This may seem an inadvisable time to start any business venture, much less one run from home on a smaller scale. How would you possibly compete in a market that stands on the precipice of catastrophic collapse? Speaking to small business owners, particularly those trying to bring a product to market, you may hear a lot of distress at fulfilling standard market regulation required for general supply regulations.
Things like a GS1 barcode, staff employment quotas and certification for production become massive hurdles when economic factors barely allow for a viable basic operations budget. This is where your idea of a home business stops being as ridiculous as people may say. The benefit of a small operation, run from home with minimal staff, lies in all the red tape that a smaller operation needn’t concern you.
If you are selling directly to the market, you don’t have to adhere to the regulations set in place by any reseller. So now that it becomes clear that it is neither impossible nor ridiculous to start a small home-run business, even during the current economic nightmare, how do you go about actually creating one?
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E-Commerce First
There was a time when this would be considered putting the wagon before the horse. A rapid change in sentiment has occurred due to global lockdown measures; a change that will likely remain in place even after the current pandemic. The curtain has been lifted on the fragility of standard business practices, and it would be unwise to ignore the lesson.
Operating as an e-commerce based business from the get-go means that, regardless of any future scenarios that may see the world shut down again, you are primed to continue operations, at least at some capacity.
Keep Things Simple
While this may be a possible time to start a small business from home, it is certainly not the time to diversify your product or service offerings. This is another approach that immediately feels counterintuitive, but you need to focus on a single, core business. You may be able to expand later, but a great deal of research proves what common sense might offer if you think about it objectively.
More products/services mean less time spent on delivering the best single product/service you can offer. It also automatically increases the probability of loss by way of a side product not performing.
Marketing By Being Relatable
Imitating corporate scale is a big no-no. In the past, home businesses, and small businesses for that matter, would put on a front that they were a more extensive operation than they indeed were. They did this because it worked, particularly in the case of marketing in e-commerce. In general, this was simply a matter of audiences trusting larger companies not to make free with their credit card information.
Secure payment technology has come leaps and bounds, and with that obstacle out of the way, markets have started to favour the more bespoke and humanised small e-commerce industry. The global crises at hand have reinforced this trend. People want to deal with real people, and you should market your home business as such.
About Carson Derrow
