Setting up a home business with low cost and high income
If you are planning to start a business and make money online while studying or working in your free time, this article is written exactly for you.
If you have a risk-taking and manager-like personality and you think you’re not fit to live like an employee, this article will help you with whatever activity you’re doing, alongside the activity you can build your dream remote job you’ve been looking for. and when your business grows, you can consider it as your main job!
In this article I tried to provide “how to start a remote business from scratch” which is finding profitable ideas until its implementation and for each stage of the process I will provide you with practical solutions.
What I mean about practical solutions is that the topics in this article are written in a way that it’ll help you on your online journey. It doesn’t matter if your job is as simple as selling cactus on Instagram or building up an empire as big as Apple company.
After reading this article, you will understand how to make money through your interests without spending a lot of money.
Writing this article is the result of more than two years of experience, research, and study. Now that I’m writing, I’ve prepared my resignation from the company and I’m going to start my own business.
To write this article, I have read the working lives of many successful managers and leaders around the world and prepared their experiences and secrets of success for you. If you agree, let’s start with the life story of one of these people.
The success story of a homeless man’s remote job!
If you ask people why they can’t do something, they will always have an answer ready. the way to break this loop is to ask them: “What would’ve happened if you could do it”?
One of the reasons that people fail in their lives is that the key to success is hard work, and it’s difficult for them to set a goal. It’s easier for them to avoid doing things and instead of planning their lives, they think about how to make a living.
However, there are still many people in the world whose lifestyle and success inspire us. People who do not use their bad circumstances, lack of wealth, and many other problems as an excuse for not succeeding and reaching it with their teeth and claws.
Among these people, if Steve Jobs’s strong will, Bill gate’s wealth creation, and Jeff Bezos’s creativity(President, CEO, Founder of Amazon) in business, if we believe what they achieved is unattainable and extraterrestrial, There will be still other people in the world who may have been on our level one day.
One of these people that you probably haven’t heard of his name is Robert Herjavec. He was only eight years old when he was forced to emigrate with his family due to his father’s escape from prison. They moved from Croatia to Canada and settled in one of their acquaintance’s basements. Living conditions were extremely difficult for Herjavec’s family. They couldn’t even speak English and communicate with the people of the city. All they had was 20 Dollar cash and a suitcase.
But none of these prevented Robert from progressing and he graduated from the University of Toronto with two degrees in English Literature and Political Science. Alongside studying he sold newspapers throughout the city to help his family and in his spare time, instead of going to bars and wandering around the city, he served as a waiter in a restaurant.
Robert then went to work for a software company called Logiquest. but since he had no expertise in the computer business, they rejected his job application. However, Robert persuaded the board directors to give him six months to work without payment. During this time, he was so hard working that he got promoted to the company’s public community manager!
Of course, some issues caused him to be fired from the company very soon. But Robert instead of embracing the grieving knee, set up his first Internet security, BRAK Systems in his home garage using the experience he gained from working in the Logiquest company. Ten years later, in 2000, He sold his company to AT&T Canada, For 30.2 million dollars.
How does starting a home-based business make me successful?
As we read in Robert Herjavec’s Life story, He was able to reach success by starting his own home-based business, a success that is a dream for many people. Robert and his family once had no place to live, but now they own a luxury mansion in Toronto. They went from poverty to great wealth.
After selling his company, Robert started another business called Herjavec Group at home again! But why did he start his own home business even though he made a huge amount of money by selling his previous company? Next, we’ll show you some of the reasons why it’s a good idea to start a home-based business.
How to start a business with low investment
In a home business, you do not need to invest a lot of money and expand your business until your job becomes profitable; Because you do not pay extra for the place you work in, workshop and equipment, and hiring an employee, and that is exactly why I say home business is very cost-effective and you can eliminate the extra costs, thus, a business with low investment can take place. According to reliable statistics, 44% of home-based businesses invest less than $ 5,000 in start-ups. It is true that at first, it may seem a scary amount, but I emphasize again that in the beginning, you can reduce this amount to nearly zero dollars!
