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Start
A Home Business
Your
Home Business Idea: Test It First
by Jeff Cohen
So you’ve figured out, roughly, what you want
your home business product or service to be. But before you
go any further and start investing, you need to try it out.
Here’s how to do it.
Build a Prototype
If you plan to sell physical products, or you’re going to
do something like starting a website or making software, then
you should build a prototype to see how well your idea will
work out. A prototype is a version of your product that is
built quickly by you alone, and serves to show that your idea
is feasible in the real world. If it’s too expensive to build
the whole product, then just building the new part that differentiates
you from your competitors is good enough.
Show your prototype to a few people and get their feedback.
Are they excited? Would they use it?
Get a Few Customers
If your product is relatively low-value, or you’re providing
a service, then it shouldn’t be too much trouble to get a few
customers and do a few dry runs. Give them a generous discount
(you could even do it for free), to make sure that everything
runs smoothly and your customers are satisfied at the end of
it.
For example, let’s say you plan to be a landscape gardener
from home. You could borrow the tools, and volunteer to do
a garden for some kind of charity project – this is good, since
it means that you’re doing something nice for charity, but
they’re not paying for perfection, so it’s not that bad if
small things go wrong. You should then go through all the motions
as you would once your business is established, and see what
comes out at the other end.
Here’s another one. Let’s say you’re an Italian living outside
Italy, and you plan to start a home business cooking pasta
in your kitchen and delivering it to customers (you’d be surprised
how many home businesses there are in the catering industry).
You could make a rough draft of a leaflet (with discounted
prices) and deliver it to a small number of homes in the area,
until you get a little response. You could then see if it really
is feasible to make and deliver these things, and whether there
would be any profit in it.
The best
dry-runs, though, are the ones where you can get one client
at full price. This generally happens in the kind
of industry where most transactions are business-to-business,
and go through a bidding process. If you’re doing something
like freelance writing or artwork, this can let you take on
one ‘job’ without being committed to any more afterwards. If
you find it’s not for you, at least you haven’t lost too much
– and if you love it, then you’re getting valuable experience
before you try to take it on full-time.
When you try your business out, make sure to do some kind
of survey – you could hand it to the customer, include it with
your delivery, or even phone up and say that you’re just calling
to make sure everything is alright. Following up this way isn’t
just good for you, it’s also good customer service.
Don’t Rely on Scale
One of the most common things I hear when I tell people to
try out their home business ideas is that a small-scale trial
wouldn’t do the idea justice, since they ‘plan to make money
on scale’.
Never, ever rely solely on scale. You think that supplies
will get magically cheaper if you’re doing ten orders a day
instead of one? Guess again. You think you’re going to save
time by doing lots of orders at once? You might save some,
but not as much as you might think. When you’re trying to see
whether your business is viable, you should always err on the
conservative side – the thinner your margins are, the easier
it is for something unexpected to happen and destroy them altogether.
You’re cheating yourself if you don’t try out your business
before you start it. You’ll be throwing yourself in at the
deep end, and there won’t be a lifeguard. Trying out
your home business gives you the opportunity to make your beginner
mistakes (there will be a few, I guarantee it), and to build confidence
in yourself and your business without taking pointlessly large
amounts of risk.
# # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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