Random thoughts on owning a business

We watched a few episodes of ‘A new place in the sun - Where are they now’ while in the UK, resting on the couch after a day of walking on the Dales Way. I like this show as we too have a dream of having a place of our own at some point, somewhere more rural than where we live and have grown up in - and to have some sort of passive (as well as active) income from it.
We’ve done Workaway at a place that has a gite business, and later gone back to housesit for the owners while they were on holiday, thus managing the guests oursleves - and we got to see that it’s not so hard to be a good host if you put some good thinking behind it. There is a good amount of money needed to set up one such business, but nothing crazy if you start small enough; a pretty house with a spacious garden to have space for a small camping (or better yet, glamping) is definitely more affordable than a bigger house that has a gite annex, for instance, and maintanence costs would be lower too.

So anyway, what I wanted to mention in this post is that in the episodes we saw there were lots of people who went all-in in their project, with some hope but also some naivety - as they often spent all their savings and were thus on a super tight budget and desperate to make money through their new businesses. I understand that you can’t always make perfect choices and that, sometimes, you just need to take a leap of faith - but I can’t help thinking that proper planning always helps