Losing a job, let alone being laid off after a 15 year career with the same company, is something that really gives one pause. I spent quite a bit of time contemplating my career options and wasn't sure what my next move should be. The only conclusion I came to is that I wanted to get out of retail management. Considering all of my options, I remembered how my dad always touted the advantages of having a business of your own. The quote that keep ringing through my head was, "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life". If you ever find yourself in a similar situation ask yourself this question "if you could do anything you wanted to do to make a living what would you do?" I had to go all the way back to my childhood to personally answer for that one, fortunately being unemployed give me plenty of time to think it through. I wanted to be an inventor and invent some simple little product that everyone would buy.

I had a prototype and knew that the concept worked really well... now what? It was such a simple idea that I knew I needed a patent or someone else could just build more faster and cheaper putting me out of business. So I started reading books starting with "Patent it Yourself" and "The Inventor's Bible". After I had a basic understanding of the process I started calling patent attorneys and asking questions, a lot of questions. I learned that the first step in the process is a patent search for pre-existing similar inventions and that there were various degrees of searches: basic, moderate and advanced, each one being more in depth than the one before and more expensive. Thanks to the internet you can get much of information for free, but eventually you will have to hire experts and that takes money.

I was out of work and had no source of income, but I had an idea for a product that I believed in. I went around cooking hotdogs and steaming buns with my little gadget for my friends and family asking them ,"what do you think?", "would you be willing to invest in exchange for a piece of the future profits?" Two of the first three people I spoke to offered to invest and pledged $6,000. Obviously I had their trust, now I had to work hard smart to make their investment pay off. Promised them that I wouldn't accept any of their money until I had completed the patent searches and had a professional business plan to give them.

One of my most passionate dreams is to pay my investors back with dividends equal to many times what they invested in my idea.