After working for others over the last few years Peter Vitolo felt now was the time to put his own name on the marquee.
So a few weeks ago, he started Vitolo Landscape and Lawncare.
“It's a lot of work. You've got to put a lot of time in. But it's there. I mean, the business is there. You've just got to...I guess a little luck involved as well,” Vitolo said of his new venture.
According to numbers provided by the city of Palm Coast, 204 home-based businesses were started between January 1st and May 20th this year. Compare that to 192 over that same time period last year.
Inside the offices of the city's Business Assistance Center and Small Business Development Center, they specialize in helping these start-ups.
What Ray Peter, the man who runs the office sees is, “I think people are feeling confident in the uptick in the economy and therefore, they maybe have this idea that they always wanted to start a business, they always wanted to run their own business.”
But there's always a danger of being a one-and-done. Not even getting out of the first year of business without going under.
We spoke with one business owner who has a handyman service. He says this market is so saturated for that specialty that he's scrambling to take any job he can find.
Peter says you've got to do your homework before starting off on your own. It's work they do with a number of start-ups who ask for it.
“When you start your business, to start looking at the competitive marketplace, the target market, identify who your customers are,” he said.
Because most small business owners like Peter Vitolo have big dreams.
“Yeah, I want to create jobs and just get bigger and bigger and keep going,” he said.
And after all, aren't all businesses traced to someone who started as self-employed?
Between 2012 and 2013, 63,000 new self-employed jobs were created in Florida out of 270,000 nationwide, according to a U.S. Census report.