THINKING OF STARTING A BUSINESS? CONSIDER BUYING ONE INSTEAD

Starting a business can be an enticing dream. It’s also notoriously difficult to come up with an original idea, find the right team and fund its growth.

If you want to work for yourself, there may be an easier way — buying an existing business. Think of it like renovating a house instead of building one from the ground up, says Mark Zweig, professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Arkansas Walton College of Business.

“I like the constraints of an existing business versus a clean sheet of paper,” Zweig says.

Here are four reasons to consider this path to entrepreneurship.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO START FROM SCRATCH

Founders need to find customers, develop relationships with vendors and hire employees. They may need to rent space and buy equipment. They also need to create processes, set up software tools, hire lawyers and accountants, and complete other relevant tasks.

Building that structure takes time and money. When you buy a business, at least some of those things are already in place.

“There’s a lot of intellectual capital when you buy a business,” says Randy Katz, founder of Synesis Advisors and past president of the California Association of Business Brokers. “The employees have seen pretty much any kind of problem that you might run into, which means that they probably are better at foreseeing problems and better (at) planning for problems.”

And perhaps most valuable of all: There may already be money coming in.