Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business. Dan Furman

almost four weeks of evenings to do the job. (Subtract a few days if you substitute coffee for beer, but then you’re also subtracting the four people, so maybe that doesn’t work.)

      Why I didn’t calculate this beforehand, I’ll never know. I just figured, “Oh, this’ll be easy.” Well, it wasn’t.

      Not to mention how difficult it was to bring 10,000 bulk mail letters to the post office, which took me three trips in my little car. I could elaborate on other obstacles, but the whole experience is painful to remember.

      Believe it or not, many people who are starting home-based businesses fail to think of obvious obstacles. Because if they did, many of them would have second thoughts. Thinking how much work something is tends to dampen enthusiasm.

      I know someone who was going to start marketing a craft product he made out of a specific car part that “hot rod” drivers commonly replace. He was going to get this specific, hard-to-find part from Internet trading sites. In other words, the supply for his entire product line would be reliant on individual people selling unwanted parts. I asked, “How will you get the parts for 100 orders?” He didn’t have a good answer to this question, so he quickly changed the subject — it was something that he really didn’t want to think about.

      I also know someone who wanted to start a painting service, but he did not have a truck or minivan or similar vehicle. So it was very difficult for him to transport ladders and five-gallon pails of paint to his various jobs. Transportation was something he really didn’t think about at first. Suffice it to say, he got a van really quickly.

      Hey, I myself thought writing was easy until I got a complicated 20-page job. Ever write 20 pages on a boring subject? It’s a lot of things, but “easy” isn’t one of them.

      In addition to underestimating the work involved, it’s also very common to overestimate sales. Remember in my first business when I figured on 30 different coupons per package? That was because the printer would print them in a sheet of 30 — I got the best price that way. So my costs were fixed — whether I sold 30 or 25, the printer would still use an entire sheet, and my mail pack would still have to go to 10,000 households.

      I thought selling 30 coupons would be easy. It wasn’t. I ended up discounting a lot of them just to fill the pack, and I bartered a few away as well. My profit was slim indeed. I had overestimated my sales by a lot.

      The lesson here is to always remember that nothing is as easy as it seems. Allot yourself the time and resources to make sure every angle is covered.

      10

      Niche Markets

      I’ll never forget the first time I knew, beyond any doubt, that I would eventually work for myself. I was 20 years old and working in retail. Every day I ate lunch by myself at the same pizza shop. Predictably, I got to know the owner, Jim, quite well.

      So one day I walked in, and there was Jim behind the counter, reading a magazine. I ordered my usual, and Jim put down the magazine and started making my lunch. It was then that I saw the name of the magazine he was reading. It was called Pizza World.

       Pizza World?

      Yes, he was reading an actual magazine called Pizza World.

      I asked Jim if I could see it, and he let me take a copy home. It was that night, when I read that issue of Pizza World, that my whole outlook on work and business changed. Here was a magazine I never saw on any newsstand — indeed, I had never heard of it. Yet it had a circulation of about 30,000. Inside, it was filled with articles and stories about running a pizza place, and more importantly, it was filled with advertisers, many of whom made their living selling products and services exclusively to little independent pizza places.

      I was almost in shock as I realized that this was a little self-contained universe, right under my nose. There were pizza trade shows, there were pizza marketing newsletters, there were advertising agencies that only wrote ads for pizza places. There were even ads for custom pizza boxes (because, let’s face it — it would be pretty silly for every pizza place in town to have the same “You’ve tried the rest, now try the best” slogan).

      I was stunned that this magazine even existed, and I was stunned that people actually made a living selling things to pizza places.

      I started to think. Almost every neighborhood or town has a pizza place — some have three or four. I then looked at my road atlas and was overwhelmed at how many towns there were just within 50 miles of me. Hundreds of little pizza places right in my area. Imagine how many there are in the country? Imagine if you had a product or service that could really be used by pizza places? And you could reach most of them with an ad in Pizza World with very little competition? What if you could sell it to just one pizza place per county?

      My mind raced.

      Well, I’ll admit I never came up with a pizza product. I never worked in a pizza place, so I didn’t know much about the business. But that magazine taught me a valuable lesson: There are thousands of these little universes out there. All you have to do is open your eyes. Opportunity is everywhere you look. It’s just sort of “hiding.”

      Just based on the above example, there’s a separate universe for auto parts stores, car washes, framing stores, karate schools, daycare facilities, septic tank cleaning, painting, plumbing, etc. Every one of them is a little niche.

      There are enough little universes and niches out there that almost everyone has a skill or an idea that can be useful in one of these little universes. And with tools like the Internet, there is no reason why someone — anyone — with a little bit of smarts and some guts can’t make a good living working from home, offering something to the niche he or she knows a little bit about.

      Working for yourself (or successfully running your business) begins with seeing an opportunity where most people do not. Most people would see a magazine called Pizza World and give it less pause than what’s on TV tonight.

      But not you. Not anymore. Hey, even if you already have a business, I’ll bet you can think of a niche you can specialize in. It could be the start of something really big.

      Think of all the things you’ve done in your life. The different jobs you’ve had. The different experiences you’ve had. I’ll bet for each job you’ve had, there’s something you know about that industry that the general public does not. Is there a service you can provide to that industry?

      Perhaps you worked at a pizza place in your teens and early twenties, and maybe even became the night manager. You know all about pizza places — and about their customers. In fact, while you were working there, you probably said things like, “Man, the owner doesn’t know what he’s doing. If I ran this place, I’d …”

      And, now as an adult, you’ve traded in your pizza apron for a college degree and a job in marketing. So you know pizza places, and you know marketing. Hmmm … maybe you can place an ad in Pizza World offering to assist pizza places with their marketing and advertising. Remember, all you need is a few clients — imagine if just two or three per state paid you $500 per year for your monthly “pizza place only” marketing newsletter and creative ads. (To make it desirable, tell them that you only allow one per county to sign up.)

      Some pizza place owners will tell you to take a hike. In fact, most will. But there are a few who, if your newsletter is good enough, would happily pay, even if just to keep their competition shut out.

      The beauty of something like this (which happens in more industries than you think) is that you write 12 newsletters and 12 packs of monthly ads. You can play golf the rest of the month if you want to (you won’t — you’ll be trying to get into other niches — but you could).

      You need to find these niche market nuggets and mine them. How do you find them? OPEN YOUR EYES and notice things like odd little