Profitable, High-Income, Home-Based Small Businesses: How to Create Your Own

More than 17 million Americans own their own businesses. Most of these companies are sole proprietorships. And many are high-income home-based business opportunities.

Heavy traffic, exorbitant fuel prices, corporate cutbacks, difficult managers and supervisors, a lack of control over one’s work life, and the search for an increasingly meaningful way to express our individuality are just some of the factors. that motivate our search for a superior home. business.

But finding a small business idea that makes money, rather than one that drains financial resources, requires considerable research, patience, and effort.

Avoid highly competitive and saturated small business markets. They are unlikely to result in the work from home success story you are looking for. Better to chart a course into the blue waters of the ocean than to swim with sharks in a blood-red sea of ​​hyper-competition.

Of course, important factors when considering the best business to start from home should include your interests, knowledge, skills, starting capital, available equipment, and other business assets, as well as your physical ability.

But ideally, the best home-based business option should reflect more than it adds to the equation. Your decision should follow an exhaustive search and careful consideration of one or more products or services for which there will be a very strong demand from customers. And that high demand should be complemented by the dearth of companies currently meeting that demand.

You should strive to be “first to market” with a new or newly differentiated product or service. This does not necessarily require the creation, invention or sale of a new product or service. However, it usually involves spectacular innovation: thinking outside the box about new ways to better meet customers’ needs or solve their problems.

Think of Sony and how that company reexamined an old product, the radio, in a new light. Transient radios have been on the market for decades. But Sony’s Walkman focused on simple problems: how to walk, jog, or sit on a park bench while enjoying music and news, without holding or holding a cheap-looking battery-operated radio and without inserting a pesky plug. in the ear canal. Just as important, Sony created its product with a sense of style and flair. It became classy to sport the Walkman while pursuing the then relatively new and trendy fad of running and stomping. Walkmans were selling like hot cakes, and Sony designed a multitude of versions of the Walkman aimed at the needs and preferences of various subsegments of customers.

Think of other companies that have found smooth sailing in blue waters and uncompetitive when viewing a product or service from a new perspective. Each of these firms appeared in Blue Ocean Strategies, a recent book by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne on methods to help companies gain a new perspective on their markets and create winning business ideas, with high income and big profits:

Cirque du Soleil brought spectacular, often staggering, circus-quality shows to dinner theater stages in vacation destination cities like Las Vegas.

Curves targeted women looking to stay fit and lose weight at small neighborhood mall-based stores. Each franchise store has a series surrounded by mechanical exercise stations.

The Starbucks owner believed that coffee shops close to homes and workplaces had the potential to reap a fortune in profit.

Authors Kim and Mauborgne describe how blue ocean thinking stands in stark contrast to notions of the red ocean:

1. WHY compete in the existing market space? Blue ocean companies create market space WITHOUT ANSWERING.

2. WHY beat the competition? Blue ocean companies make competition IRRELEVANT.

3. WHY take advantage of existing demand. Blue ocean companies create and capture NEW DEMAND.

4. WHY make traditional trade-offs between value and cost. Blue ocean companies break the value / cost ratio.

5. Why align the entire activity system of your company with your strategic choice of differentiation or low cost. Blue ocean companies align their entire business system to pursue both innovation and low cost (cost differs from price, which companies with little or no competition can often increase).

Compare some red ocean industries to blue ocean thinkers who parted ways with the pack:

The airline industry’s price wars led to a series of bankruptcies and marginal profits for the survivors. Southwest Airlines pioneered a new market: the speed of air travel, combined with the low cost and flexibility of driving.

For decades, players in the golf equipment industry competed for a greater proportion of existing golf customers. Callaway Golf innovated a golf club called the “Big Bertha”, giving frustrated benders and air players who are willing to quit the sport a big head.

Competitors in the cosmetics industry were churning in a red ocean with high-priced models, expensive advertising, and hopeful (but often exaggerated) promises that their clients would regain their youth and beauty. The Body Shop innovated its path to a blue ocean that lasted for more than a decade, simply marketing functional cosmetics that solved women’s problems, rather than appealing to their emotions.

The wine industry flooded its market with thousands of brands competing on the basis of expensive hardwood barrels, overly nuanced tannin attributes, and legacy brands. Casella wines innovated with Yellow Tail, a wine that created a blue ocean in a sea of ​​reds by stripping an elite industry of its deliberate efforts to confuse customers and build a fun and uncomplicated brand: a wine for whom they used to intimidate. market would enjoy.

Each company generated cost savings and improved value. Cost savings can often be found by eliminating and reducing the very factors that an industry bases its competition on. The value rises by introducing elements so far absent from the industry. And as a market responds to new value, it creates strong sales volume and economies of scale emerge.

As you think about each of your potential business ideas, think about these companies. You can also focus on needs or problems that have not yet been recognized by competitors in the market.

Can the product make a leap in profit with easily achievable changes? Can an existing product or service be applied to a whole new market? What about costs and prices, can they be reduced substantially? Or is there an untapped market among consumers who don’t mind paying a premium for a premium version of a product or service (like coffee)? Perhaps your new company can fulfill a business need for a rapidly growing blue ocean company, riding your wave of success?

It’s time to start innovating! What are your ideas for the high-income blue ocean?

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