Starting Home Business - Planning and Production Strategies
A Home Business Article Contributed by Charan Singh
Starting Home Business
After careful and considered view, if you have decided upon the product for which you want to produce and market from home, your next step towards starting home business is to work on your production and marketing strategies.
Factors Bearing upon Production Strategy for Starting Home Business
What and how much you want to produce depends upon the space and infrastructure you have or can afford to have at your disposal. You have to assess the volume of production that is required to make your unit a profitable proposition. The space required depends on the physical length of the production process of your home based business. Besides production hall, you need space for office from where production process is supported by people not directly involved in the process itself.
Before starting any home based business, you have to plan for adequate space available for storage for the raw materials, consumable stores, and finished goods. If the production process for starting home based business is short in duration of time and inventories and finished stock moves faster, you need lesser space.
Easy and cheaper availability of raw material for the production process in home based business, and existence of other supporting infrastructure like water, power, cheap labor, transportation and packing materials have bearings on the feasibility and profitability projections to be considered for starting home business.
Marketing Strategies for Starting New Home Business
1. Make market research and surveys to identify the target group of prospective customers of the products to be produced by your home business. You may engage professionals or other less expensive people like students, or processes like agencies giving email addresses of people to whom you can send a response sheet requesting for eliciting their responses to your queries regarding acceptability of your product viz-a-viz products of your would-be competitors.
2. Study market reports for feasibility for starting home business available from different agencies, newspaper reports, journals. It will give you an idea as to what is the market standing of the product you want to produce in your unit.
3. Making comparisons of your proposed product with products of this class available in the market with the objective to know as to what extra goodness you put in your product that is preferred by the customers.
4. You may also use your personal contacts to have reports on other similar home based business units to ascertain their sales strategies and production and operating and selling costs, sales figures and profit margins to know whether your unit can have sustained profitability with the proposed level of production of your proposed home based business. If direct contacts are not adequate or fail to serve the purpose, you may engage intelligence agencies/people for the same.
5. If the reports based on above techniques points towards weakness for starting the proposed home business, then consider shifting or revising your focus on marketing ancillary products, if possible with your resources, consider possibility of acceptance of your product by your prospective customers at upwardly reviewed prices. Alternatively or simultaneously brainstorming may be done on the possibility of cuts in production, operating costs, packing charges and other selling expenses; but it should never be at the cost of the quality of the product and should no way sacrifice the selling thrust.
