There are plenty of people who have been able to start a career with nothing more than drive and a dream so I'll let them post how they did it however I'd wager that they are the minority and the hard situation is this is a cash intensive business. 

I would like to rent out the top floor and start my own business on the first floor. 

If your properties are in LLC I would talk to your bank about a business line of credit and see if the terms and interest rates are more favorable.

Creating a business account with ComEd and Peoples Gas and transferring the bill into our name was easy.

- Do you work with any specialty tax firms to help us small business owners get access to historic tax credits, energy efficiency tax credits, cost segregation and other specialty tax credits?

However I paid cash for both so had a little more room for error.I would say that the biggest 'pain point' in this business is this: If you want to make top dollar on an average place, you need to self-manage, clean yourself, and do your own repairs.

Try bender management and rentals Mr Bender been doing business for over 40 years give him a call and his rate is cheaper (414) 349-9108

Instead of just taking out the $100K + $30K of HELOC to pay for the $100K purchase price + rehab, I take an additional, let's say $20K from the HELOC and transfer it into the LLC business checking account and consider this my "Holding Reserves" in order to pay off the month interest - only HELOC payments until the house sells.

As other states are considering eliminating their business/corporate income tax to attract business, that requires shifting the tax base elsewhere which tends to make it more regressive. 

On another note, from experience, some lenders will do anything to get your business just to change the terms when they figure you're in too deep.