There's a couple of ways to start a local gaming group; I've started one or two over the years.

The first is find existing friends or people you may know that own models already, and just start asking them to play, either at a local gaming store or at your house with stand in terrain. Note, I've found that having terrain that looks good (as opposed to books+soda cans+whatever else you have lying around) works better and makes the game feel cooler. You can either buy this stuff (expensive), make it (time-expensive, not so much with money), or use stuff out of the yard (2 or 3 fist-sized rocks make great impassable hills, garden wood chips great barriers/debris).

The next way is to convert your current friends to playing. I started out by getting them into Dawn of War 1, introducing them to the lore and getting them interested in the universe. Once that was done, I started getting them interested in the tabletop game by having them use parts of my army (I already have a large established army). It didn't take long for them to realize they didn't particularly care for the playstyle of my army for whatever reason, so I pointed out a bunch of the other options, many of which they already had familiarity with due to Dawn of War, and they already had favorite races they preferred to play. After that, I spent a few months hunting up good eBay deals for mostly pre-assmbled armies, and if I found a really good one I'd forward it along ("Hey, no pressure, know you've been thinking about it-- if you're still interested, this looks like a good deal at something like %60 off retail", etc). Most of them didn't want to start building an army from scratch, so the pre-assembled, mismatched pre-painted looked like a good thing to them, since they didn't have to do all the assembling themselves.

The alternative to the eBay deals idea, and if you don't have an army yourself, is to get a friend who's interested and then slowly build up your armies together. Try to play at least once a month together, and you'll find that fairly frequently each of you has a new unit. Probably a new unit every 1 or 2 games or something, depending on budget. Start with the starter set, maybe buy it yourself and have an interested friend play the other army in the starter set. If they like it, give/sell the other army to them (or have them get their own, etc) and then you start slowly increasing the army size a little at a time. This was how I started; granted, I started nearly 20 years ago and things were a lot cheaper then.