New business owner-operators often have one or both of these:

Help I don't have ANY information about how to start a business! and

Help!  I am overwhelmed with information about starting a business! 

That's where a Chamber of Commerce comes in to give people a place to ask questions face-to-face.

IF YOU HAVE NO INFO AT ALL - start here

If you have too much info and need to chunk down - start here

1) Get trained in “heart selling.”  Move out of everything you learned about "hard selling" and moving to "heart selling."  This is no gimmick. This is the direction the entire biz field needs to move to reign in extreme capitalism and get to a sustainable win-win business climate and planet. 

RejuvenateYourPractice.com was designed for healers with a gift for the heart.  They offer a free weekend training.  This gives you some training in heart selling, a crucial threshold you must cross to be successful as a sole proprietor practitioner. 

The free two-day training leads to optional for-pay trainings in all aspects of building out your expertise and leveraging it into greater profit. 

SellingByGiving.net offers a free two CD training course that parallels Rejuvenate but does not overlap.  Highly recommended too.

2) Another FUN way is Play To Win, the free three day training offered by Frontier Trainings.  This a much more hard-edge business school approach.  See it here:

http://www.frontiertrainings.com/playtowin/registration.php#1

3) You can always go to a public or college library and find a helpful reference librarian to get you started. 

4)  http://.smallbusiness.yahoo.com:  small businesswomen

http://seedsforsuccess.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/index.php

5)  Most conventional Chambers of Commerce sites have links to the Small Business Administration (http://www.sba.gov/)  and related orgs.  None of the Holistic Chambers have such links yet.  If they did this would only duplicate info you can find on sites like the Fresno Chamber of Commerce list of useful websites:

http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~chamber/hotspots/leglink.html

6)  IRS:  Starting a Business (mostly not about taxes)

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99336,00.html

7)  http://www.morebusiness.com/startup

8)  http://www.inc.com/resources/startup/

Starting a Business Checklist:

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99336,00.html

9)  List of local LA-San Diego small biz online supports:

www.sdge.com/business/orangecounty.pdf

10)  What Color Is Your Parachute?  Classic book on narrowing down what you wish to do with your life.

11)  Maybe a little career counseling would be helpful?  MBTI take your free four question test here:

http://www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory.html

Once you have your provisional four-letter code for your personality preferences, put it into Google along with the word "careers."  This will help you cross-reference your personality preferences with which careers are natural for your preferences.  Remember you CAN change your personality preferences and your four letter code!  This is the fastest access to high quality career counseling tools at this time.  See Benziger.org if you want the Prius of this field. Bruce has a Masters in school counseling with an emphasis on career counseling.  Feel free to ask him questions if you get stuck.

If you have TOO MUCH info

This business problem can be solved two ways, either by chunking down your question, getting more precise, and searching for info on it. This is the OUTER way.

The second way in an INNER way to solve biz problems. 

Big Help for Small Businesses, Our favorite offerings for e-commerce businesses are easy enough for novices and cheap enough for even the smallest small-business owner

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/sep2006/sb20060905_359906.htm

If you have too much info and need to chunk down

http://www.morebusiness.com/startup

Bruce Dickson  ~  ToolsThatHeal.com  *  HealingCoach.org  *  SelfHealing101.net