Today we’re going to be talking about some of the things you have to think about when you’re before you start your business. And some of the actual research you have to do before you start your business. So first off we’ll be talking about starting a home business and picking a business. And today it’s all about offline. So we’re going to be talking about local business and working out if your home office and there are many ways you can do that.

There are some restrictions obviously to what you can do from your own home office. You can check with your local authority on what kind of businesses are allowed as a home business in your community. For example we don’t really have hairdressers. We don’t have car shops. We don’t have you know auto body shops. We don’t have various other ones basically things that make noise and smells because of course you have to think about your neighbors which we’ll talk about another time when it comes to offline.

But in terms of home businesses and what one you might be interested in, one of the recommendations I would say is that try to do something that you already know about and that’s something you’ve been working in. Whether it’s the food industry (that would be a concern in terms of doing it at home) or if you were to had an internship as a bookkeeper or you were working in marketing or your writing business and you were writing for business or you were an office administrator for business. These are skills that you could do from your home in terms of a local home business.

You just have to decide if there’s a market out there for you. So you have to decide how to figure out if there’s a local market for your business. So they see the first things that we would do, which we did a long time ago in the 1990s, was have a look and see who else was out there in the local community who was doing the same business.

I think there was only one Engineer near us at the time so we had not too much competition in our local area and then of course we had to look at the kind of work that’s out there for us in terms of being able to have a steady flow of business. So you want to research at what is selling in your community whether it’s a product or service.

How many people or how many businesses are out there? 

For example, if there are five to 10 home cleaning businesses in your community and your community is only 5000 then you might want to consider a different business.

But one of the things I want you to think about if there are other businesses out there doing the same service then most likely there is a demand for that business especially if they are in the business for at least five years or more than they have enough clients to keep them busy. So you’ll probably find enough clients to keep you busy. And of course there’s always people moving into your community and it is always growing. Assuming your population will grow enough to support five or six of what you do as your product or service then you might want to consider putting some tentative idea out there that you’re in business. See if you get some interest in people wanting to know what your business is and whether or not they could use your business.

If you have no idea, my first recommendation would be to decide on a business.

Don’t forget that you pick the wrong business just pick something and then get an internship or part time job in that type of business to see what it’s like to see if there’s certain skills or knowledge that you don’t have for that you might need in order to do that same business. Then you’ll need some experience to learn about it and see how the business sells its products because that’s one of the important things to learn if you want to sell your products. So be in the market similar to your business product or service and then you have to allocate a few five to 10 hours on learning about your type of business part time outside your day job in order to get some of the skills you need to be in business.

We’ll talk about that on Thursday when we’re talking about running your own business and some of the skills that you need as an entrepreneur. Then once you have a primary a pretty solid understanding of what the business entails and what kind of requirements are needed. You can certainly have a tentative look at maybe starting selling a bit of what you’re doing part time.

Now I forgot to mention that there are a lot of good government Web sites which have information on starting your own business and how to do it and some other requirements that are required for by the government So go and just do a search for starting a home business and add your country and you’ll probably find a great many places on Google where you can learn more about what their requirements are for starting a business.

Say you’d like to start so what you need to do is to do research and maybe gain a bit of knowledge about your business that you want to be and is probably recommending that you already know something about the business that you want to go into and then make some kind of decision on what you think you could do day to day and be useful in your business.

For example I think I mentioned yesterday that I don’t think even though I have the skills to be a bookkeeper I would be happier as a bookkeeper. So I’m not going to have a bookkeeping business. Whereas I love being an artist and I’d love to have an artist business and that would keep me going day to day even though the sales might be less than in a bookkeeping business.

So it’s something for you to think about is are you willing to challenge yourself to do that you have the passion to do that you want to know the things that you need to know to do the business. Don’t go into something that people are just saying “go into it because it’ll make you rich.” It won’t make you rich because you don’t have the passion for it.

So we’re going to be talking about some of the practical ideas next time where you can do your research for offline and starting your local business. Obviously, anyone can go get their computer out and start an online business from their home office without really any requirements from the local authority.So we will talk about online research next week and it will be for offline and online.

So let’s hope the you got some information out of that and we’ll go out and research your local community and see what’s out there and whether they need another dog walking service or whether they need another cleaning service or whether they need another bookkeeper or another accountant or another.

You know there’s lots of business that you can do out of your home that are not required to go out and be in a rental office in your hometown. ‘

So go out and have a look and see if you have enough passion in order to do business.