No one ever said that starting a business was easy, right? Well, starting a business is actually the easy part. It's the keeping it going and growing part that is difficult.

I just read an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times titled "Start-up lessons learned the hard way." In this article, a group of entrepreneurs with a variety of different businesses offer advice on how to avoid the mistakes that they themselves made. And these entrepreneurs made plenty of mistakes -- some quite devastating. Consider the California-based baby planners whose big-time national debut on the Rachel Ray Show was preempted in Southern California due to live coverage of local wildfires. Or the jellyfish aquarium maker who failed to realize that he would need to find a source of live jellyfish for his customers to buy along with their fish tanks. Or the guy who took out a home equity loan to buy a restaurant -- right before the economy tanked and business at his establishment went down the tubes.

Rather than detail all the mistakes -- and solutions -- here, I suggest you read the article. Whenever you can learn important business lessons on someone else's dime, then the price is always right.