@yinandyang I have a small company that does a trade in the outdoors -quite a physical one with some risk. Its not clever, its not innovative. The gear has changed and still evolves but people have been doing it since the stone age.

What I would observe to a young man wanting to start out is that what trade you do is more important than you might think if you want to run a business that scales. My trade is a poor fit actually. I probably picked it for less than perfect reasons -it grew naturally out of my hobbies, it was physically challenging and other men on a site respect you when you arrive and sort out something, particularly if its dangerous. These are poor reasons to start a business and my trade is actually hard to scale because it involves a lot of gear -and the consequences of messing up can be serious -so you need at least one man on a gang to be very experienced and sensible.

At the end of my road lives a man who is almost the same age as me. I chat to him when I meet him out running. At one point we had daughters the same age and same name in the same school. He is a landscape gardener. He has a large successful business and He is also booked up a year ahead by clients who will wait for his reputation. He can hire young men with no more skills than a strong back, give then cheap tools, put them in a second hand van and send them to do most of the work, while he visits sites, draws up plans and pays bills and one or two experienced men oversee things. He has been known to go abroad for months with his family.

Who is paid more per job and has more respect from men on sites -me. Who earns more and has an easier and more scalable business -him. All he started with was some hand tools and a bike as a jobbing gardener.

Look for something solid that deals with a need that will not be designed out by technology. Learn to do it, get clients and scale up. Check its low regulation and cheap to scale up. Plumbers are a good example -van and simple tools are all you need to scale. Heating engineers are OK but more regulation makes it harder to scale, even if it pays more per job. Tax company -risky choice because of uber and driverless cars.