign if it is alright for customers to call you. Get a answer machine so you want miss calls, or so you can call someone back if necessary.

We did O.K. in our small businesses. We never lost any big money on business thank God for that. Our brother-in-law an sister-in-law lost thousands of dollars trusting the words of a shrewd businessman from another country. That should have raised a red flag. Anyone can create a bogus bunch of books to show you a profit on a business.

If they would have listened to us they would have had their pizza businesses they wanted. If the business would not have been successful they could have sold what they could have created themselves an lost nothing.

Anytime something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

God Bless You.