Hiring Yourself

My fall semester of Senior year at Clark was supposed to be spent entirely on courses for a minor in Entreprenuership and business courses. I've always wanted to be my own boss to some extent and I figured if it were to ever happen I should probably know how to write a business plan and navigate a startup. Unfortunately, that summer I took an internship on the campaign in NH and got sucked in for the entire semester and took the Fall off from school. I learned a lot but not about starting a business. 

Lately, this job hunting business has me looking at all my options, including going into business for myself. One thing that I've been reading about is passive income. Basically, work you do once that grows as an investment. One of these is writing a book. Costs nothing to write, and I have a lot of free time, so why not? They say that you should write what you know so I've begun doing some mind mapping for a book about volunteer recruiting, refining techniques, and building a self sustaining organization of volunteers for non-profits, small campaigns, and local committees. 

My opposition research has shown that there is a bit of a gap in this area of literature. There hasn't been a book written on volunteer recruiting since 2004. What this means is that there's a big opening for someone like myself to write about the techniques used on the various campaigns in 2007-2008. 

The various incarnations of this idea that I've been toying with for the past couple days has brought me to the conclusion that a website on this topic is both viable, but with back up tools such as a book/ebook, and seminars/workshops I could turn this into a real business or consulting firm. I'll probably be using this as a sounding board as I flesh out my ideas and move forward on this project. At the very least it is giving me a chance to expand my portfolio and develop some skills that I can bring to a job once I get hired if this doesn't fully pan out.