Earning Money
Herjavec’s new company now generates more than $ 125 million in sales and has grown by 643%! If we look at this issue on a larger scale, we see that the revenue from US home-based businesses last year was about $ 427 billion.
Creating jobs for women!
Many women give up earning money altogether because of the hassle and difficulty of working outside the home thus men earn 2.5 times more than women. For this reason, the comfort of being at home, flexible working hours, more supervision over housework and children, and the possibility of earning money and taking care of housework at the same time, make home business very suitable for women.
Personal Life
Years ago, Alvin Toffler predicted in his book named The Third Wave that with the advancement of technology and the progress it has, the way of life and human relationships would change, and so it did! One of the factors that cause conflict between work and life is long working hours;
However, one of the benefits of a home-based business is that you can take advantage of this time and balance your life and work as you wish. For example, if you want to leave at 3 pm, visit a football stadium without worrying about asking for permission and taking a leave. Or spend this time with your friends and then go home and do your chores.
A survey of personal reasons for people who decided to start their own home-based business found that the results were as follows:
60% to balance personal and work life
45% due to higher efficiency
47% due to traffic avoidance
44% for more focus and less distraction at home38% due to lack of workplace stress
43% due to the calm environment
44% due to lack of commuting to work
29% support this type of work to spend more time with family and friends.
23% said such businesses (due to less traffic) do less damage to the environment.
55% for car fuel costs
Home Business Challenges
You’re probably telling yourself, ‘Well, I’m starting my own home-based business, and I’m going to sell it right away. I’ll have enough money to hire someone to just count them. Everything is at its best. I’m the biggest entrepreneur in the world, Bill Gates has to falter in front of me! But let’s give a little color to these imaginary clouds above your head.
I don’t like to give you false hope at all and, like some friends who work in the field of startups, success or the law of attraction, etc. (I emphasize some, not all of them). Because I believe that to make better decisions, we should always look at things from the opposite direction to challenge what they say in the current situation.
We also want to increase your chances of success by considering the issues and challenges that may come your way after starting a home-based business.
When you start your own home-based business, you have some problems that will slow you down. You have to measure them, despite these problems, you can still start your own business. You need to think about them so that they do not bother you at later times. While I was working at home, I was involved with a few of these issues that I want to share with you:
The first and probably the biggest challenge you will face very early in the process is that after starting your business, you often have to do many different things. You may not even have experience doing some of these things before and need to learn them. Although, in my opinion, you have a very good opportunity to learn different issues and gain a good amount of experience by implementing them. It all depends on how you look at it.
When you work at home and you are so busy, you have to stay at home and in your room for many hours during the day. Maybe even half a day! And well, if that doesn’t stop you from doing other things, like studying or shaving your hair, unfortunately, I have to say that it will cause you to lose your social status, and become isolated and depressed. That’s why I suggest that if you plan to run your own business at home, set aside time for other activities such as personal work, personal development, spending time with family and being in the community, and so on.
Isolation outside of your personal life can also take its toll on your business and isolate you from interacting with other businesses (this is more of a challenge for larger businesses). Communication and collaboration with other partners and companies are very important for your future. For example, consider your home-based business selling wedding table decorations. And at the suggestion of modern business media experts, you are producing content on your site to attract an audience. Well, you can easily answer your potential customers’ frequently asked questions and publish them on your blog. But if you ask people who are professionals and experts in this field to link your website, they might hardly accept your offer since they don’t know you well. So if you want to expand your business one day, think about it from the very beginning to build long-term relationships with other partners and businesses.
Another reason that can be a stick in the wheel of your home business is the inability to manage time. This happens when you cannot resist tempting factors. Like when you go out having fun with your friends, you forget about your job! To solve this problem, you should consider regular working hours for yourself. You can do it to your liking, choose the hour that is most convenient for you. But when you get home to work, you see oh! Your brother turns up the music and the situation becomes very difficult for you. Do you have a solution to this problem?
If you have never thought about these challenges, be sure to consider them when making your home-based business.
Where do we start to start our own home-based business?
You seem to be very determined, so be sure to keep reading!
