Starting and Managing a Business From Your Home

Are You Ready, Willing, and Able?

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.

Order a copy of the SBA pamphlet Checklist For Going Into Business, MA 2.016 (see For Further Information). Answer the questions and discuss your reactions with friends and family. Or better yet, ask several people close to you to think carefully about you and fill out the checklist for you. 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 word processor 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.