Your own home business - Dream or Reality? by Craig Binkley
This is a question many people have asked themselves, sometimes over and over. Is it possible for the average person to start and run a successful home business? I’m here to say that the answer is a resounding YES!
With that said, there are some specific questions you should answer before starting your business. This list is by no means a complete, comprehensive all-encompassing checklist, but it will give you a good starting place.
What type of business to start?
1) Do I have any knowledge in this area? 2) What skill do I have to run this business? 3) Is this something that I will enjoy doing? 4) How much will it cost to start? 5) Do I have the money this would require? 6) Is there a market for this product/service? 7) How will I promote my business? 8) Am I willing to put in the effort to make it work? 9) Am I dedicated enough to “stick with it”? 10) How much income will this business have to create? 11) How big do I want this business to become? 12) What are the tax implications of owning a business? 13) Are there any regulations (federal/state/local) that I need to be aware of? 14) Am I capable of doing the bookkeeping required or do I need to hire out? 15) What type of insurance will be required?
There are numerous resources online to help you answer some of these questions. Here are a few of the sites I recommend.
http://www.sba.gov http://www.bcentral.com
Of course, some of these questions can only be answered by you. Be honest with yourself. A successful home business is a wonderful thing, but a failed business can be a hard pill to swallow. Honestly answering these questions (and others) will help direct you on the path to success.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Craig Binkley, husband and father assisting in the restoration of the "traditional" family through home business ownership. http://www.bornagainbargains.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you haven't done so already, why not subscribe to our free newsletter! It is loaded with freebies, articles and more to help you in your work at home endeavors.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
More Online Business Help Articles More By Developer Shed developerWorks - FREE Tools! | This demonstration gives you an overview of IBM® Rational® Build Forge Express Edition, a global offering that provides a framework to automate and execute software processes. Rational Build Forge provides a software assembly line that can support all of your tools, technologies, and platforms so you can achieve a repeatable, reliable, and traceable build and release process. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | Join this webcast, to learn how the Rational Process Library can help with compliance issues, drive process improvement, and assist in service-oriented architecture (SOA) or Agile development. We will take a peek into the Rational Process Library with content around software and systems engineering (including RUP), operations and systems management, program and portfolio management, and asset and SOA governance. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | Achieving true agility is a never-ending effort. We will showcase how you can become agile incrementally, a few practices at the time.Which practices should any agile team strive to adopt? What additional practices should you consider based on your needs to scale? Adopting practices are however made much easier with the right tool support. What about if your tools adapt to your practices? We will take a look at how the Jazz technology can be leveraged to make your process change the behavior of your tools. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | Learn to enable users to both rate existing animations and to combine existing animations into new snippets. This is the third in a series of three tutorials that chronicle the building of a site that enables collaborative discussion and animation building using Domino and OpenLaszlo. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | Visit IBM developerWorks to download a free trial version of WebSphere Extended Deployment Compute Grid, which lets you schedule, execute, and monitor batch jobs. Because online transaction processing and batch jobs execute simultaneously on the same server resources, you can avoid costly duplication of resources. Compute Grid supports job types of Java transactional batch, compute-intensive and a new type called "native execution", which enables non-Java workloads to run on distributed end points. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | As systems increase in complexity, communication between systems and software teams becomes more and more difficult. Now, there’s a way to improve product quality and communication.<br />Read the “Model Driven Systems Development” white paper to see how. Also included in this kit are more educational white papers, customer examples, tutorials, informative Webcasts, and best practices for designing, building and managing systems.<br /> FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | Learn how to implement a build management system that uses and extends your existing automation technologies. This tutorial shows, step-by-step, how to install and configure IBM Rational Build Forge to manage builds for Jakarta Tomcat from source code. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | This webcast outlines the best practices that must be instituted to gain the maximum benefit from SOA while maintaining high quality of service. Whether you are deploying new applications or managing and monitoring your existing infrastructure, learn how you can ensure high quality of services with SOA based solutions from IBM. All registrants who attend this live Web Seminar will receive complimentary access to a white paper titled “Maintaining QoS in an SOA Environment”. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | Rational Build Forge Express Edition is an automation framework that packages the latest enterprise-grade technologies into a reliable, flexible and robust configuration designed and priced specifically for small to midsize businesses. The new Rational Build Forge Express eKit provides you with valuable resources – including a case study, podcast, demo, and articles – to help you increase staff productivity, compress development cycles and deliver better software, fast. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | Whether you are creating new applications or modifying existing ones, managing integration of new components with traditional z/OS elements is a critical part of building and deploying modern applications. Listen to this webcast to see how IBM can help you optimize your development process using an IDE like Rational Developer for System z that integrates with management tools, such as ClearCase to manage your application development on mainframes. FREE! Go There Now!
| | | | All FREE IBM® developerWorks Tools! | |