What's the perfect business for you? You've listed your skills. You've outlined your interests. You've described your family's preferred lifestyle. You've come up with a business idea. Next, consider such questions as: Are there customers for my product or service? How do I know? How will I find them? Who are my competitors? What will I charge? How will I promote my product or service? Finding the answers to these questions is the challenging and sometimes tedious homework that will help you determine your chances for success, and whether you should look for another more marketable idea.
The following home based business guides will help you start and manage your own successful home business:
The first step in deciding whether to start a business is to ask yourself this important question: "Do I have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?"
Studying the characteristics of successful business owners will help you to tell whether your personality traits, experiences, and values are similar to those who have succeeded. And assessing your experience, skills, and life goals will also help you decide if you want to invest the energy, time, and resources that successful entrepreneurship requires.
Are You Ready, Willing, and Able?
Now that you have studied the characteristics of others who have succeeded in a home based business, survey your reasons for wanting a home-based business. Are you dissatisfied with your current job? What are your skills? What is your business experience, especially in the business you want to start? What are your life goals? What resources do you have that might help? Answering these questions will provide reality testing for ideas that can sound incredibly glamorous when chatting with friends or seductively attractive when you are irritated or bored by your present job.
Answer the questions and discuss your reactions with friends and family. Have you underestimated your abilities? Overestimated them? Sometimes an evaluation by a friend is more useful than a self-evaluation.
How does your family react to the idea of a home business? Will you expect them to help out? What changes would your business use of the house mean for them? Will you have to remodel to create a usable business space?
What resources are available to you? Will you start by keeping your job and "moonlighting" for a while? Do you have a small nest egg, inheritance, or retirement income to live on until you get the business going? Do you already own tools or machines that will help (for instance, a computer and programs for a secretarial business or professional cameras and a darkroom for a commercial photography business)? Are you able to go back to school for training if necessary? Have you built up a network of contacts and possible customers through your previous lines of work or will you be starting from scratch?
Answering these questions honestly and completely will help you assess not only your chances for success but also which type of home-based business to choose. For instance, if your past professional life and contacts are all in the educational, teaching, child-oriented school area, then you should have powerful reasons for leaving that and opening a mail-order seed business. Possibly a tutoring business or a tot exercise franchise would use more of your resources and networks. On the other hand, if your assessment of your life goals and preferences helps you realize that you are burned out from working with kids, then perhaps a business planning birthday parties could later be built into a general party planning and catering business. You would be using your old contacts to build a long-range business plan that focuses on a service business for adults.
How to Start a Home Based Business Video
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