So a lot of us have been spending more and more time at home lately and your want to want to add value to your personal economy and start a business from home.
So before you start any business you need to consider the following:
Establish your product or service. You need to create a product line or service, whether it is coaching, for example, as a service or e-commerce as a product, your going to need, first of all to decide what you to do. Product base is great, because, once the customer gets their product, the transaction is pretty much over. Their happy, your happy, they have their product, you have your income.
A service base, is a little different, where the customer is going to buy a package or a program from you, and that is a service you continuously need to fulfil on. It could be a long term fulfilment like a coaching program for once a week for three months or maybe its a service like your doing hair and your spending a few hours with clients.
Products and services have different benefits either way you go, but just pick what you want to do and I highly recommend, especially if you are working from home, something that you already like doing.
The second thing that you need to consider, is that when you are working from home, you need your own separate work space. Even if your kids are at home or at school, your separate workspace needs to be just that, a separate place for you to work, where everyone in the house knows that when you are in your work zone, you should not be disturbed. Even if the kids are in your work space, it’s important, they know mammy or daddy is in the work zone and noise should be kept to a minimum, especially if you are on a phone call or Zoom meeting.
You should also consider what address you are going to use as your business address and which address you are going to use on your website or registering your business with the Companies Registration Office. You should consider a virtual office service which will provide you with a business address along with extra services such as meeting rooms if you want to meet clients or call answering service, so you never miss an important call again.
If you are creating a product base business from home, you need to consider where your product is going to be stored. You also need to consider whats know as the min math, which is the minimum stock count and maximum stock count. This number will be established by the number of sales you have. The stock needs to be able to be stored, which means, if you have stock that is any way big, you may want to consider drop shipping the product directly from the producer, especially if it is an item that is less than a €100. Rules for selling products from your home is it has to be small, it has to be light and you have to be able to store it easily.
Also when working from home, you need to be able to have, whats called in the industry, a POS or point of sale. A point of sale can be a Squarespace, Stripe, Paypal, whatever program your going to use to take payments electronically. You have to make it easy for customers to pay electronically. From my own personal experience Stripe is a much better platform and has lower costs than Paypal. One of the major benefits of Stripe is it enables user to stay on your site when making a payment, instead of being redirected to another site. There is no set up cost or monthly fees and set up is instant. Other benefits include: Easy to setup recurring payments.
The last thing you need to consider is your advertising. What do you have to spend on a marketing campaign and what are you prepared to do to market your product. Does your product need a featured video, does it need photography, does your product need testimonials. You need to factor all this in, to get your product in front in the market. Consider using social media, consider Google Adwords, consider where you want and how much you want to spend on marketing. You definitely need to get your product out there. If you are just starting out, you need to get your product into peoples hands, which means part of your marketing investment will just come from a loss on the product for the people that first receive it in order to get those testimonials. So consider taking a little bit of a cut just to get your product out the door and getting word of mouth.
Best of luck on your new venture and I hope this blog has helped in some way.