Congratulations. You have made the decision to take your future into your own hands and become a home based business entrepreneur or ‘homepreneur’ as this growing brand of ‘new age business owners’ has come to be known. Your decision to become a home based business owner may have been forced on you overnight by the devastating news of yet another redundancy. Or you may have spent months watching things gradually get worse. Savings slowly dwindling and the slow but steady realisation that things are not getting better, they are getting worse. You may, as I did, have had one of those ‘that’s it’ moments. A moment when you suddenly wake up and declare: ‘That’s it, no more. I have no idea what it is I am going to do going forward but I know I am not going to do this anymore. No more. Not for me’.Either way, the moment you first decided to make the change and start your search for a home based business you probably felt much as I did. At that moment I felt exhilarated, liberated, as if a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I had finally loosened myself from the sickening, stifling paralysis of inaction that had been engulfing me for months. Watch out future, here I come! Full of determination, I switched on my computer and began my search for the business that would finally pay me what I was worth and let me live the life of my choice, on my terms, not somebody else’s.That feeling of exhilaration and liberation lasted for approximately 10 minutes. And then mental exhaustion from the seemingly sheer enormity of the task ahead hit me and paralysis threatened to engulf me again. At the time of writing, a quick search reveals a stomach-sinking 210,000,000 results for the search term ‘Home Based Businesses’. Where on earth do you start? How do you sift through the plethora of promises out there? What is real, what is not? Should you even be looking?For me, when I started my search, the internet was largely an unknown entity, and a home based business search was definitely a very scary prospect. This article has been written for anyone who may be feeling like I was then. I hope you draw strength from it, and I wish you every success in finding your dream business. It is out there and it very definitely does exist. However, what you need to do is have a very systematic approach. Before you start, write down what it is you want to achieve from a home based business, how much you are prepared to invest, and how long you are prepared to wait for the results to start appearing.A healthy amount of scepticism is recommended when you start looking into any business seriously, but a word of caution here: if you are already thinking ‘This is too good to be true. I don’t believe this can work for me”, then I suggest you do one of two things. Start smaller or ask yourself if you really have what it takes. Somebody once told me, “You don’t go into business to make a living. You go into business to make a killing. I think that sums it up perfectly. If you are looking to make a living, if you are looking for ‘security’ you need a job (or you need a business that you can build-up part-time around the security of your current job – that is a great option). To make a living, a job requires that you turn up every day with the right qualifications to do the tasks assigned to you. If you are looking to make a killing you need a different set of qualifications. Bare-faced determination. Tenacity. The drive to succeed no matter what. If it is Friday evening and the ‘job’ isn’t done, you stay til Sunday. If you don’t possess the skills to do what needs to be done, you invest some time and resources and you go out and acquire them. Or you learn to outsource. But you don’t say “I can’t do that. That’s not in my job description”.Fact: There is a lot of money to be made on the internet and from a business that you may start from the internet.Fiction: It is going to happen overnight or without any effort on your part.Fantasy: It is going to happen for FREE! “You don’t get out for nowt”; “Never look a gift horse in the mouth”; “You get what you pay for”.Just because we live in the age of the internet doesn’t mean that traditional values of common sense no longer apply. Yes, there is a lot of dross out there, but no more than in any other arena of life. If you are dating, there is a lot of sifting and sorting to be done to find your perfect soul mate (!), if you are shopping for a bargain, same thing applies. The important thing is to go looking with your eyes open and most importantly take your shopping list with you. What is it you are looking for? You don’t have to know exactly what you want to do but you do have to know where it is you want to go. Your business is going to be the vehicle that takes you where you to you dream destination, and given that there is going to be some rocky terrain out there, it makes sense to choose your vehicle wisely! For me I had 3 very set criteria and although I didn’t know exactly what business would drive me when I started, I knew the business when I found it because it ticked all 3 boxes. (If you would like to know my own personal ‘shopping list’, I direct you to my article, titled “Home Based Business – 3 Criteria To Bear In Mind When Making Your Choice”)
So, I will leave you with this quote by Yogi Berra:”If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else”.Trust in your instincts and trust that the Universe will guide you. I once read this: “Trust the Universe, it will never let you go where it cannot support you.” I drew strength from that and it served me well on my search, I hope it serves you.