Did the stumbling economy eat your job? Are you just entering the workplace and there are no jobs for you? Terrible situation, isn’t it? Well, maybe not. It is often the case with personal disaster that opportunities present themselves in ways you never thought of before.
This is the time when you list and review those things you’ve always wanted to do but thought they were impossible. What are you really passionate about? Do you have special skills developed over the years as a hobby or in connection with schooling or in the workplace? Pursue these thoughts along with continuing efforts to find a “real” job.
If you are lucky, you will decide upon an idea that can be used as a home-based business. Some of us actually do run significant businesses from our homes, often working in our pajamas.
While the economy is declining, and even if it should hit bottom later this year or next, we will tell you about anything that could offer an idea to you for starting your own business so you will always be in control of your financial and career destiny. Self-employment may not be something everyone can do. There are many reasons why people can’t, or won’t, start something for themselves. Unfortunately, your worldview formed by the thinking of others around you from birth—family, friends, schools, and the general community—will tell you it is impossible to do. But look around you.
Government data show over two-thirds of the jobs in the US are developed by small businesses. A majority of these are home-based or mom-and-pop operations with few, if any, employees. Other potential entrepreneurs will feel they have inadequate training, which can usually be easily overcome using local resources like a community college or the Internet. Lack of financing could be another reason, again conquered with a small local bank in conjunction with the Small Business Administration (SBA). Then there are times when, if you have enough passion about a possible venture, you will just make a plan and charge off toward the edge of the cliff, confident you will be able to avoid falling over.
That’s the purpose of this article—to show you some ideas and instill enough confidence in your passions to get you up and going by sharing some stories of others who have made a success of their very small business. It may not be possible to exactly duplicate what our examples are doing, but the way they started and how they have pursued their drives to success could be the inspiration you need to get up off your couch, in your pajamas, perhaps, and define your future as you want it. Let’s look at a few current success stories.
Experts Briefings
What would you suppose is the greatest challenge facing pharmaceutical and medical device businesses? It is compliance with myriad and quickly-changing federal regulations from all sides. Before Expert Briefings, companies in these fields were required to send many employees to meetings and seminars all over the country incurring enormous expense in the process. Joseph Pickett, owner of Expert Briefings, found a way to avoid most of this expense using his home computer to offer teleconferences for about $400 each--nothing compared to travel expense and lodging. Pickett lines up speakers and packages seminars for these teleconferences with all the work being done right in his home.
He purchased the company from others for $50,000 in early 2008 and since has increased revenue from $25,000 to $300,000. This is a lot of money working from home, but it is a very good living, because overhead at home is very low; there are also tax benefits related to home-based operations, so we all would like to make $300,000 from a small operation like this. The cost to the medical companies is almost nothing, but benefits to the owner are great.
The teleconferences are also provided as audio conferences which may be purchased separately. This is a convenient way to keep an entire staff current on Federal regulations affecting them and their companies. Here is the kind of regulatory information provided by this company:
- Expert analysis and interpretation of rules.
- Actual case studies of practical applications .
- Proven approaches to staying in compliance.
- No special equipment is needed to participate in a
conference—just call from your office or conference room, or purchase a
convenient cassette.
- This company maintains archives of briefings on many topics including:
- Electronic records and security
- Adverse event reporting
- Branded/Generic drug policy
- Clinical research
- Computer validation
- FDA enforcement
- Human research protections
- Prescription drug marketing
- Electronic records and security
- The company produces live conferences available along with audio tapes; all are available for $100 USD to $450 USD; there is a registration/order form on the Website.
ExpertBriefings was listed number one on the Startupnation list of recession-proof businesses in 2008. The business is recession-proof because the medical industry is always needed and they have billions of dollars to spend, while FDA regulation is ever-increasing. Most experts forecast any kind of service business to be in demand, because they do things for people.
Mindsmack.com
It is increasingly important for any business using the Internet to present the very best Website possible. This is where Mindsmack.com makes its presence felt. The owner, Sam Feuer, understands this requirement very well. This company is a full-service Web-design firm that does everything from iPhone applications to commercial animation. Feuer does all this from his home and manages a staff of about 50 full-time employees and a network of freelancers all spread throughout the world. Feuer doesn’t care where his employees are located as long as they accomplish their work as customers want and ahead of schedule.
Mindsmack realizes the power of the Internet and how important establishing a brand is for all those using it. This is why they form a special team to develop each project in a way that promotes the brand of those behind the project. This company provides everything from web design and graphics through brand development strategies as well as technical support. Mindsmack associates are located throughout the world, providing depth of experience, local knowledge, and creativity. Samuel Feuer realized the potential of the Internet as far back as 1998, when he was working for several successful startups. He quickly began his own company and branched out all over the world to become a leading design and animation company developing Websites for many satisfied customers.
Some of the services provided are:
- Web design
- Advertising design
- Rich media
- Custom built interfaces
- Screensavers
- Print design
- Identity
MindSmack.com ranks number seven in Startupnation’s 2008 list of top 10 recession buster businesses. Sam Feuer started the company in a small New York City apartment in 1999 and has now moved to Sam’s home in New Jersey. Feuer obviously believes in the power of communication and expects e-mails to be answered within five minutes.
