Intro
They say money can’t buy happiness but it can buy freedom. I’m going to show you how to start a Business From Home in less than 30 days. However, starting a small business is not a piece of cake. I’m not here to sell you a dream, I’m here to give you a plan to start Business From Home. You probably have an itch to leave your 9 to 5 or gain more time with your loved ones. I get it. Here’s my question to you: if you don’t start now, then when?
Inspiration from Success Stories
If you need a little inspiration, Ben Francis made Gym-shark in his parents’ garage in 2012 and his company is now valued at over 1 billion pounds. Whitney Wolfe started Bumble in her apartment in 2014 and it is valued at $1.3 billion. Sarah Blakely started Spanx from her apartment in the year 2000 with only $5,000 in savings and her company is now valued at $1.2 billion. Anybody can become a full-time entrepreneur at home and can start business from home with the right strategy, consistency, and hard work. Don’t underestimate the power of bootstrapping.
I know the struggles of trying to create a quality product. I recently had a manufacturer lose my clothing sample that I spent 6 months making. I’ll tell you more about that later, but let’s get to the plan now. The best part about working from home is that you can wear sweatpants all day and no one will even know.
First Week Plan
For the first week, you will need a business idea. You’ll want to start your business from a place of passion. Consider what you do in your free time. What activities excite you when you wake up? Identify your areas of competence and excellence. We have four areas we can place our time in: our zone of incompetence, our zone of competence, our zone of excellence, or our zone of genius.
Understanding Your Zones
The zone of incompetence includes tasks you’re not good at and don’t enjoy doing. Your zone of competence encompasses activities that you can do, but others might perform better. The zone of excellence is where you excel, although you might not enjoy these tasks. Finally, your zone of genius involves activities you’re naturally good at, enjoy doing, and find fulfilling. As a solopreneur, you will fall in between all four of these in the beginning, but the long-term goal is that you can be living in your zone of genius and doing what truly fulfills you in your business.
The Zone of Genius
We are often scared to pursue our zone of genius because we fear that we’re going to fail, but pursuing it will be one of the most valuable things in life that you ever do. What is your zone of genius? Write down the question and think about it later. There are tons of businesses that you can start from home. You can sell stickers, clothing, artwork, books, journals, DIY home decoration—there really is no limit. You can create your own design, do Drop-shipping products, or even do print-on-demand products.
If you’re struggling with ideas, you can check out this Shopify blog article on businesses that you can start from home. But a business is a lot more than just an idea, so make sure to watch till the end of this video first. Grab a pen and a piece of paper and write these questions down.
You’ll want to answer them before starting:
- What is your long-term goal with your business from home?
- Do you want to create and ship everything yourself or do you want to work with a manufacturer and a fulfillment team?
- Do you know how to make the product or are you going to need a little practice?
- What makes you stand out and why would people buy from you specifically?
Market Research
Next, you will need to think about your target demographic and do a little bit of market research. Who are your competitors and is there a demand?
Tools for Market Research
Ideally, if you’re starting a new business, you’re going to want to get into a market that’s growing and not shrinking. For example, the newspaper industry is currently shrinking, so it might not be the best business to pursue now. My favorite AI tool for market research is Frederick AI. It will run a SWOT analysis, competitor analysis, determine gaps, and does a lot more. Also, User Personas is a fun tool that helps you document a persona who you can sell your product to. You can also use Instant Personas to see how people in your target demographic would actually respond to your product or website.
You are actually my target demographic. I made this blog just for you—aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start a business from home.
Second Week Plan
A business from home plan is essential—it’s like your treasure map. This plan guides you to achieve your goal. Skipping this step will leave you wandering aimlessly. Some might argue, “I don’t need a business plan, it’s too much work.”
However, it’s crucial, and here are the top five reasons why:
- It forces you to articulate your business concept clearly so that you don’t fumble when people ask you what kind of business you run.
- It helps you set up realistic goals and timelines.
- You can use it for passing on things like operations details, company values, and systems to your future team.
