Reasons

What's your reason for wanting to work for yourself? Think about it.

So many are jealous of their boss, the things he has and the apparent lack of work that he has to do during the working day. If you're of this mindset you're in for a surprise. The boss may not be liftin' that bale or totin' that barge but, he's traded those efforts for less visual things like phone calls, organizational details, listening to workers' and customers' complaints, etc. Basically he's become a fireman putting out the little fires as they pop up with policy decisions, capital investments, and headaches. Sure he takes grand vacations, lives in a fine home, and drives a top of the line car but, unless he inherited the money his sweat paid for those things.

This is not to say that there aren't unscrupulous individuals out there, and their numbers are growing, who own a few houses and several top of the line cars, and flaunt wads of cash while their workforce struggles by on the most minimal wages that can be paid. Frankly, this is the situation that drives our workforce to be as mobile as it has become. The days when you took a job and stayed with it until retirement, diligently working your way up within the hierarchy over time are gone. The vastly overwhelming trend these days is that you take several jobs over your working life working your way up by taking new jobs with several different companies. Of course the flip side of this is that employers are less inclined to pay the big wages and invest in the futures of employees who don't stay for long. And so, a cycle exists the less the employer invests the shorter the employee stays leading the employer to invest even less and the employee to be looking for greener pastures on their first day.

Under this scenario, many are driven to try their hand at running their own business by the sheer frustration of this cycle. Why work anywhere that has no interest in you the worker who makes possible, through effort, the wealth of the boss? After all it may have been his ideas and organization but he couldn't do it alone, he needed you. Unfortunately, many of these people will fail because they don't understand the boss's job since they've never been offered a peek behind that particular curtain. Many businesses fail because they're insufficiently capitalized in the beginning. Restaurants are particularly susceptible to this. Money is needed to get through the lean early days while your business builds up steam and begins to bring in customers as either repeat business or referrals. In the current climate many new businesses are repeats of other existing businesses. As such, a reason to come to you over your competition needs to be presented. Often, now, the sole reason may be that your name got listed before your competition or your ad was more eye-catching. Either of these will require investment. And now you're the consumer, who do you enlist to get your name out there? Is more expensive necessarily better? How will you know? Probably you'll have to go through some trial and error meaning that you'll be eating into your capital until you get it right. How to get it right?

Here we go again. In order to make any money you need to invest time, effort, and money. You'll need to make your choices based on what you can actually afford which is where home-based businesses come into the equation. Likely, the lack of physical overhead brings the amount of investment down to a more realistically affordable number for the average person looking to break out on their own. That having been said, the odds are good that you'll still need some money for marketing.

Marketing is probably your single most important expense. If you're unknown you'll remain unknown without marketing. You need to get your name out there where your potential customers can see it. You need to advertise. There are many free sites where you can post ads free of charge but not free of effort. You'll need to find these sites and then write and post your ad. There are tools that help with this process but, here again you'll need to buy them. The other aspect of this is that you'll need to be doing something for at least some part of every day. If you sit back and try to let it run itself, you'll rapidly find that your competitor has been working diligently on their campaign and suddenly instead of being on the first page of a search you've dropped down to the third or fourth page, you know, that part of a web-search that NO ONE EVER READS.

I don't mean to be discouraging, I do however, believe in honesty. Too many people buy into various programs, systems, or schemes that have the potential to work for them but then find out about how much it'll cost to get going and their initial layout to buy in becomes just so much lost money. I believe that a person can make good working for themselves at home otherwise I wouldn't have anything to do with listing these programs. I also believe that left in a sea of options many people will buy in and then leave their investment to gather dust. They've bought hope, not success. I'd rather that the casual tire-kickers hang on to their money and leave these opportunities to those who want them bad enough to succeed.