I don't know owt about Bushcraft schools (@Wayne has some great points above), but I do own and run my own small business in a particular technical niche. I set it up when I was made redundant several years ago when it was the fashion in my sector to make persons deemed "unproductive overheads" redundant. Basically if you were an older technical non-frontline person with deep knowledge/experience, you went.
When I finished with my employer, the following day I continued working with them as a specialist contractor. The redundancy payment and some ad-hoc work with them helped me during those first 2 critical years. After those first 2 years I was starting to do OK with a developing customer base, but then a year after that we had COVID and it was back to first base. I got square root of **** all from the govt, but thankfully had built my reserves, had no debts and had low outgoings (I'm a service business with no premises, I work on customer sites or from home) so I survived. Battered, skint and without debt- but I survived. I was one of the lucky ones.
It's taken another 3 years to rebuild and realign since then, and even tho I'm in a specialist technical niche, my market has changed considerably. A whole chunk of my business has.... gone.... and will never return. (On the bright side tho, most of the other people doing what I did were a few years older and retired permanently, so less competition).
The government bureaucracy increases every year for a small business and no matter how technically good you are, you also need to learn a bunch of other skills e.g. financial, marketing and the behemoth of govt requirements, the (various) tax(es) being top of the list.
Insurance premiums have gone up too since COVID and if I didn't already have good cover it would be much more difficult to get now. Opening a business bank account with a mainstream provider gets more difficult every year.
Once you get the customers, getting them to actually pay the full amount due in good time is another matter entirely (especially when you work business-to-business).
Qualifications, competence, maintaining CPD etc is another can of worms. Then there's marketing, social media presence etc.
To @Lime2023 :
There's MUCH more to running a business than having the interest and technical skills.
Sorry if that's cynical, but it's real life.
GC
Yep, ran my own technology business for 30 years - it was easy except for the problems with customers, staff, and suppliers