- There is always an idea
The first step in starting any business is to have a good idea. It all starts with an idea; our whole life, even our simplest daily activities are based on ideas. For example, when it hits you on an autumn evening, go for a walk and hear the sound of rustling leaves, which is an idea in itself. But most of the time, these ideas are commonplace. Sometimes some of these ideas are pure and innovative that is worth commercializing.
These business ideas are also very common and every day and there are thousands of them around us every day, but we ignore them without paying attention to them! Well, here’s an important point that’s worthwhile and worth discussing: Where are these lovable business ideas that are blowing up the world? and How can I have one of them?!
Let me reveal a fact to you before I answer this question. I or no one else can give you an idea and say, “Comrade, you will succeed!” Because it is like asking a fish to climb a tree, as Einstein said. While the fish is interested in swimming and certainly fails to climb the tree.
So before you start a business, you need to consider what your interests are and what you do well. You spend more time with your job during the day, even more than you do with your family. Undermining your passion and skills will make your life hell! You will all say to yourself, “I would be more successful if I did something.”
So if you want to succeed, ask yourself what your talent is. What is it about your life that you are willing to sacrifice even your sweet life for? What can you do to keep your customers interested in your project rather than your potential competitors? Answering these questions is very important.
Of course, there is an unwritten rule here that no one has ever told you about. You will understand this law when you complain about the whole world and people and shout “Do you know how much time I spent on this product ?! “People, you have to buy it.” Of course, we all know that the effort you put into making this product with your passion and skill is no ideal reason to sell more. The day will come when you will realize that the truth is something else;
For example, I used to love eating hamburgers and I had a special ability to eat five or six burgers in one meal 🙂 I would have liked my future job to eat delicious hamburgers, but no one in the world has ever valued my skills and feelings! So I had to turn my interests and ability to commercialize so that people would be willing to pay for it. This means a real business! (And so YouTube eating channels were made!)
Now you might want to ask, where are these people in the world that are willing to spend their precious money? What do they want from businesses? It’s very simple, these lovely people want to be happy at the end of the day. A business that helps customers be happy and solves a problem has a better chance of success.
So we can conclude that contrary to popular belief, money-making ideas do not come out of the minds of creative people, but rather because they pay attention to life’s problems. In other words, instead of looking for business ideas, we should look for problems so that we can make people’s lives better and they will be willing to pay us for what we do for them.
Problems are everywhere! The world always needs people who can find the right solution for them and solve these problems. “People know their problems but they don’t know how to solve them,” says Rob Fitzpatrick. It’s your job as a business owner to find a solution for them.
For example, the founders of the startup MommyCooks initially realized that many people do not have time to cook and on the other hand do not get along well with restaurant foods. So they started a business to solve this problem and started serving homemade foods to customers.
- Evaluating Ideas
Thus far, we know that the first step to succeeding in business is to know exactly what we want to do. My suggestion to you was to enter the field of work that you are interested in and do something that you are good at. Then we said you do not need to use your creativity to find a business idea. All you have to do is find the problems around you and think of a solution. Now that you have an idea (or rather a problem to solve), it’s time to look at it together to see whether you can succeed or not.
In general, there are three risks of failure when you’re starting a business that you should make sure you do not fall into these traps before implementing the idea:
Risk of the chosen product(s)
Risk of marketing and customer
Risk of competitors
Product or service risk:
Some time ago, a friend of mine suggested building an automatic machine for making fried onions. What this machine was supposed to do was peel the onion several times by turning the onion on a blade several times. In the second stage, the onion was sliced and diced, and finally, it was put on heat to fry well. The device looked very good and functional, and the manufacturer was sure to sell it with the market research he had done. He was sure of selling it. So he took out a loan to build an automatic onion fryer. But after working on the machine for a while, he realized that there was a problem and could not complete the machine. The risk was his work on his product. It’d have been better if he could make sure he can make the machine properly work and function before taking out a loan. He could even build a small, low-cost prototype of his final device on a trial basis.
