What You Need to Know about Home-Based Business

 

That’s a lot of home-based businesses! Take it from us: Owning your own home-based business may be the most rewarding experience of your entire life. And not just in a financial sense (although many home-based businesspeople find the financial rewards to be significant), but also rewarding in the sense of doing the work you love and having control over your own life. Of course, every great journey begins with the first step. In this chapter, we provide you with an overview of this book, taking a look at the basics of home-based business including getting started, managing your money, avoiding problems, and moving ahead. Finally, we’ll consider some of the good news and the bad about starting your own home-based business and knowing when it’s time to make the move.

 

 

Home-Based Business Defined

 

A home-based business is, not surprisingly, a business based in your home. Whether you do all the work in your home or on customers’ or third-party premises, whether you run a franchise, a direct-sales operation, or a business opportunity (described in the next section), if the centre of your operations is based in your home, it’s a home-based business.

 

 

The Basics of Home-Based Business

 

Each part of this book is dedicated to a specific aspect of the home-based business process. In the sections that follow, we take a peek at the topics to be covered within each of these parts.

 

What kind of business will it be?

 

Once you decide you’re going to start your own home-based business, you’re left with two questions: Exactly what kind of home-based business should you start,

 

What’s the best way to market your products or services?

 

There are two major types of home-based businesses: businesses you start from scratch and businesses you can buy. The latter category of home-based business is further split into three types: franchises, direct selling, and business opportunities. whether you like to create systems (or follow those of others) and how much structure you like. The advantage of a business you start from scratch is that it can be moulded to your preferences and to existing and emerging markets, and thus provides a boundless variety of possibilities. Businesses started from scratch account for the majority of viable, full-time businesses — in other words, they tend to be more successful over the long run than businesses you can buy.

 

(In their book Finding Your Perfect Work, Paul and Sarah provide an appendix with characteristics of over 1,500 self-employment careers and hundreds of examples in the book of unique businesses that people have carved out for themselves.) Each type of home business that you can buy, on the other hand, has its own spin. Here are examples of the three different types

 

Franchise

A franchise is an agreement in which one business grants another business the right to distribute its products or services. Some common home-based franchises include the following

 

-          Aussie Pet Mobile (mobile pet grooming)

-          Jani-King (commercial cleaning service)

-          Jazzercise (dance/exercise classes)

-          ServiceMaster Clean (cleaning service)

-          Snap-On Tools (professional tools and equipment)

 

Direct selling

Direct selling involves selling consumer products or services in a person-to-person manner, away from a fixed retail location. The two main types of direct-selling opportunities are

 

1-Single-level marketing: Making money by buying products from a parent company and then selling those products directly to customers

2- multi-level marketing: Making money through single-level marketing and by sponsoring new direct sellers Some common home-based direct-selling opportunities include the following

 

-          Shaklee (household cleaning products)

-          The Pampered Chef (kitchen tools)

-          Green Irene (green products and consulting)

-          Longaberger Company (baskets)

-           Mary Kay, Inc. (cosmetics)

-          Fuller Brush Company (household and personal-care products)

 

Business opportunity

 

A business opportunity is an idea, product, system, or service that someone develops and offers to sell to others to help them start their own, similar businesses. With a business opportunity, your customers and clients pay you directly when you deliver a product or service to them. (Another way to think of a business opportunity is that it’s any business concept you can buy from someone else that isn’t direct selling or franchising.) Here are several examples of business opportunities that you can easily run out of your home:

 

-          Astro Events of America (inflatable party rentals)

-          Debt Zero LLC (debt settlement)

-          Closet Maid (storage and organizational products)

-          Vend star (bulk-candy vending machines)

 

 

Good reasons to start a home-based business

 

When you start a home-based business, you may be leaving behind the relative comfort and security of a regular career or 9-to-5 job and venturing out on your own. Or you may be entering the world of work again after devoting many years of your life to raising a family. How far out you venture on your own depends on the kind of home-based business you get involved in.

For example, many franchises provide extensive support and training, and franchisees (the people buying the franchise opportunities — you, for example) are able to seek advice from experienced franchisees or from the franchisor (the party selling a franchise opportunity) when they need it. This support can be invaluable if you’re new to the world of home-based business. At the other end of the spectrum, some business opportunities offer little or no support whatsoever. If you’re a dealer in synthetic motor oil, for example, you may have trouble getting the huge, multinational conglomerate that manufactures the oil to return your calls, much less send you some product brochures. And you won’t find any training or extensive, hands-on support if you run into the inevitable snags, either. This wide variety of home-based opportunities brings us to the good news about starting and running your own home-based business:

 

You’re the boss. For many owners of home-based businesses, just being their own boss is reason enough to justify making the move out of the 9-to-5 work world.

 

You get all the benefits of your hard work. When you make a profit, it’s all yours. No one else is going to try to take it away from you (except, perhaps, the tax man — see Chapter 9).

 

 You have the flexibility to work when and where you want. Are you a night owl (like Peter, who wrote these words at 4:58 a.m.)? Perhaps your most productive times don’t coincide with the standard 9-to-5 work schedule that most regular businesses require their employees to adhere to. And you may find that because interruptions from co-workers are no longer an issue and the days of endless meetings are left far behind you’re much more productive working in your own workshop than in a regular office. With your own home-based business, you get to decide when and where you work.