- You will need one if you’re going to pitch your idea to investors or you’re hoping to get grants.
- There are endless reasons.
Creating a Business Plan
Financial Projections
Let’s talk about how to make a killer business from home plan. First, your financial projections: you will need to calculate the cost of materials, taxes, shipping, your tags, packaging, and any other expenses. I know that it sounds like a lot, but try not to miss anything because even if you miss it on the projection, you will still be paying for it in real life. Then make sure that you’re selling your product at at least three times your expenses. This means that if an item costs $10, sell it for $30. It doesn’t have to be three times, but just make sure that you have a good profit margin. Gross profit equals revenue minus expenses.
Marketing Strategy
Next, your marketing strategy: you will need to put together a beautiful marketing strategy—basically how you’re going to acquire your customers.
Operational plans:
how will you run things? What will be your processes for creating, selling, shipping, following up, your growth plans, and all that good stuff? And I have really good news: Shopify actually has a business plan template for you to use.
Choosing a Business Structure
LLC (Limited Liability Corporation)
Next, you’ll need to choose a business structure. Depending on your country, you will have several options. Usually, there is an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation), which means that your business from home is a separate entity from you—separate taxes, liabilities, and whatnot. A sole proprietorship is a company under your legal name. It’s not separate from you—you basically are the business. This is a good choice when starting out because corporations can be very complex when it comes to taxes. You can also do a partnership. A partnership is basically where you share a business with another person and you split the cost and profit. But just make sure that you like them.
To register your business, just Google “register my business” in your city and find your government website, and then they will guide you through the process.
Building Brand Identity
This next part is vital. As a small business, no business from home can survive without it: brand identity. First, you’re going to need to come up with a logo, and if you want, you can use Shopify’s free logo maker for this. Next, you’re going to need a mission statement: what you do, why you do it, and who you do it for. You’ll also need to discover your color palette, your brand voice, tone, and archetype. Add your own story into this—it’s definitely going to make your brand unique because there’s literally only one you.
Once you have your branding set up, you now get to make your social media accounts with your name, buy your domain, and build a quality website. There is the option to sell on marketplaces, but the problem with that is that your products aren’t actually hosted on a website that you own. Now, the best website builder for small businesses is Shopify because you can plug and play whatever you need. I have put a link to a free Shopify trial down below for you guys to get started.
Third Week Plan: Sourcing Your Products
For week three, you will need to do your own sourcing research to find legit suppliers and ways to manage your inventory.
Here are some tips. You basically have five options:
- You can create your own product by hand.
- You can design a custom product with a manufacturer.
- You can do dropshipping. This means that design, production, inventory, and fulfillment are all taken care of.
- You can do wholesale. This means buying products in bulk at a discount.
- You can create a digital product or service.
I decided to design my own products for the manufacturer because I wanted control over the design, but I had no idea how to sell the kind of products I wanted. So consider what’s best for you. Here are some sources for dropshipping that you can use: Spocket, DSers, ZenDrop, and S-Pro are all great options. For wholesale distributors, check out Magnolia Fashion Wholesale, DollarDays, Costco, Image Beauty, Petra for electronics, and GTS Distribution for games.
For making products at home, Xtool.com has engravers, embroiderers, screen printers, heat presses, and a lot more fun stuff. Michaels is also an amazing option with lots of tools to help you make products right in your home, plus they always have discounts. You can also source blank clothes from places like BlankClothing.ca to print on.
Managing Inventory and Shipping
Remember that sample that I talked about earlier? If you’re curious what happened, I waited 6 months sourcing fabrics with a manufacturer. We found the perfect one, but once we were ready to create the next sample, I found out it had been lost in their warehouse. Here’s the thing: you are going to run into hiccups like this. Is this situation going to stop me from creating my product? No. It may delay the process, but ultimately, I learned a lesson, and sometimes a lesson learned is better than anything else that you had planned.
