The best home-based business is the one you start with yourself, not the one in the ad or the one your friend is promoting.

How do you go about starting a home-based business? The secret of success is not to stop halfway through the business selection process as so many people do. There are six steps in starting a home-based business that will succeed rather than just being a drain of your time and money.

1. Examine your Abilities

Think of your abilities as the things you’re really good at. They’re like personality traits. For instance, you may be a very creative person, or a person who’s really good at paying attention to details or a person with strong technical background. Your abilities and work ethic are the key to starting a homebased business.

2. Examine your Expertise

These are the things that you can do. The difference between abilities and expertise is that abilities are passive and expertise is active, you’re born with unique abilities, but you develop expertise over time. For instance, a creative person may have great expertise for programming, or marketing or Sales. For Example, a person who has the ability to pay attention to details, may have strong accounting or organizational skills.

3. Put your abilities and expertise together to create business ideas.

The procedure I’m outlining here will work for starting any kind of business, but as we’re focusing on home-based businesses, the question is, “With my abilities and expertise, what type of home-based business could I start?”

Let’s say you’re one of those people who has the accounting and organizational expertise and the ability to back them. Some of the home business ideas you come up might be::

• Tax preparation
• Business Consultant
• Website development

These are just a few ideas from brainstorming business ideas exercise. When you’re doing this exercise, you know you have more than one or two skills, so you’ll find that your list of possible home business ideas can be much more expansive.

Don’t limit yourself as you list home business ideas. Write down all your ideas at this point; eliminating choices comes later.

4. Test your business ideas

The fact is that not all businesses are going to work well as home-based businesses, and some won’t work at all. For example, it may be difficult for neighbors to handle a home based business that creates a nuisance to the neighborhood.

Always go back and cross off any business ideas that won’t work as home-based businesses.

Many people who want to start home-based businesses stop here. They’ve come up with an idea that they like and feel they’ll be good at, so they plunge into it at this point.

Don’t make this mistake! If you do, you run the risk of wasting months of your time, energy and money and seeing the home-based business you had such hopes for fail. As I said in the introduction, the secret to starting a home-based business that will succeed is to work through the entire business selection process. The next two steps are critical to your home-based business’s success.

Don’t make the mistake not writing a complete business plan, with one you have thought completely through the whole idea. Too many people starting a home-based business don’t bother with this process

5. Understand how your idea will make money

You may have the ability create a business and the expertise that enable start, but if people aren’t willing to pay you for the product or service, it won’t work as a business. Don’t start a homebased business idea unless you know the answer to two questions:

• How much are people willing to pay me for this product or service?
• Can I make the income I require?

Too many people put themselves in a very similar position by starting home-based businesses without considering the profit and loss of the business. Always go back to your list of home business ideas and assess the profit-making potential of each. If the answer to either of the two questions above isn’t satisfactory, then you need to cross that idea off from your list.

6. Do a business plan to assess the viability of your new home-based business.

Many people are under the impression that working through a business plan is only necessary if you’re going to be looking for a business loan. But the primary reason to do a business plan is to find out if your business idea has a chance of becoming a successful business.

So once you’ve chosen a home-based business idea you’re passionate about, start working through a business plan.

So if you want to start a successful home business, understand the importance of creating a complete business and financial plan. By following the six steps outlined above, you’ll end up with an idea for a home-based business has realistic chance of succeeding.

William