If you had $20,000.........

I'd say that largely depends on your skills and interests.

This is like a parent asking their kids "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

How the hell should I, or anyone else on this forum, know what you want to be. Perhaps you can open 200 lemonade stands and get school kids to work them. Or maybe you could start a for profit fire department that responds quicker. Or you could start a cult and make money off the donations. Or you could sit down and look at what you already know and find a way to monetize that.

Hint: the last idea is probably the best.

You will burn through that money very quickly.

Best way to start: Bootstrap. Create a minimum viable product - something you can sell from day one. It would be best to have a service you outsource so you can focus on selling.

Then, don't spend ANY money on your business except for the profits you make from selling. This will save you a lot of headache as you figure things out. It may seem like you should just invest the money and move forward but it is likely you will have to try several different things out as you make your way forward.

Use that 20k to pay your basic bills until you get your sales process worked out. The lean startup and bootstrapping is the way almost any business should start. Even the very wealthy and well-capitalized businesses start this way now. You invest just enough to put the very basics in place and use profits from sales to fund business growth.

This is the only really proven way to success. If you can't sell your simple initial product, investing 20k will not help you sell your complicated product. You will just lose that money.

Donations are tax exempt

Yes, start with what you know and have skills at.
Also, don't buy anything - like a new, faster computer because
you anticipate "needing" it to handle all the new business.
Keep going until the business is self funding.

Dan

What would I do with $20k disposable?

Set it aside for several months bills (preferably 12 months+) that I could depend on while growing my business, with the understanding the the 12 months allows me to screw up and learn as I go.

I would be focusing on local prospects, initiating contact either through cold calling over the phone, or cold calling in person, with the goal of asking for the appointment to go over your offerings.

I would lead with a product that has a fast turn-around, and a reasonable amount of profit to it, preferably one I can trustfully outsource, so that I can spend my time selling and making new clients.

I would fight to see 12 to 15 people a week -- to do 30 cold knocks a day and 100 to 125 prospecting calls a day -- until I have a week or two booked in advanced.

Only after I closed 100 to 200 clients, or only after I sold the website, would I offer upsells (SEO, etc.), to boost profit.

However, my recommendation is to lead STRONG with something like web design, which is quick to turn, requires little to no management, and is fairly profitable, and is mass-marketable, so as to make it EASY to make them a customer, then worry about up-selling them on residuals later, AFTER they are customers.

This is basically a strategy many life insurance agents are taught. Lead with one product that's mass marketable -- like term life insurance -- to make it quick, easy, and profitable to turn the prospect into a customer. Then, on yearly reviews, begin to offer alternative life insurance products (whole life insurance, group life insurance, annuities, etc.) so as to get wide and deep into the account.

Hire a mentor who's already doing what you want to do. it might cost 5-25k to hire a good mentor but it's well worth it. that's my secret to success. =)

My advice first: spend the next year educating and learning about all kinds of business opportunities. Let's start with a true story...

There is a man in Missouri, several years ago he ran a small appliance store and was looking for ways to make more money. He spent a lot of his spare time looking for new products, mostly from China, to import to his store.

He found a small specialty product and started to test it out. He sold a few, got good feedback and ordered more. He knew that he was LIMITED by his store, he could only sell so many.

But after some time and a few orders, this Chinese company offered him the exclusive rights to import this, because they had many products and this was one they couldn't sell but all the tooling and dies had been set up but not turning out much product.

Mr. Missouri went searching for a distributor. Few were interested because they didn't think they could sell enough to make it worth their while. ONE company wanted to test it and they offered him a contract, but they would only pay him a small percentage of the sale, a ROYALTY, of about 2.5% which seemed not even worth his time.

He agreed to get some testing done...at their expense they used a multi-channel approach to find customers. They came back to the man and wanted an exclusive distribution contract, instead of a buy-out offer for HIS exclusive distributor agreement.

The only thing this man had, was a contract.

Between 2007 and today over 5 million units have been sold at about a 250 dollar average per unit. His contract, at a measly 2.5% ROYALTY, gave him about 6.25 per unit X 5M puts his take at 31 million dollars so far, and he's still going strong.

So consider this. He spent way less than 20,000 to ACQUIRE the rights to distribute this product. He then had a marketing company do all the work.

He doesn't do anything with the product other than check that his monthly ROYALTY PAYMENT is accurate. NO selling, NO marketing, ONLY ONE "customer".

This is the power of having a TOLL POSITION on a good selling product.

As you consider what you want to do with your 20k next year, why not spend some time on educating yourself on all the investment opportunities that exist, and find something which return your highest rate for the minimum amount of time YOU want to spend?

This real life example is just one of thousands of TOLL deals going on everyday, I doubt if you can sell websites or do anything IM which can match the potential of learning about and gaining a TOLL position.

