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

bookstore (such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Chapters, and look at their magazines. You will find all sorts of “odd” magazines. Buy a few and look at the ads. That should give you plenty of inspiration.

      Other Types of Niches

      I’m a big fan of horror, and while looking on the Internet for scary stuff for my basement, I came across the website of an artist who specializes in spooky paintings. Here’s a guy who’s an artist who has carved himself a niche selling his prints to the world. I bought several. I buy many products from small, home-based entrepreneurs: owl figurines (I like owls, too); sea otter shirts for my wife; old, out-of-print books.

      Back when I was making custom golf clubs, I began by selling them on eBay. This is a great way to test the market for a product. (There are entire books about the inner workings of eBay, so I won’t go into detail here. Suffice it to say, listing a product is surprisingly easy: go online, sign up, and follow the instructions.)

      My eBay experience let me know there was a market for my product, so I built a website. I eventually shut the business down, but the fact is, I found a little niche (custom golf clubs) and comfortably fit a product into it.

      Niche markets are everywhere. It’s up to you to fit yourself into one (or create one). Perhaps you have a talent that is perfect for a niche, or you can make a product, or you have some professional knowledge or skill that a niche could find useful. It’s a big world out there — find your niche and carve your place.

      A Small Numbers Game

      A few years ago I wrote the following on an online business forum. It puts starting a home-based business into perspective:

       … here’s one of the key things that keeps me going in my entrepreneurial endeavors: It’s a HUGE world out there with an untold number of different flavors, varieties, tastes, wants, and needs. Knowing that, I’ve always felt that there HAS to be something I can offer or do that will result in just 30 people or companies paying me two to three thousand dollars each per year.

      I wasn’t looking to make a million bucks or break through with a best-selling product. I didn’t want to be Wal-Mart, or even Dan-Mart. All I wanted was 30 companies or people in the entire world to pay me two to three thousand dollars a year for my services. That’s $60,000 to $90,000 per year. Heck, if I looked hard enough, I could probably find 30 local companies to pay me two grand annually just to clean their offices or something.

      When you look at it in numbers like that, all of a sudden succeeding in a home-based business doesn’t seem so daunting, does it?

      11

      Think Big, Even If You Are Local

      One of the things that I am most thankful for in my current business is how I started. When I got fired from the knife company almost ten years ago, I was a specialist in a particular type of software (I made data maps … the whole story is told elsewhere).

      This was a good thing, because this software was not software you could buy in the store. In fact, I’ll bet anything that not one other company within 50 miles of me used this software. So if I was going to sell my data mapmaking skills for this software, I’d have to look beyond my little local area. In fact, I was forced to do a few things:

      • I was forced to look nationally for clients.

      • I was forced to used the Internet — I had to have a website, I had to learn about advertising on Google.

      • I had to rely on email for a lot of my communication.

      These are all a pretty big deal. In fact, it totally set the stage for me to sell myself to the entire world once data mapping gave way to writing. Literally, I have clients across the US, in Europe, in Asia, and even Australia. In fact, selling “local” never even occurred to me until much later — my focus was always BIG, because it HAD to be (and truth be told, to this day, I do almost no local business).

      But What about True Local Businesses?

      Now this brings us to a sort of dilemma for certain types of businesses. Obviously, if you are a plumber, you’re not traveling to Japan to unclog a sink. Heck, depending on your area, you may not even want to drive across the county to do such. Maybe Bill Gates flies in his personal plumber (how’s that for a job title?) to unclog the toilet, but the rest of us are likely content with a more distant relationship with our plumber.

      So what I’m saying is that there are some businesses that are forced to be local by simple logistics; for example, your trades, hairdressers, and pet sitters. 99.9 percent of you are going to start local, and are likely stay local … for the most part. I say for the most part because there are still ways you can branch out. I’ll get to that at the end of the chapter.

      But for now we’re going to leave the true locals to do their local thing and move forward to businesses that should definitely be thinking nationally and internationally.

      Types of Businesses That Should Be Thinking Big from Day One

      Last year, I went to a Chamber of Commerce Trade Show. Besides being the worst dressed guy there (someone needs to come out with a “business casual” line of sweats), I was also somewhat incredulous to the number of businesses there that just thought so … small.

      To give an example, there was a web design firm there. They seemed like they did good work, but all of their collateral/marketing material was right out of 1996 — it all had the “you need a website because … ” line of thinking (which was effective when nobody knew what a website was or what they could do. However, today, most web design firms need not sell the idea of a website).

      To make it worse, their material was also specifically targeted to local businesses (“We handle all of the Hudson Valley’s web design needs.”) It’s almost as if they were saying they couldn’t help you if you weren’t local. Which might be okay for a plumber, but for a web design company? That makes no sense to me.

      Now, maybe this marketing material was just for the local trade show … yeah, that must be it. I asked. Nope, these were the only brochures/marketing materials that the company had. And in talking to them a little more, I found out business wasn’t so good as of late … seems like more people are looking online for web design than locally (well, duh).

      When I went home, I looked at their website: same exact stuff. Local, local, local. This stuns me, because the answer to “business isn’t so good” is obvious — sell to the world.

      The preceding is one example. There are hundreds of businesses that can sell to the world.

      I would say that almost any business where you do not have to be there to do the work can be a “world business.” This means anything done on a computer, anything done on the phone, all manner of administration, marketing, web design, graphic design, business consulting, computer programming, writing, etc. Almost all of it can be done remotely.

      Even some businesses that can take advantage of mail/shipping — like a specialty repair service — can sell to the world. I know of someone who repairs and modifies expensive remote control cars — you send him the car, he fixes/modifies it and sends it back — I’ll bet anything he has clients all over the world.

      How to Sell to the World

      Selling to the world is shockingly simple. You need four things:

      1. A website.

      2. A way for people to find that website (search engine/pay-per-click advertising works nicely.)

      3. A way to accept payment (credit cards/ PayPal).

      4. The mindset to do such.