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Forced onto Fastlane road by previous choices I made

Yankee427

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Hello everyone, I have been a member here for a while and read the Fastlane about 2 years ago at a previous job I had while at work. It was so bad I had time while at my job to read the book all day. Instead of waste time I figured I'd read the book and learn everything I can. I always thought that there was a better way.

I went onto a new job in tech support, pretty much the lowest form of corporate employment you can get answering tech support calls. It just forces the life out of you and everyday you are just in a prison. I started the job I was excited that I would be learning about the products and working for a manufacturing company. Then I realized that there is no hope for promotion and I was really frustrated and not doing my job well. At this time, I was getting no fulfillment from the job so looked to start a workout routine and put all my energy into that. After completing that which beforehand I never thought it was possible to stay in shape and just thought I would be fat forever.

After a few months of being miserable at work, my work was suffering and my boss called me into his office and threatened to fire me that day if I didnt turn it around. I vowed from that day forward that I would come in and be a stellar employee and in the meantime find a way out of my dump of a corporate gig.

I have a degree in Electrical Engineering with a Masters in Electrical Engineering. My plan here is where I want to see if I can get some feedback to see if this type of plan is worth it for a fastlane business. I am 27 now so still have time to build something luckily.

I want to start creating a E-commerce website. I have been reading while at work (answering support calls all day gives me perfect time to just read e-books all day on my other monitor) a lot about SEO and choosing the right product niches. I am going to volunteer to create for my father who has a construction business a website for him for free and go through the entire process of creating it from scratch and building local traffic to his site to get experience in building sites from scratch and doing marketing.

What I ultimately want to get into is a lead generation business in the aviation field. To build contacts I figure I need to get into Aviation to build up the website. This is a high barrier for entry since doing that requires money to gain the private pilots license. I was thinking of joining the Air National Guard in Florida since they have no income tax to work one weekend a month while trying to build the business and they will pay off my 50,000$ school loans so I can have a fresh slate when I start with little debt. I could then use the Guard to pay for 60% of any commercial licenses that I get as a pilot while using the guard to build pilot and aviation contacts in the industry. The guard will not pay for a private pilots license as they see this as just a hobby but anything above that they will pay 60% of the cost so you can build up your hours. I mentioned my degrees as I would use those to enter in as a Civil Engineer officer.

Does everyone think that this route would be worth taking to the fastlane or is it too much work to get there? I know paying for flight lessons and trying to become just a pilot is the lower spectrum of the slowlane. I'm using flight lessons to build contacts to build an aviation website eventually, not just become a pilot. I would then use the E-commerce site to pay for the flight lessons and try to grow this business.

What does everyone think of this long winded plan? I see that there are sites in the field that I am looking at and they seem to be growing steadily over the years.
 
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100k

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Ecommerce site selling plane parts or what?

To who? Small plane owners? Big aviation companies?

Is there an unmet demand/need in that niche?
 

Yankee427

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Sorry I should have clarified on this. The E-commerce site would probably not be in Aviation at all. I'm in the very early stages of finding the need and product. It would probably be very tough for me to sell any plane parts or something like that as the industry is probably regulated way too much for easy entry and probably too much insurance and risk I'd have to take on.

The moment when I knew there is money to be made online if you think outside of the box, there was a retailer of audio, video receivers who would only ship them to the USA. I bought receivers from him directly as a test and put it on ebay in the same page as him but allowed international shipping. He was selling for less than me and free shipping. I sold one to Russia and after the shipping cost, which he paid for, I had a $150 profit for doing nothing. I know the profit margins in this field are not that great, but as a test it was a very eye opening experience. I ended up doing a few more, I made some money, lost some money, but it was a great experience in selling and profit margins.
 

MJ DeMarco

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Seems quite common around here ... a long intro and a detailed background story punctuated by glorious plans of a Fastlane, amounting to a wall of text, and yet, no mention of NEED, DEMAND, or SOLUTIONS.

What does everyone think of this long winded plan?

I think you should rethink your plan.

Welcome to the forum and thanks for the intro. :)
 
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Yankee427

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MJ, my ultimate goal is a website lead generation site similar to how you started up the limo business. I see a certain need in the aviation field that would connect buyers and sellers. I see a need where the aviation industry is a very fractured offline run industry and I want to bring this segment of the market fully online. This would have nothing to do with the airlines but other distinct areas of the aviation sector. The competition I've researched is low, so I have to do some research on that next to figure out if the sector is not filled because the barrier of entry is too high to compete or if the margins are not great. That is what I am in the process of doing now. I know the one site which would be the main competitor has on their board a former executive of lastminute.com, so they felt this could be so big they left the well established site to join them.

