34+ Business Ideas For People With Disabilities You Can Start Today [2021]

Ten years ago, my husband and I were working in an office set-up. Due to a mix of struggles experienced, my husband and I decided to quit our job and transition into freelancing. The transition phase was difficult since we didn't have the facilities needed like a computer and internet connection. We worked in an internet cafe for the first month of our freelancing career until we bought our personal computer and had our internet connection.

We had experience downtime in our new career at first, but we grow and learn from our mistakes as we go along. Freelancing changed the quality of our lives, our family, and so with our marriage. We embrace these benefits to realize that if mothers can work at home, they can earn while taking care of their family.

Another thing is the overseas workers. They have been working far from their family to make a living. Those who are exhausted and feel unproductive because of many circumstances like long hours of commute eat a lot of their time, endangering their work-life balance. These are a few of our realizations why we come up with putting Filipino Virtual Assistance. Because we know how difficult it is to work far from our family, we want to empower Filipino families, one freelancer at a time. We want to provide our graduates an avenue to earn dollars at their homes' comfort, without the hassle of traffic, toxicity of the environment, and an excellent opportunity for those who never got the chance to go to College.

After working for over two decades combined, we realized that corporate life wasn’t what we wanted or valued. So much that we both turned down multiple job offers—I turned down an opportunity to join Amazon.

So, in 2017 Sara and I both decided to quit our jobs and take this opportunity to travel the world. We ended up backpacking throughout Southeast Asia, and it was such an incredible experience.

Here’s us below in Indonesia and in Vietnam trekking:

I began my business career with the family in-store sampling business, C.A. Courtesy, in the 1990s, while at the same time attending college at Johnson and Wales University, where I pursued a degree in Web Management & Internet Commerce.

I’ve always had a knack for marketing and technology, and when I left C.A. Courtesy, I was the Vice President of Marketing and Technology.

People don’t remember what you say as much as they remember how they felt when you said it.

I worked a desk job out of college and hated it, so I began tending bar nights. As chance would have it, one of the places I worked had live entertainment--a Spanish guitar duo. I loved the atmosphere they created, and, being a guitarist myself, would sometimes sit in when things were slow behind the bar. One month, the normal musicians went on vacation to Spain, and the backup band had some problems. I went up on stage and helped them out, and just kept playing!

Whenever I play a gig, I view it as an opportunity to get more gigs.

Me becoming a musician was fairly random. I had been playing since I was young, but it never had occurred to me to do it as a living. But I enjoyed it, and people wanted to hire me. After a time, it made sense to pursue this path.

I have 15 years of professional experience across Investment Banking, Tech Consulting, and Entrepreneurship and have studied in 3 continents in Asia, North America, and Europe from schools like the University of Michigan, Indian School of Business, and the London School of Economics.

I have been an entrepreneur 3 times now and founded my first company at the age of 19 to sell paint jobs to homeowners in Detroit while studying full-time at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. This was my first experience as an entrepreneur and got me hooked to the hustle required to get stuff done. I followed it up with a stint in Investment Banking, which taught me the meaning of perseverance and quality testing when I worked 100+ hours a week on multi-billion dollar Financing and M&A deals.

I came across the idea of starting SkillSoniq when I was working with outsourced talent on a tech project a few years ago, where I was sitting in the United States and working with contractors in the Philippines. That experience was extremely excruciating, as I worked at odd hours to keep up with the time zone differences, had difficulty communicating with the contractors and there was a lot of concern around IP security and trust. That experience put me in major depression and when I started looking for better alternatives to hire talent in the US quickly and at affordable rates, I found that the recruiting space in the US was broken.

One and a half years after starting my studies in business administration I came into touch with entrepreneurship and I immediately knew that I wanted to dig deeper into how to build your own business and be your own boss.

So I started reading books, especially biographies, of successful entrepreneurs.

Pretty soon I found out there’s one major component all of them have in common: They all talk about their personal growth and how they had to improve themselves so that their businesses could grow.

This immediately triggered me and I started digging deeper into the topic of personal growth.

I have always been very musical and played piano, oboe, and sang throughout my childhood. I fell in love with music education as a freshman in high school and was very inspired to follow this as a career path due to my incredible choir director and voice teacher. I completed my Bachelors in K-12 Music Education with an emphasis on Vocal Performance from Elmhurst College in 2014 and taught private piano and voice lessons throughout my college career.

Although I always thought I wanted to teach in a public school setting, after being in the classroom for a little over a year, I knew it was not the right fit for me. I was making about $30,000/year and although I had great benefits and a pension, I knew that I could continue to be successful elsewhere. When I first began offering private lessons and was quickly able to gain 10 students with a waitlist of 20 more, I knew I was onto something. Clearly, there was and still is a need for in-home private lessons in our area.

Good intentions, honesty, and communication will take you further than anything.

I remember vividly when my idea of business consulting came to me. I was at a networking conference with other business owners and when I stood up to introduce myself to the group, I called myself a systems consultant.

Industries change. Times are constantly changing. Relationships, if built regularly, can last forever!