The Write Resume
With many people out of work and few companies hiring, we have all heard about hundreds or thousands of applicants vying for a single job, like the much publicized part-time janitor job at a school a few weeks ago. You have probably also seen local news reports of local job fairs attended by hundreds of people waving resumes, the networking ticket of choice. Resumes are important parts of Internet applications, as well. This makes a resume the most important document in a jobseeker’s life. It has to be as close to perfect as you can make it, which prompts many people to seek professional help when preparing this document. Kathy Sweeney helps people stand above the competition for jobs with her resume service, The Write Resume. She brings in customers from all over the world by building relationships without actually meeting anyone. Her business has grown by 21% in the last year alone. She is one of the most important experts in the resume-writing industry.
Kathy had years of experience in personnel administration when she started The Write Resume in 1987. Since then thousands of job seekers have come to her for help with their resumes. One part of her service is to insure all of her customers have the necessary information and documents available when they go for an interview; nothing is left to chance.
Among her qualifications are these:
- Nationally Certified Resume Writer - 1 of 26 resume writers world-wide to hold this designation.
- Certified Professional Resume Writer - Awarded in 1995; one of the first to hold this designation.
- Certified Employment Interview Consultant - 1 of 5 career services practitioners in the world to hold this important credential.
- Credentialed Career Master - 1 of 45 Career Services Professionals world-wide to hold this prestigious credential.
- INC.com
- CNN.com
- Forbes.com
- Monster.com
Startupnation.com ranks The Write Resume number six among recession-buster businesses. With jobs becoming scarce and more people searching for work, this business will continue to prosper. Ms. Sweeney provides interview coaching and career consulting services to people in 17 countries around the world. She helps people in all areas of job-seeking from entry level through executive job seekers. Located in Arizona, she has a 95% referral ratio, avoiding almost all marketing costs.
PlentyofFish
Just about everything you can read about a home-based business discusses the difficulties involved in such a venture as well as the many benefits. Most of these discussions stress not thinking of getting rich quick, just making a decent income to start. Well, here’s a business that will appeal to most entrepreneurs, because this owner has discovered how to quickly make a lot of money with almost no effort, except for a short period of education and start-up. A business like this is possible today because of free software and inexpensive Web services available to everyone. This environment creates possibilities of building rapid growth in a new company without having to raise large amounts of capital from the venture market.
Markus Frind, owner and founder of PlentyofFish, has used all of these resources to build the largest dating site in the US, according to Hitwise. Since its beginning, in 2003, when Frind had no idea how to start a business, PlentyofFish now generates $10 million annually. Are you interested? Read on and see how this was done and maybe you can get an idea about how to follow the same path yourself in a different business.
Just what are we talking about? The answer is on the home page of PlentyofFish where the page title tells it all, “Free Online Dating at Plentyoffish.com™.” Beginning on the fourth line of the page body these facts give you an idea about why this site is so popular. Here’s what you find, to quote the site itself, “ Every day over 30,000 nurses and doctors, 27,000 educators, 25,000 business owners, 5,000 chefs, 2,000 pilots and 800 Architects use PlentyofFish to find love, and they are joined by nearly 1,000,000 others just like YOU!” Who doesn’t want to find love for free? Mr. Frind goes on to say his service is five times bigger than any paid site and generates more interest than all the paid dating site combined. This is making an enormous statement because there are thousands of dating businesses out there.
This business was born in a small 900 square foot apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada. The owner received a degree in Computer Technology and worked for several companies during the dot.com bust in the early 1990s. The dating service began as a learning experience for a new programming language he was studying, the site’s free status spread by word-of-mouth and has just kept going. To continue the free status, Frind began using AdSense—his first check was $5, but quickly grew to more than $3,300 a month. Because of the astronomical traffic, other advertisers are using the site and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars up front, all contributing to the $10 million dollars income. Markus gets about $5 million of this for himself.
There is an interesting article in the January, 2009, issue of Inc. Magazine, written by Max Chafkin. The business moved in 2007 to an office in downtown Vancouver because a very few employees were needed to check for imposters and fraudulent images. The owner used free software and his own servers so that the short walk to his office takes longer than his normal work day, maybe 15 minutes. It is so automatic, Markus spent most of last summer with his girlfriend on the French Riviera. He did his normal “work” late at night from a computer in his hotel. Growing numbers of online daters assure the growth of PlentyofFish and bring ever-increasing numbers of advertisers along with the growth.
What’s YOUR Niche?
In this article we have discussed several real home based businesses which have succeeded even in poor economic times. The ideas presented here should stimulate some of you to pursue your own ideas and get your own business going in spite of the economy. These are examples of opportunities for anyone who has lost a job and has time to do something else for which they might be uniquely qualified. Spend some time assessing your experience, skills, knowledge, and passions. Your own niche market might be just waiting for you to discover it.
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