Getting the experience to manage your home based business

This is the final instalment in our series “Breaking Free Of Your Salaried Existence - Being Your Own Boss” series. I hope you’ve found them helpful :

1. Breaking Free Of A Salaried Existence - Being Your Own Boss
2. Your Mind - Your First Hurdle
3. Getting The Money To Start Your Own Business
4. Making Time For Your Home Based Business
5. Getting The Experience To Manage Your Home Based Business

Unless you are already a manager overseeing the running of a business, finding the experience to run your own home based business won’t come without some sort of sacrifice. If you’re caught in a (dead-end) job that gives you NO opportunity to develop business management skills, you HAVE to find that experience yourself. There is no other way but to break into unchartered waters - as far as your own personal experience is concerned. It means moving out of your comfort zone. But don’t break into a cold sweat yet. There are workarounds to this problem :

1. Work part-time during weekends or moonlight in the evenings helping out in the industry that you’re targetting. If you’re thinking of starting a food business, work in a restaurant or open a small stall in your local flea market. While you’re making a little extra money, you’re learning and getting a feel of the business. Sure, you’re going to have to put in extra time and effort, but you DO get the benefit of keeping your day job if you decide your target niche isn’t for you. If that DOES happen, don’t give up on your dreams. Look for other opportunities. You never know when you will strike gold.
2. Convert to part-time status in your day job and work the rest of the day on your business. This may be a better option than the first one, especially if your day job needs you to put in long hours. You have to remember though, that you will likely lose lots of benefits if you choose to be a part-timer. Do this only if you have enough funds to meet your family and financial commitments for whatever length of time you need to double up on your full time job and running your business to gain experience. Go into your business full-time whenever you’re confident.
3. Another way to work part time and still work on developing your own business would be to look for a flexi or telecommute job. A growing number of companies are offering these sort of positions to counter growing utillity and rental costs.They find that having less people in the office can actually save them lots of money. If you can find such a position, you’ll be able to devote lots of time to your new business - even while you handle your freelance or telecommute job.
4. Find a job in a fast-growing company or one that’s in a fast-growing industry. Ideally, you should have a strong interest in the industry. Being passionate about your niche is one of the surest ways to succeed. Make sure you learn all that you can about the company and how it operates. While you’re doing this, look for opportunities that are directly associated or indirectly contributing to the industry. Starting a franchise of your own might be one option or perhaps if your company getting supplies from someone and you think you could supply those items at a lower cost, ask if your management would consider getting their supplies from you if you had a similar set-up.

If you can’t swing any of the three suggestions above, you could always learn from others.

• The Internet is chock full of good advice. Look for forums and entrepreneurial support groups that help new entrepreneurs. Many seasoned entrepreneurs offer great support and advice to newbies simply because they know the struggles every entrepreneur goes through and they just want to help.
• Join an entrepreneurial support group forum. You’ll find that many of them charge an annual fee to be a member. This is simply because they offer their members quality advice from seasoned professionals and valuable resource materials. It’s sort of like finding a mentor, except you have many of them and they’re online.
• One of the best ways you can help yourself is to find a mentor - someone you can trust to help guide you. It could be your boss, your ex-boss or a business owner - someone who can answer your questions and guide you through the many pitfalls of a starting a new business. Not every boss would feel threatened if you tell them you’re planning to start your own business. My last boss was someone who truly encouraged his staff to explore self-employment. Running a business is a life-long learning process and even if you don’t establish a formal mentor - mentee relationship with anyone, nothing beats learning from the experiences of other business owners.

The biggest teacher though, is running your business day-to-day. When my wife and I started our home based catering business, we had the ONE critical skill that was needed - cooking - and pretty much nothing else. We had to learn as we went along. We made lots of mistakes. A LOT of mistakes, but the secret is to learn from those mistakes. We asked questions. We asked everyone we came into contact with - suppliers, customers, shopkeepers, supermarket staff, coffee shop cooks etc. Many times, these folks say something that helps us like where to find the cheapest veggie, the best equipment and cooking techniques. Best of all, as we get to know people and they get to know we run a catering business, they’re more likely to refer us to their friends and family!

Well, that’s it then… I hope this series has been helpful in motivating you to break free of your dead end job. I think it all boild down to this - if you want to know how a flavor of ice-cream tastes like, you’re going to have to take a bite. Just like running your own business. Big or small, there’s just no other way but to jump right in!

In this series :

1. Breaking Free Of A Salaried Existence - Being Your Own Boss
2. Your Mind - Your First Hurdle
3. Getting The Money To Start Your Own Business
4. Making Time For Your Home Based Business
5. Getting The Experience To Manage Your Home Based Business

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