Start Up a Small Business Working from Home - Step 2

You have mission, vision and a focus for starting a small business from your home. Time to open the doors, right? Not quite yet. Now that you know exactly what you want and how you intend to build it there are a lot of questions that need to be answered to determine if your home based business idea is feasible. You need to do some research.

How many competitors do you have? What is the size of the market? Is there room for another business offering your product, or service? What is the market price for your product or service? What are your competitors strengths and weakenesses? Do a SWOT Analysis to get a handle on your own strengths and weaknesses as you enter the market.

What are the market trends? Right now you can buy a film processing business at a great price, but would it be a good buy with the market trends pointing to a 17% annual increase in digital camera sales? Not likely.

The most important quetion of the, all, of course, is exactly who is your customer? Later on you'll be working on a marketing plan. Where and how will you advertise? Precisely identifying your customer allows you to tailor your marketing to his/her needs. Marketing is an expensive and time consuming activity. You can't afford to market to the wrong customer, or present the wrong product benefits to the right cutomer who might have purchased, if he, or she had heard the answers they wanted to hear.

Don't ignore this crucial pre-opening work. Many past clients have felt that proper research was for bigger businesses, not for them. Many felt they already knew all the answers and didn't want to waste valuable time researching when they could be making sales. All of them later admitted the research was not only valuable, but caused them to reshape their business concept to fit the world their research uncovered, not the world they originally imagined would greet them. Invest the time.

Research removes a great deal of the risk in starting up small work from home businesses. The popular idea of an entrepreneur is that of a risk taker - and its true, but entrepreneurs are not reckless.

Successful entrepreneurs take calculated risks based on sound research and planning. If you have done your research correctly you are a giant step closer to being an entrepreneur. That thorough research will point you in the right direction, and prepare you for the next step.

If you have thouroughly researched market trends, your competitors, and your customers click here to move on to Step 3

Back to Step 1