When starting a small business, what should I think of?

The first thing to ask yourself is whether you need your head examined.  After you answer this question, you can now get more serious Let's start out with whether this is going to be a capital-intensive or labor intensive business.  In other words, are you going to manufacture widgets that will need substantial capital to get started or will you be a consultant where capital may not be the primary consideration but instead the source of where new clients will come from. You need a plan and the plan does not have to be perfect but what it does need is budgetary considerations, goals to be achieved adn a time frame for reaching these goals. Next, assuming you can afford it is some professional advisors. At the start of the business I think the most important advisors probably is the CPA who can help you decide whether the business should be an LLC, an S corporation or C corporation. Regardless, one of these should be selected in order to protect your private assets from claims of business creditors. Once the CPAs is in place, and don't be afraid to ask if they have experience in dealing with new business owners, your next step would be to retain a fee-only financial advisor to help put forth the future in the form of projections of cash flow and tax planning with the advisor working closely with the CPA. These services are not free but in my professional judgment and based on many years of experience without them, it may be difficult to succeed. On the assumption that you may be married, you may need the support of an understanding wife and possibly children as self-employment is not a five day week with eight hour days. Very often it begins with seven working days per week and long hours. One of the early considerations is the preparation of proposed budget and recognizing that it will never be perfect, it will serve as a guideline to measure actual performance against. Your question is incredibly broad and we could probably go on for paragraph after paragraph but hopefully this is enough to get you started. Except my best wishes and hopefully you have the financial resources or can obtain them to get into the business until profits can be generated. Good luck.