Solution – Cost Estimation:
The risk of a product or service is often due to a lack of financial resources (otherwise we could have built your product in any way possible with a lot of effort and hiring professionals). Although it’s very affordable to start a home-based business, you still need some money to get started. Run an estimation to see if you can afford to implement your business idea. For example, if you want to set up an Instagram page to sell Medicinal herbs at home, How much money do you need to buy the product? For How long you can afford to pay for the product? You can even trick here. For example, to reduce your costs, make a deal with a Herbal medicine store and sell its products online, and when you have a good income, buy the product yourself (or if you’re thinking big, produce it!).
The important thing to keep in mind when estimating costs is that because your productivity is not yet known, you should not spend too much at all. “You have to be able to separate real expenses from what you like to consider expense,” says Samuel Clason in one of his books, The Richest Man of Babylon. For example, if you want to have a site with your design, you can start a site with minimal features. When you make a profit, expand it and add any features you want.
“When I was just starting, I kept all the money I made to myself,” said Mike Clum, CEO of Clum Creative, a company that makes promotional videos. I did everything simply; “Because I thought I did not have enough money to hire others.” You also have to learn to do your own thing. Of course, you do not need to know how to do everything. You just have to know a little bit about everything.
Customer and market risk:
Most of the reasons behind the failure of start-ups are related to this sector. About 47% of startups that fail do not pay much attention to marketing and their customers. Assuming you have a very good product, should you know that people need this product at all? Do they pay for it? Is there a large number of customers?
Of course, if your idea is based on solving a problem, you have greatly reduced that risk. But there are still many twisted lines that you have not paid attention to! Consider, for example, that many people forget to turn off the lights when they leave the room. And because of this, they pay a lot for electricity. Well, so far you have a good problem to solve and you decide to sell them sensor bulbs to reduce their costs. But have you not considered that these people, except in rare cases where low energy consumption is important to them if they were willing to pay to buy your product, would not have the problem of paying more for their monthly electricity bill?
Solution – Make sure you sell your products/services
The best way you can find out if your product will sell or not is to talk to your customers! They will tell you better than anyone else whether they will buy your product or service.
That’s why we do mom’s test! Mom test is a series of simple rules for appropriate and good questions to learn how to talk to our potential future customers and to validate our idea. This test is described in the book mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
Competitors risk:
This risk is not very scary and it can be solved very easily. Competitors risk generally says that when you want to start your business, consider what other people and companies are working in your field or offer similar products or services to you. Can you compete with these companies? Can you offer products with the same or higher and better quality?
Solution – Check/Study your competitors
If you are the first business to enter a field, it will be very beneficial for you. You can bring your brand name to the forefront with innovation and have a lot of sales. However, be aware that innovation does not guarantee you for the rest of your life and many companies will start working in your field right after you. Just like when Curb(Magic Taxi) started as the first online taxi service, various other companies entered the field including Uber.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have to compete with reputable competitors, there is no reason to back down. Instead, you can target a segment of the market. You need to know the problems and needs in your business market and offer solutions to them. Ask yourself what services or services do people provide. How much do they pay for it? Can a simpler method be substituted? How much would it cost if you were to use this new method? What is the reason for using my suggested method? This is called special marketing (meaning finding a special place in the market). The purpose of special marketing is to focus on providing a product or service for a small segment of the market that the existing product or service has not been able to meet the needs of that segment well.
- Imagine your favorite day of work
Now that you have a profitable idea and know what products or services you want to sell, determine exactly what you want to achieve; At the beginning of the work, you should be aware that, for example, in the next six months, you want to sell X amount of one product per day. Or think even a little bigger. For example, say you want to market a particular product over a longer period of 3 to 5 years.
If you want to succeed in your business, you need to do this planning. Because you should not be confused like each piece of leaf that’s moved by the wind. Doubt in expressing desires is the most important way to fail! If you don’t know what you want, how can you get it? If you can’t picture your favorite day, what chance do you have to make it? Maybe you spent it today. Who knows! Sit down once and for all and plan your goals.
- Roll up your sleeves and get started
Walt Disney has an interesting quote, “To start, stop talking and just start moving!”
