Home Based Business Franchises On The Rise

For decades, franchises have been a staple of the American economy, but the barrier to entry has typically been several hundred thousand dollars (if not millions).  Franchises offer the stability and success rate of a well known (and well proven) brand and business strategy, while still requiring and employing many of the entrepreneurial skills required to run a startup.  A growing trend in the last few years, however, has been the advent of inexpensive, and highly lucrative, home based business franchises. 

  

The businesses range from lawn care and home maintenance franchises like CleanPro USA (an entirely innovative spin on carpet cleaning), to entirely web-based franchises like L&L Opportunity (a home based business that delivers groceries directly to the customer’s home) and this home based segment of the franchise market has taken off over the past few year, quite unexpectedly.  While a home based business is attractive to many people simply because of the fact that you get to work from home, the recent recession and the rise in technological advances over the last several years has made the prospect of starting your own home based franchise more attractive than ever.

A struggling economy is bad for just about everyone, and just about every industry, but one thing that seems to thrive when the economy doesn’t is home based businesses.  This is not to say that home based businesses only succeed in poor economic times, but rather; starting a home based business entails investing in yourself, and that is one of the best investments you can make in an unstable economy.

The economy, however, is not the only reason that home based businesses have seen a bump in popularity lately; technology in general (and the internet specifically) is allowing sophisticated businesses, that typically would have taken an entire staff to operate, to be run out of a home office, sometimes by a single person.  Having the ability to advertise, take orders, ship product and schedule services all from a website makes the entire process for many home based businesses much easier (and much cheaper) than ever before.

Franchisors have capitalized on this new market as well, enabling budding entrepreneurs to start and run their own home business without any formal training, and without even having a “million dollar idea” of their own.  While many people unfamiliar with the category might associate the word franchise with fast food restaurants and chain-stores in the mall, there’s a vast number of franchises available today that can be operated with as little as one employee and can be started sometimes from anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to tens of thousands, depending on the particular type of franchise.

An important thing to note when digging further into the world of home based business is to know the difference between legitimate home based businesses and work from home scams.  Drive through any metropolitan area (or browse the web for 20 min for the matter) and you’ll no doubt come across someone claiming that you can make upwards of ten thousand dollars per months working from home without any real effort or skills needed.  Make no mistake, there’s still no such thing as a free lunch, but modern technologies have enabled legitimate home business opportunities, just know what to look for.  You can find legitimate franchises through a reputable franchise broker; unless the franchise you’re looking at has been recommended by someone you personally know and trust, or by a reputable franchise broker that has vetted the franchise and made sure that it’s legitimate, don’t take the risk.  A sure fire way to spot a scam is when you’re promised a lot for very little.  A real home based business will require a lot of hard work to get started, and will require hard work to maintain it.

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Work From Home Opportunities

How To Grow Your Small Business

Many small businesses are created with the goal of eventually becoming large businesses. Growth should be an integral part of nearly any business, because like it or not, businesses that plateau, soon begin to decline. Much of growing a business will come naturally, however there will be certain points in your business where you “hit the wall” and knowing some practical ways to get over the wall can be the difference between keeping your business healthy and letting it decline and become just another statistic.

Steps Not Leaps
Growth in a business doesn’t necessarily have to look like some of the biggest success stories out there for you to still be a success. While a success story like Google, Facebook or Microsoft may be the desire of most entrepreneurs, don’t let big aspirations rob you of the joy of small victories. For a small home business, a five or even two percent increase in profit year over year will keep your business healthy and continually push you one step closer to your ultimate goals.

Net Growth Is The Best Growth
Many small businesses can make the mistake early on of thinking that by bringing on more employees, this will exponentially increase the amount of revenues coming in and therefore increase profits. In actuality, for a lot of small businesses, having too many mouths to feed early on can be the death of the business. Whether your plan is to eventually exit the business through its sale or if you want to run it for the rest of your life, make sure that every hire you make is absolutely essential, because increasing revenue is pointless if your net profits stay the same; it just ads unnecessary complexity to the business.

Keep An Open Mind
Ultimately, the best and easiest way to continue to grow your business is to try new things and don’t be constrained by your preconceived notion of what your business should do. Many companies in the technology sector encourage their employees to spend 20% of their work week coming up with new ideas that have little or nothing to do with their day-to-day jobs, and this is where much of the innovation in the company comes from; so experiment with new products, marketing ideas or even a whole new business model, because growth doesn’t always have to be linear, or follow a pre-set path.

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Choosing the Right Business

Like any big decision in life, choosing the right business is much more complex than simply coming up with a list of pros and cons. Choosing the right home based business should be a decision that you spend some time on, because if you want to be successful, you’re going to have to put a lot of time and sweat into your business, and it will essentially take up the better part of your time for at least the first couple years. Here's a few probing questions to ask yourself that should help you narrow down what the perfect home business is for you.

What Are Your Core Values?
Just about any business coach will tell you that narrowing down your core values personally will not only help you figure out what kind of business to start, but it will keep you on track and give you some common language to refer to when you bring others into the business (particularly investors). For example; if in your own life you place a high value on the environment and living green, you will want to model that in your business as well. This can result in higher costs (buying locally, using green materials, etc.) but depending on the business, you may be able to charge a premium, knowing that your customers also share this value and are willing to pay more for it.

What Are You Willing To Put In?
A business will not build itself, so you need to have realistic expectations for the time and resources that you’re willing to invest in the business to get it off the ground. The earliest stage of a business is often called “friends and fools” because when you first start out, you will have little money and will have to rely on friends helping out and “fools” or people who are willing to invest time and/or money with no guarantee of any payout anytime soon.

What Is Your End Goal?
A common mistake when starting a new business is to build it with the intent to sell the business in a couple years and make millions of dollars. While this would be nice, and it may very well be what happens to your business, setting an exit strategy as the goal for your business is a good way to kill your business before it ever starts. You need to set a goal for your business that will allow it to continue to evolve and grow over time, and you need to invest yourself in it for the long haul. This doesn’t mean that you’re committing the rest of your life to the business, but it will help you to focus on making the business truly great, rather than just building something in order to get rid of it.

Where to go from here?
Check out our Work From Home Business Directory for proven home based business concepts.

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