Some of us fall into our home businesses, others of us spend a long time researching and planning before we ever take the plunge into entrepreneurialism and the home business world. What is optimal? How much planning should a person put into getting all the ducks in a row before hanging up the shingle and letting everyone know that he or she is open for business?
At the very least, a person starting a home-based business should look ahead a year and develop an expense budget and a business plan. Just the process of working on a business plan can help you to figure out many things that will affect the realities of operating your new business. The business plan will guide you into thinking about daily operations, how much time and energy you’ll be spending on your business in order to achieve the results you need, as well as an understanding of the sort of start-up capital (money) you’ll need and what sort of income you can hope or expect to extract from the business in the first year or so.
Of course, it might be possible to do TOO MUCH planning—depending on the personality, a person can become incapacitated by spending too much time working out business plans and estimated budgets and trying to make sure that he or she has prepared for every possible situation that could arise in a home-based business. Surely we cannot possibly anticipate and prepare for everything–and at some point, it becomes necessary to either take the plunge and start the business or move on to something where we feel more secure. There is a certain amount of intuition that comes with running a new business and achieving a good balance between planning and preparation and risk and action makes for the most successful business people.
See Also: Learning and Borrowing From Business Models–Part One
Where Do You Go For Business Ideas?