I have always struggled with this problem; When I wanted to start a business, I spent several months making decisions, researching ideas, and preparing prerequisites. By the time I read the story of launching the DropBox (cloud space provider) site, I was amazed at how DropBox was created on the bus! Houston, the founder of Dropbox, says about starting his company:
“I usually had a flash drive with me where I held files and things related to my work. The story began when I was traveling from Boston to New York by bus. In the middle of the road, I realized I had forgotten the flash drive. I was very disappointed because it was not my first time. I thought to myself that this should not happen again. So I immediately opened my laptop and started coding. At first, I did not know what the result was going to be, but it was the start of the job. “Then, within two weeks, I found an interlocutor and we officially started working together.”
Starting a business quickly is important because you can get your products/services to market quickly. By doing this, you will learn everything you need to learn empirically while working. When you do not offer your product/service, you are wasting your time. Because the core value of any business is to have an excuse to engage with people and customers, and the evolution of the business is your second half.
Of course, the concept of quick start-up does not simply mean turning our backs to everything and just work, but we must quickly apply the principles we have learned so far, without getting too involved; Let’s do it.
- Prepare your equipment
Now it’s time to prepare your equipment with love. If you have a workroom or even a small desk at home, be sure to consider it just for this purpose and try to avoid doing other things in this space. It is very important that the place you choose to work from home is away from things that might take your attention and that your work and personal life do not interfere with each other. You can even choose a corner of the parking lot or basement as an office!
But if your business is manufacturing, you want more than one desk and computer; In this case, you should be careful that working at home does not harm your family and neighbors. Also, if you need space to store products, you can use your home warehouse or rent a small and inexpensive place for it.
- Start a low-cost website
Although having a website will be very profitable for your business and can play an important role in increasing your sales, building a website is very time-consuming, complex, and costly; You want to have a site for yourself; So you go to a designer or a web design company and order your site from them. Designing your site can take weeks to months. But the painful part is that you have to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on your site.
So you will be looking for another way. You will remember that one of your friends is skilled in website design. You communicate with him. You ask him to design your website. You are suddenly faced with a partnership offer.
- Start marketing
If you have a good product, do you put it on the shelf to eat dust? The goal of marketing is to know and understand the customer well, so that we can offer products and services that are suitable for them.
Although marketing and sales are different, marketing should make potential customers interested in your product or service and generate sales leads. So a key role of the marketing department is to know the job market from the perspective of a customer who is the company’s target audience and help the company move in a direction that meets the needs of the customer in the future. And so, the job of marketing is to lead a brand to parts of the market and groups of customers in which the company can compete and make a profit.
- Know the rules of home business
Since all home-based businesses require a license, I suggest that you apply for a license so that you do not have legal problems. To register your home business, you need to go to the home business organization system and fill out the relevant form. After reviews and confirmation, you will be asked to contact the Department of Labor and Social Welfare to continue the licensing process.
To be licensed for your work, you do not have to be employed and your qualifications for skills and expertise in your home business must be certified. Also, when the permit is issued, the labor office experts will visit your place of business at home and will issue the permit if you do not disturb the neighbors. (if sounds/noises are relevant to your job)
My other suggestion when starting a home-based business is that if you want to hire someone in person or online, do their legal work and make an appointment with them and determine the amount of salary and all working conditions so there will be no problems regarding work conditions (terms of employment) later on.
Final words
Herjavec has achieved success in entrepreneurship, which is the dream of many people regarding this he says; “People ask me, ‘Is entrepreneurship an inherent thing to be born with entrepreneurs at birth?’ Or can it be learned and mastered? What I have come to realize during this time is that successful entrepreneurs are flexible in a variety of situations; “If I am left in the middle of the forest, I can save myself from difficult situations, and this is my greatest skill.”
He continues, he points out that at a young age, he doubted he could start his own business because he had no experience in business and did not know accounting and financial law. Many around him have said many times that you cannot succeed! But the secret to Herjavec’s success was that he did what he thought is right, endured hardships and difficulties he was going through and because of that, he progressed and improved.
You, too, have to step away from idealism and take the hardships to heart to progress. I know starting a home-based business, despite all its benefits, is not what you expect it to be as a future job, but it can at least get you closer to what you want. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt: Do what you can with all you have, wherever you are…
