What Home Based Business Can You Start?
By now, most people know that being in business for yourself pays more (if successful) and being your own boss is a reward in itself. If you have been following my column you will also realise that by starting your business home based, your aspirations to be an entrepreneur will be more realistically realised. But as high as your aspirations may be, it will amount to nought if you don’t have anything to sell! You can draw a few lessons from my first entrepreneurial experience:
    I started my career as a lawyer so when I decided to start-up a part-time business, I thought a business which would suit me would be one which would allow me to utilise my legal skills. So naturally, I started a law tutoring service. That was already a disaster from the start because I hated practising law at that point. To face more law in my spare time was not at all what I looked forward to. Further, I was faced with too narrow a market (law and accountancy students) and although tutoring pays a nice RM50 an hour, I had to put in 8 hours of research behind it. There was no guarantee that I could re-use the materials I developed. My first (and only) student needed tutoring in Malaysian Company Law for her ITM accountancy course, but my next student might need a crash course in English Law of Torts! I was certainly not looking forward to another 8 hours x 10 tutoring sessions of research.
    After I finished my stint with my first student, I had to re-evaluate my position fast. I realised that although I loved teaching, I knew nothing else to teach. Then suddenly ideas began flooding which culminated into a lucrative business venture. (Tip #1 for would be entrepreneurs: Always Carry A Notebook Around To Jot Down Brilliant Ideas).
    I was good in Bahasa Malaysia and English but teaching these to school kids might earn me a pittance (about RM30 an hour) and I didn’t feel I was good enough to teach for exam purposes. I could teach Conversational English to adults but a very established language school only offered to pay me RM25 an hour. So I figured that the only option was to teach Conversational Malay. Luckily, there was a market for that in Malaysia: the expatriate community. My market survey for this was simple: I struck up a conversation with a Mat Saleh in McDonalds and offered to teach him Malay. He called me up 2 days later and asked me to teach he and his wife for RM60 for a one and a half hour session. OK, not as lucrative as law tutoring but about 10 times easier. It was also ironic that I was getting more to teach simple Malay than what I would get to teach exam-standard Malay. So here I was, knowing a language which about 15 million other people in the country speak and making money teaching it.
    During the course of teaching Malay to the couple, I developed formidable course materials and approached other expatriates. I happened to bump into a teacher at the British Council Language Centre and he was kind enough to assemble a group of expat teachers for an in-house Malay course at the centre. This paid more at RM100 per session and also led to some oral examination testing engagement at the British High Commission. I finally felt brave enough to offer a public program in a rented classroom for expats which paid me RM150 per session! To date, I have invited my sister to join the business and we have 6 part-time teachers teaching our course all over Kuala Lumpur and we are still home-based!
    Of course since then, I have ventured into business and personal development training, fields which I have developed a passion for and built a professional and reputable network marketing business. Let’s see what you can learn from this:

1. Start by looking at your vocational skills. If you are an accounts clerk or executive and don’t mind repeating what you do at the office in your spare time, you should start a business which relates to your daytime job. The difference will be that after hours, you will be working for yourself, not for others.
2. Do you have any personal interests or hobbies which might be developed into a business? Mine was learning foreign languages so I knew what was required to teach a foreign language effectively. A friend of mine is an avid vinyl record collector and developed a part-time business trading records. Similarly, if you are an IT enthusiast and are comfortable with software and computer equipment, you can develop that into a computer consulting business.
3. Do you have any natural talent that can be the basis of a business? I always had an affinity for public speaking. It naturally fits in with training and teaching. You could also be an artist, singer or musician and make money off your natural talents by creating products and courses.
4. Are you familiar with a particular segment of the market? If you have worked in a particular industry you know what they need and can provide solutions to businesses or professions in that industry. For example, if you have worked as a secretary, you will know what products will help secretaries perform better. Why not start-up a company which sells these products?
5. Is there an obvious need that needs filling but there is no one to provide for it? This is a bit hard to uncover but can be very rewarding if you stumble upon it. My Malay language classes serves as an example. What I offered was simple, yet no one else was able to provide it well.
6. Any product that you offer should be reproducible easily for you to reap the most profits out of it. You should develop a product which you can sell repeatedly to the same market with the same needs. This would be obvious for manufactured items like handicraft. Even if you are providing a customised service, it should have reproducible elements. My law tutoring service did not have that quality because each client had different needs. It would cost me a lot of time and money to research from different books for every client. But if you are a carpenter, you will be using the same skill and equipment for different jobs although there will be variations to each job.
7. If everything else fails, be a copycat …….. but with a difference. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If a certain kind of business is already doing well, chances are, if you started-up a business selling the same thing, you will be turning in a profit too. But try to provide it from a different position. For example, although Pizza Hut has the biggest chain of pizza outlets, that didn’t stop Domino’s from coming in and gobble up a sizeable share of its market. It did this just by becoming the "Pizza Outlet Which Delivers" and almost monopolised the home pizza delivery market in the USA. Similarly, if you are an income tax officer, the fact that Arthur Andersen is the biggest tax consultant shouldn’t stop you from providing the same service. You can go to your client’s homes after office hours – they can’t.
8. Can you do this at home? In my opinion, 80% of all businesses can be operated from home. Just think, which do you prefer, having to go to the seller or having the seller go to you (at your request, of course)? If you can provide your service or sell your product to your customer at the customer’s place or at any place outside your home, then it has home based business potential. You have the extra edge by being able to do it outside normal working hours. Further, a traditionally non-home based business can be modified to be home based. For example, for obvious reasons you cannot operate a restaurant from home but what’s stopping you from starting a on-site catering or food delivery service? You cook the food at home but provide it elsewhere. Remember, even the American President doing a very important job works from home so why shouldn’t you?