Excellent Ideas on How to Start a Business at Home With Little or No Money

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Do you want to start a business from scratch? If YES, here are excellent ideas and success tips on how to start a business from home with no money and no experience.

Everybody seems to be jumping on the work-from-home trend these days and who wouldn’t want to, when your ears and eyes are consistently been assaulted with tales of people who are making thousands of dollars from their homes, using a computer, a mobile phone and a pen.

Is It Possible to Start a Business from Home With No Money and Succeed?

Well, it is no longer news that there are people who started their businesses with just their skills and without money and are now worth several thousands and even millions of dollars. There are several easy to start and manage businesses that an unemployed person without money can conveniently start. Although in some cases, you might have to source for a very meager startup capital to kick start some of these businesses.

What Does It Take to Start a Business from Home With No Money?

There are two categories of preparations you need to make before you start your home based business- mental preparations and physical preparations. Whilst mental preparations would ensure that you are in the right mental frame and have the right mindset that would guarantee your business survival, physical preparations involve putting all the right structures and facilities in place.

8 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting a Business from Home With No Money

  1. Are You Hungry Enough: Trust me, it takes being genuinely hungry for success to be able to succeed in a home-based business undertaking. You know how difficult it is to get up from bed to go to work when you were in a paid employment. Now that you are your own boss, the only thing that would be able to drag you off your cozy bed every morning is a genuine hunger for success.

  2. Can You Motivate Yourself:  In paid employments, there are usually competitions. If you want to get that raise or that promotion, your human ego wouldn’t even permit you to fail, so you have no choice but to give it all you can. In your home-based business, it is just you with no one to compete with so you really need something that can serve as a motivation for you.

  3. Do You Have a Mentor: A mentor is very important here and this should be people who have succeeded in establishing home-based businesses too. These people would be able to show you the ropes and prevent you from giving up and throwing in the towel when you hit hard times. Challenges are unavoidable for every business so what you need is a backbone to help you stand when times are rough.
  4. Are You an Independent Worker or a Team Worker: We are all wired differently; some people can do better when they work alone but there are some people who would excel when they work as a team. You need to honestly ask yourself the ‘what kind of worker am I?’ question. If you are a team worker, you really have no business setting up a home-based business except you are willing to put in extra efforts to make it work.
  5. Are You Disciplined: Now there would be no boss breathing down your neck and no clock-in and clock-out times- you are now your own boss and you can do whatever you like, whenever you want. It is only when you are disciplined that you can force yourself to stick to a routine like a resumption time, break time or closing time. If you are not disciplined, it is going to be very hard to succeed in a home-based venture.
  6. Do You Have a Plan B: It is not smart to be fixated on a single business plan or strategy- you should have as many plans and strategies as possible so that if A fails, you can move on to Plan B or Plan C. This would keep you from getting frustrated and abandoning your dreams halfway.
  7. Do You Have a Marketable Product or Service Ready: It is important to conduct a market research for your products and services to ascertain if they can sell in the market. Don’t just start your business based on assumptions or passion alone- you have to be sure that what you are putting out there can make you money.
  8. What is Your Exit Strategy: Do you plan to keep on doing this until you retire? Do you have a growth plan that involves moving out of your home to set up your business in a proper office? All of these are important things that you should figure out before you start.

9 Physical Preparations to Make Before Starting a Business from Home

1. Find Out about Zoning Laws: You cannot just start any business anywhere. There are zoning laws that may restrict you from setting up some types of businesses in a specific area, so you would need to make a trip to your local zoning office to obtain a copy of the zoning laws for your area so that you can be sure that the law is on your side.

This might not be necessary for small online based businesses where you can just do your thing from home without disturbing your neighbors. But if you would be producing anything, entertaining a lot of business guests or making a lot of noise, you have to be sure about what the zoning laws say.

2. Understand the Tax Laws: Because you have decided to become a freelancer or an internet marketer doesn’t guarantee you an exemption from paying taxes- everyone has to pay taxes regardless of what they do for a living so it helps to get a full understanding of the tax requirements for your type of business so you can avoid a tussle with Uncle Sam.

3. Get Necessary Business License: Legally, you would be required to register your business and have some permits and business licenses to be able to set up your business. Typically, you would obtain a general business license from the federal or state Government, a professional or trade license, sales tax permits, health and safety permits, sign permits and construction permits if you plan to make any structural changes to your home to be able to accommodate your new business.

You would also need to decide on a legal structure for your business- do you want to set it up as a sole proprietorship, partnership or limited liability Company? This is important because it would determine how your tax payments would be set up amongst other factors.

4. Set up Your Home Office: If you live with your family, then this is very important because there would be a lot of distraction from family activities. It helps to set up a special place within your home where you can use as your home office. Your family would be able to understand your need for privacy and less distraction when you are in that space otherwise, everyone would start treating you as an unemployed person who is free for a chat and maybe a game every now and then.

5. Get Your Website and Social Media Accounts Ready: There is no way you can do without these two tools if you are really all about succeeding in your home-based business venture. A website can help you promote your business and sell your services to just about anyone, anywhere in the world. Social media can also help you to establish open communication lines with existing or potential clients.

You should also remember to set up a professional email address for your business so that your clients can see that you are a professional to the core.

6. Get Some Stationery Ready: The goal is to reduce distractions to the barest minimum. You cannot be running to the stationery store every time you need something new or dashing to the local business center to make photocopies- the less distraction you have to deal with, the more focused you would be and the more success your business would record; so get that mini photocopy machine, a fax machine, an official telephone, business cards, papers, a filing system, pens and pencils and every other thing you think that you would need for your business.

7. Get a Virtual Assistant: You may not be able to afford a physical assistant and trust me; you don’t need one except your home-based business is a really big one. What you need is a virtual assistant who can work from their own homes or wherever else. A virtual assistant would be able to help you handle some of the tasks that may be time consuming with minimal results- instead of you slaving over them.

8. Develop Your Business Plan: Do not think that business plans are only for when you need to secure external funding or investors for your business? Your business plan is a blueprint and guide that would help you organize all your thoughts, ideas and plans for your business.

Your business plan should have an executive summary, a company overview section where you talk about specific details of your business, a product and services section, a market analysis and strategy section and a financial overview section where you talk about the profit potentials of the business.

9. Secure Financing and Have a Financial Backup: Financially, you would need to make two major preparations- you need to have the required capital for your business handy before you set up shop. You should also get some financial backup (at least 6 months’ worth of funds) stashed up somewhere because you can’t be too sure that you would start making profits immediately, so you would need some fall back cash so that you wouldn’t end up frustrated.

It is also important to open a separate bank account for your business so that you can separate your personal finances from your business finance.

Now in recent times, the internet has made it possible for people to successfully launch businesses with little or no stress and as a stay at home person or an unemployed person without money, you can leverage on the potentials of the internet to launch your business. There are several internet based businesses and offline businesses that someone without startup capital can successfully launch and build to profitability in no distant time.

If you fall under the category of a stay at home person without money and you desire to start a business of your own, here are 50 business ideas that you can choose from.

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