My E-commerce business I would focus on fully to make money to get by to lead up to this aviation business. Without a pilots license or any knowledge of aviation sector currently I would have to build the knowledge, and there is no way I could build up aviation knowledge besides flying. The founder of the site that would be my main competition left as a netjets pilot to start a company and had 10 years of air force flying before that. I could not compete with that knowledge unless I would be flying to start.

I'm interested in joining air national guard to build up self discipline so I can go full steam ahead and only have to work one day a month and gain all the free contacts in the aviation industry.

Since you know this area so well from the limousine business, would you mind if I run my full idea by you and send you a message on it? I probably should join the INSIDERS area of the forum so I can fully post my idea and let others see it without risking it leaving the forum from a search engine.
 

The Autobahn

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Vance

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If you absolutely must get your pilot's ratings then if I were you I'd get a job at FedEx Express as soon as you can, even if it's as a Part Time handler. I worked there as a courier back in the early 2000's and they reimbursed me for my instrument rating and part of my commercial license through their tuition reimbursement benefit. Now, I'm not certain they still offer this (and you must train under part 141), but it's absolutely worth looking into as they are the only company in existence, including other airlines, that will do this. Ironically they reimburse because it's industry related, however you actually have to quit the company for several years while you build up hours to ever even be remotely considered for a position with them, which as we all know is NOT the goal for folks on this forum.

I was a young man back then, and now at 42 I "finally" feel like I"m on to something and working towards financial freedom but I'm still battling away as cash flow is always an issue. Another two years and I should be over the hump.

Where I'm going with that is, as MJ said I'd rethink your plan. Thankfully I had the smarts to be anti-job/anti-corporation back then, but if I had this book at your age I'd be typing this from Fiji.

Best wishes.
 
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Felix II

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Just out of curiosity, why work such menial jobs with an MS in EE? You know that is worth over 6 figures with a little experience, right?

Granted, I know a job is not what you want, but it is much easier to save to start a business when you are making good money.
 

Yankee427

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Thanks everyone for the replies. I posted in the INSIDERS forum my full idea of the business if anyone wants to see that. MJ I wanted to make sure to show you that I do have a need that I want to fill and wasn't just trying to talk about a grandiose plan that was not need based.

Something to add about financing the business. When I worked for a small software development company, one of our CEO's was a multi millionaire and we still stay in contact with him. He enjoys investing in new technology companies so I am thinking of trying to ask him for seed money when the time comes.

Vance, thanks for the idea. I am weighing the risks of joining the Air National Guard and the only negative I see now is that I work one weekend a month for 6 years and could get deployed whenever they want me to. Obama is lessening the troops overseas and lessening the military. I gain leadership experience part time in the Guard while using their tuition reimbursement program to gain my commercial license and instrument rating and everything like that. They will pay off all my school loans and pay 60% of all my flight lesson fees with little risk on my part outside of one weekend a month where I make $500 in that weekend as an officer which can pay for the utility bill while I grow the business.

Felix II, thats how I ended up in my predicament. I was in the Coop program in college and worked in IT because I started as a Computer Science major. I moved to Electrical Engineering too late in my college years to get an internship in time. All jobs pretty much require you to have an internship in engineering before they will take you on as a risk of an employee. No past experience is pretty much a red flag to the engineering companies to not take you on.

With my masters degree, it also makes me less desirable for them. They want to take on and train entry level employees at a lower salary. With a masters degree they don't even want to talk to me in an entry level salary so they just move on to someone else they can hire with experience at a lesser pricepoint than me. I doubt most people just kind of fell into their Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering because they were paying for college anyways and didn't need to pay extra for tuition so just kind of added a Masters degree to the college path because I ran out of undergraduate courses to take. With the civil engineers program in the Air National Guard I can gain a Professional Engineers license to work in a high paying Engineering role to fund my startup if I wanted to also as this would gain the proper experience for this type of work, not that I would want to be stuck to a desk all day as an engineer.
 

Yankee427

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Alright, I have an E-Commerce niche that I found. Talking to suppliers to setup my wholesale accounts once I have my business incorporated and have a tax id.

Many of my suppliers are going to be in Canada and I found one is in the UK and I'm in the USA. Does anyone have experience in setting these up? Are there any extra steps I need to take when setting up the business to be registered to import and export goods? I think I'll probably be mainly shipping to the USA and Canada, but possibly over to Europe as well.
 
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