Good Choices for Home-Based Businesses
Home businesses fall into three major categories. First, there's the service-oriented office in a home. You might be writing resumes or keeping accounting records for other businesses, but it's likely that walk-in customer traffic is minimal, especially since technology makes it increasingly easy to work by transferring computer files.The second category is retail-oriented businesses, in which the product or service requires a customer visit. This might be a craft shop, hair salon, or daycare, for example. You'll need parking space for this business and an area either in the home or an outbuilding that's completely dedicated to the business.
The final category is contracting businesses such as plumbers, electricians, computer specialists, or landscapers. These businesspeople handle the business administration from home, but actually do the work off-site at the customer's home and business. It's very rare that a customer will visit the contractor at home, so the office might simply be a place to handle the bookkeeping and marketing functions of the business.
Service-Oriented Businesses
Many home-based office-type business owners meet with their clients at the client's office or perhaps over lunch or coffee at a restaurant, rather than having their clients come to their home. Therefore, you likely won't need to worry about issues such as parking and accessibility.Business-to-Business Services
Many people create successful home-based operations by taking on the tasks that other business owners don't know how to do, don't have time for, or want to outsource rather than handle in-house. This can be everything from medical transcription to bookkeeping to taking care of employee payroll and benefits payments.According to the SBA, some 60 percent of American home-based businesses are in service industries, such as bookkeeping, writing, or tax preparation. Another 16 percent are in construction; 14 percent are in retail trade, and the rest include a smattering of manufacturing, finance, transportation, communications, wholesale trade, and other industries.
Information Technology
Despite the bursting of the dot-com economic bubble, information technology remains a hot field for business in general and home-based business in particular. This area covers everything from software development to computer repair to network and Web site development and can often be marketed effectively to a range of both individuals and other businesses.Consulting
If you can provide advice that other businesses or individuals will pay for, whether it's suggesting structural changes within an organization or putting together a marketing plan for a new product, then you could consider becoming a consultant in that field. A common offshoot of this is training: Once you've developed the initial training packages, you can often just tweak them to suit different clients or audiences. And since both consulting and training can easily take place at the client's site, or an off-site meeting space, you don't need a large office in your home.Professional Services
Professionals in occupations such as legal and accounting services often work at home. As long as you're following the rules of your regulatory body (such as those governing trust account management or client confidentiality, for example), and have a space within your home that can be dedicated to meeting clients without fear of interruption, working at home can work well.Retail
People have been “living over the store” for centuries, with a walk-in storefront on the ground floor and living quarters behind or above the store area. This is great for security, because it means you're close by, even when the store's not open. To accommodate the need for display and inventory storage space, this tends to work well in a larger building where you can seal off the store area from the living area or where you have an outbuilding that you can turn into a store.Alternatively, you could set up your retail business to rely on direct mail, catalogs, or even trade shows or farmers' markets instead of physical floor space in your home. Retailers are increasingly setting up “virtual” storefronts on the Internet, either in addition to other methods of selling or as a complete replacement for them. And, of course, your store can be selling products that you make yourself or that you've purchased from other people.
