If you cannot go it alone, consider very carefully if you really need a partner.

My name is Jane Williams, and I'm the owner and editor of the La Habra Journal, which is a local community paper that two women and I started five years ago.

If I had a tip for someone starting his or her own business, the biggest thing would be to be flexible and be ready for any eventuality. I think every assumption that we began with had to fall by the wayside. We did begin with a business plan. We had postulated the number of advertisers we would need to finance it. We thought we knew who those advertisers were.

It actually turned out that we never got any of those advertisers. That meant we had to scramble very hard to find people to make up for what was missing from the original plan. The plan did tell us how much we needed to get in advertising. Unfortunately, we were wrong about who we could get.

We also started out as a partnership and very quickly discovered that that just didn't work. There was no even way to break up the work. I, as the one who was doing 70% of the work, came to resent those who were not working as hard, and eventually bought them out. That took more money, more time and an awful lot of tact because I could not afford, in this type of business, to make enemies of those people.

One suggestion I would certainly offer is, if you cannot go it alone, consider very carefully if you really need a partner. I think, from a woman's point of view, you're usually getting the partner just to have some support. Find a good friend, but don't take him or her into the business. Get the same support from a friend, not from a partner.