How can friends and family help you achieve financial freedom?

Statistically speaking, very few people have the courage to start their own business. This means that your friends and family will most likely not understand why you would go into business, when getting a job is so much easier.

This is a problem encountered by many first-time entrepreneurs, and it's easy to get angry sometimes and resent friends and relatives.

This is one of the reasons I created the BMW workshop (www.businessmodelworkout.blogspot.com), which helps people to rationalize their business model and test it. As a result, they can show friends and relatives their key numbers and, hopefully, get more support from them.

If you're lucky, you might have highly supportive relatives who encourage you and support you. However, they might not be able to help you business-wise, since they may not have the business training or experience.

This is okay. In fact, it may even be an opportunity for you to share your newly gained knowledge about business and entrepreneurship with them.

From my research and experience as a coach to first-time entrepreneurs, I'm beginning to believe that business knowledge will become increasingly valuable in the new economy. Whether a person chooses to make a living as an employee, a free agent or an entrepreneur, business knowledge will be an important success factor.

So by sharing your increasing business knowledge with friends and family, you not only enrich them intellectually and perhaps economically (if they decide one day to launch a business), but you also enable them to provide you with valuable feedback based on sound business knowledge. Everybody wins!