From that day forward, I created the perfect way to audit an operational system or create one, effectively and efficiently. My systems consultation service is still available to this day and I’ve helped business owners dial in theirs to allow them to grow and transform their teams.

I’m guilty of being a serial entrepreneur. I love building businesses and really wanted to find a way to share that passion with others. I actually started a very successful kid’s gym when I was still in college. Back then, I was definitely working harder rather than smarter.

There are too many franchise concepts that sell too many locations without the ability to support those locations.

After college, I wanted to continue being an entrepreneur and that was the root of Busch Global. Busch Global started as a franchise and a regional developer. We found a couple of brands that worked well and were able to grow those brands. Our success over the last decade really showcased the potential in franchising done the right way.

My background is in finance. I worked in investment banking for six years in New York. I loved the job, the people, and the hours. But as a service job I wanted to be making things not just helping others make things. This desire has led me to where I am today.

My brother and I have always loved to make fun of everything. Around 2014, we visited my mom’s house and she had this musical greeting card. We thought it was annoying. We asked each other, "Who wants to listen to this!?" Then Nick asked, “What if it didn’t stop?”

That was it. Nothing more. No market research.

Our product is a website. The process of designing and developing it was very similar to designing and developing any website or an information system. As both I and the other main founder were software developers, this part was pretty straightforward for us. However, we still did some things pretty right and some things pretty wrong.

The funny part about any SEO-based business is that you can’t really make decent planning. Do you plan to improve some parts of your website and grow? Well, good luck with that, almighty G can have completely different plans for you.

What we made right was a decision to create a system that models all the relations and information about online casinos as structured data. As an example: almost every online casino has a list of countries from which it doesn’t allow residents to play. To capture this information we have created a database table casino_restricted_country and fill it with 1 record for every casino and every country that is on its restricted list.

One day back in 2012, I happened to go to a local flea market. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and I'm not a flea market or garage sale regular.

I noticed these two old radios for $15 each. I had not been interested in old radios before, and I was not a collector or a retro guy. These particular radios were from 1950s, bright and colorful, oozing with retro pride, but in sad, neglected shape.

As far as my professional background, I have an electrical engineering degree but never worked on radios. My understanding of these things was only basic at best. I knew analog audio sounded better than digital from my guitar days.

I decided to dive into the beauty industry because as someone that has a felony record from years ago, I fell into a depression state. After all, no one would give me a job so, I turned to make-up. Makeup became my comfort zone. It made me feel beautiful after having down days.

No one back then would give me a chance, no one cared I had a college degree all they saw was that I had a felon, so I cope with my depression through makeup and skincare routines. I am overly obsessed with flawless makeup and flawless skin. Everyone has always told me that they have loved my makeup and how flawless my bare skin looked, that I should consider getting into the industry. Here we are 3 years later and now I am passionately involved with my brand.

Five years ago I was really lost and confused about what career path to pursue. I had graduated from college with a degree in Biology in hopes of becoming a doctor. I quickly found out that I didn’t want to spend my life working in an office or having to see as many patients as I could fit into my schedule to make back my medical school expenses. At the end of my senior year, I started to watch blogging really start to take off and was immediately interested—this was an entirely new career path we hadn’t see before and something about it made me want to learn more. I figured out how to use WordPress and made a free account to start something like a food blog. I published a few articles and just wrote about what I was eating and why I was so focused on eating nutritious foods over others.

After stumbling upon a writer’s Instagram profile with the bio, “Contributing Writer at EliteDaily”—I Googled, “How to be a contributing writer at EliteDaily” and sent in my application. They accepted me (to be fair, I think they were accepting everyone at this time) and I wrote a few articles for them. That was my first taste of the writing life, unpaid work that could get views if it struck the right chord with their audience. Those articles are still online today haha. But, because this was so new into the blogging world and I had absolutely no idea how to monetize or figure any of this out on my own, I didn’t take the opportunity too seriously. I assumed I’d need a “regular” job and soon stopped writing for EliteDaily.

After I graduated, I decided that I would take a break from applying to jobs I didn’t want and instead obligated myself to do something I loved every day with the hope of stumbling upon my passion and purpose. While it seems obvious now that I wanted to be a writer, at the time I was still pretty lost and confused. I didn’t know any successful internet writers and I wasn’t confident enough to ask people for help, guidance, or advice. But, a few weeks into obligating myself to do something that I loved every day, I started writing again.

In 2017, I started my business by accident… quite literally! I was in my second year at Capital University (Columbus, Ohio) and was looking to get a part-time job. One day in my spring semester, I found myself looking up “babysitting jobs in Columbus, OH”. In my short search, I came across “dog sitting jobs available - sign up now!” Curiously, I hadn’t known that dog sitting was “a thing” or rather, that there were professional dog-sitting companies out there that employed people. I signed up as a pet sitter on Rover.com that same day and in a matter of 10 months, found myself a technician suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.

Continue creating and documenting so that the business owner can pointedly begin to remove him/herself from being so directly involved. Herein lies the definition of what it means to be a true entrepreneur.

This is a phrase coined by one of my biggest inspirations in business, Michael Gerber- author of the E-Myth series. More to come on him later!