Consider this week, we learned of a 17 year old APP creator who had Yahoo give him 30 MILLION dollars and a job, for his CREATION because he owned it...you can CREATE, or ACQUIRE, as you see from these two examples and I can't think of any field which can produce such incredible ROI, that beats CONTROL of a product or service. Set up a TOLL booth, and in two years, you can ask how you can invest your 2 million dollars (my answer will remain the same).

Just some food for thought.

gjabiz

What would I do with $20k? Buy a Lotus Esprit or C4 Corvette ZR1.

What should you do with $20k? Whatever you want because $20k isn't going to make your business and if your are doing many of the things guys here offer to their clients (normal online marketing for offline businesses) I think it might just break your business.

There is something to be said for bootstrapping. When every bit of profit matters not on some random P&L but on rather you can pay your bills that month.

That said here are some things I noticed based on what you said.

this time next year

Will it be coming in a lump sum? Or will that be saved evenly? If evenly why wait till next year?

desperately want to leave my job

Ok so why haven't you left your job? Twice in my life I left a job without another lined up and I'm not sure if it is clear from my posting but my idea of saving money is having a grand or two in the bank. I survived and likely you would too. If you truly hate your job you need to have a true plan for getting out of it. That may mean working a new business on the side to get going and make sure if you jump you will be ok. It may mean applying for other jobs. or it may even mean jumping ship and trusting in yourself and God to make it. I choose the last option twice.

I really want to start a business

That's great. Guess what you just started a business. Now on your next day off run to the county court house and register your DBA or better yet do business as some version of your name. Then open another bank account for your business and get out there selling.

month on month residual income

This makes me think you want to make a Muse. And if you don't get that you need to read the 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. Already read it? Read it again. The good news is you can create businesses that require relatively little work. Now the bad news.... It isn't easy or everyone would be doing it. But you got the first idea right by knowing you will need employees...

don't mind employing staff to get things moving quickly

Employees are great when it is time to scale the business. But unless you have systems and training in place all employees will do is give you a monthly expense. Do it yourself first unless you suck at it in which case hire someone who is better than you to do it.

I have a few ideas myself

Great now all you need is a healthy dose of action. Unless you don't trust yourself and your ideas. And if that is the case you need to find another job.

I am 100% honest when I tell you that the $20k won't make a difference. The only thing is might do is pay your bills for X number of months.

Unless you have an idea which requires money that money will make little difference besides allowing you to free time you would normally be working to make money for bills.

But if you are truly working your business and truly need to make money don't you believe you could next week? All the $20k does is gives you an obstacle to success.

That morning when you don't feel like getting up to go prospect you will think..... I have $20k in the bank I don't need to push myself.

That day when it starts raining you will think about that $20k and decide you are ok going home for the day. I mean no one is going to buy on a rainy day right?

That day when the big match is on you will think about the $20k and decide to hang out at the pub vs. working that day.

And finally when you run out of that $20k you will look back and decide that after $20k and X number of months that your ideas were not very good so you better go get another job.

You know why I can say this? Because I have been there myself. Money and your relative success will hold you back far more than just going out there with no safety net. You will either succeed or fail but it will be 100% on you and you won't be able to make excuses.

So now all you have to decide is what you want to do tomorrow. Will tomorrow be a repeat of today or will you take the actions you know you must to build the kind of success you want vs. the relative success you have now.

I would invest them to build the idea i already have and don`t have the money to finance(a website)! Then become millionaire!

Eliminate all of your "extra" bills over the next year then use the $20,000 to pay your bills.

I can tell you from personal experience.. You can't buy success. It takes work.

Like other people said, I'd put it towards bills. Precisely speaking 80%.

The other 20% I would use to build an automated online sales funnel, for a local service. Thats $4,000. You can get a lot done with $4,000 if you know what you're doing. I've gotten a lot accomplished with half that amount.

In fact, the 80/20 rule is a rule I still follow today.
20% of all my revenue goes right back into my biz.

This was the single most effective piece of advice I ever applied in my life, and it came out of the mouth of Jim Rohn. Ironically enough, it actually works better when you're broke, because you're less careless with your money (I should really speak for myself here lol).

Although I don't see a problem with cold calling or cold knocking, you'll wind up with a high maintenance biz. I would just rather prefer to build a low maintenance marketing funnel. I see companies who do nothing but cold calling all day long. You walk in there and its disorienting. 10 people on the phone, a boss screaming at them full metal jacket style. Almost like, "its 2013... and people are still using phones to sell stuff?"

Trust me, I'm not trying to bash cold calling. I know it can be profitable when done right. But so can anything else. So why pick the most stressful way to be profitable? Thats just my stance.