Do You Have the Time?

There are only so many hours in a day, and you want to save some of them for yourself. If you’re planning on, for example, making small products and selling them, will you really have enough time to take orders, make them, pack them up and post them? If you’re not careful, you can find yourself doing tedious work all day and all night for $2 per hour.

Remember that time is money: the only way to make the income you want is set an hourly rate you’re happy with, and then work out pricing as your rate plus expenses. If you don’t have enough time to do the work, then increase the rate or hire someone who does. It’s simple supply and demand. When you’re running a home business, you’re not going to be big. You don’t have a big advertising budget, and you’re not going to be able to have lots of customers and make a small profit from each. The kind of market you need is called a ‘niche market’ – a set of customers who want something very specific, and aren’t currently able to get it. It might seem strange, but the best niches can often seem really obscure. You might know what industry you want to be in, but exactly what are you going to be doing, and for who?

Here’s an exercise that you really need to do. Take your home business idea and write it down. You are only allowed to use one side of one sheet of paper for this. The point of this is to make sure that you know the absolute core of your idea. It’s all too easy to get bogged down in details when you start a home business, and you need to make sure you know exactly what your idea is, in its simplest form.

Once you’ve got the basics down, that’s when you can start to develop the idea. The aim here is to take your core idea and turn it into products, suppliers, customers and work. For example, if your idea is to provide web design for small businesses, then this is where you need to sit down and figure out what suppliers you’d need (web hosting, for example), and what services you’d be providing for customers.

Think of it as inputs and outputs. Imagine, for example, that your business is making clothes. It starts with the input you don’t control – what you ‘outsource’, meaning that you pay to order it in from outside suppliers. For clothes, this would be a sewing machine, material, thread, and so on. The next input is what you add yourself. This would probably be the design and manufacture of the clothes. The output is the finished product – the clothes, ready to sell.

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