So, if you’re selling a physical product, you will need to manage your inventory and shipping. I would recommend finding local post offices where you can ship your things from. I would also recommend getting a PO Box address for returns. This way, you don’t have to give away your personal address. You have to protect your home. You can just go to your local UPS or FedEx to set this up.
When it comes to packaging, Sticker Mule is a great option for custom packaging, labels, mailers, logo stickers, and all the good stuff that you need for your packaging.
Fourth Week Plan: Marketing and Sales Strategy
For week four, you will tackle your marketing strategy and sales strategy and you will set up your financial plan. Now that you have all the logistics set up, you’ll need to market and sell your product. I know that this is the much-dreaded thing for many entrepreneurs. I will give you some advice here, but I would recommend diving deeper into this because we have a lot of good marketing advice right on this channel.
Content Creation and Marketing Tips
Content creation will be your best friend as a solopreneur. You can market your store totally free, but if you have more money than time, you can get UGC creators to create content for you. If you’re looking for UGC, I would recommend BrandsMEC Creators.com. You can get access to thousands of professional UGC creators for free. You will have to pay the creators, but you get access to the platform for free.
Here are a few other marketing strategies you can do: email marketing and use MailChimp for this, ads on Meta or TikTok, influencer marketing, traditional mailer marketing, and event marketing. There are a lot of options here—just think about where your target demographic actually hangs out.
Customer Service and Retention
Here’s a little tip: you can’t just sell to clients; you also want to retain the ones that you already have, and this is why you’re going to need some really good customer service. You can do this yourself to start, or you can outsource through Shopify apps such as Shopify Inbox, ZenDesk, or Tidio.
Managing Finances
The whole reason you are starting a business from home is likely because you want to make some moola. So here’s how you can manage it well: you’ll need to set up a business bank account so that you can keep track of your business expenses, write them off, and have a good idea of your actual profit margins. You don’t want to have this in the same account as your personal, even if you have a sole proprietorship. Just open up a second account under your name to keep things separate.
Pricing Models
Here are a few pricing models for your business. There are many more than this to consider, but here’s just a few:
- Subscription pricing: sell your product every month on a recurring basis.
- Skimming pricing: start with a high price for an exclusive product, then slowly make it affordable. Tesla did this really well.
- Value-based pricing: charge based on the value that it brings to the customer. For example, if you run ads and it makes the company an extra $50k, you can definitely charge more.
- Bundle pricing: you can give a discount to customers when they buy more of your products.
Make sure to set profit margin goals based on the standard for your industry. Never just compete on price, or you will go under. Compete with the value that you bring. Good ways to track your finances are Google Sheets, QuickBooks, and a money planner journal. Try to track expenses at the end of each month so that you don’t get overloaded during tax season.
Conclusion
Okay, so there you have it—your step-by-step guide on how to start a small business from home in less than 30 days. It will take you some more time to iron things out depending on your business, but now you have a good foundation. You can absolutely do it if you put your mind to it. The best thing that you can do is try 30 days will fly by whether you did something towards your dreams or not.
Bonus Advice on Scaling Your Business
When starting out, it can be easy to worry about what other people will think or say, but know that whoever tries to push you down only does so because they aren’t pursuing their dreams themselves. Trust me, I know from experience. I say it all the time, and I will say it again: you don’t need to be the best to succeed, just the one staying in the game the longest after everybody else has quit.
Guys, kudos to you if you made it this far. A like-minded community can be incredibly helpful in this process. For those who stay till the end, here is some bonus advice on how to scale your business.
As you grow, you will need to do more of what’s working and outsource your work to other people. You can find great affordable talent on sites like Upwork and Fiverr to start. You will also want to reinvest your profits back into your business to begin with. This way, you can ensure that you have the funds necessary to truly have all your financial ends covered. And remember to take care of yourself on this journey.
It can be very easy to experience burnout. I had it so bad once I took a 4-year hiatus from doing content creation. Make sure you take the time you need to stay healthy and happy. You are the heart of this business.
