The Critical First Year of Building a Home Business
The reason the first year is so important is because it is the year when we begin to learn if it is even feasible that we could start our own business at home. Our attitudes and habits and most of all our mindset will set the tone of how we will proceed; or determine that we won’t be able to do it right now when we realize there is nothing instant or magical about earning money.
Certainly if we have no way to survive while we build and develop our business, then we will have other real priorities. Money, time, and all resources available to us will determine whether we can come up with a firm plan in which we can manage our finances. We have to live while we are building.
One of the worst attitudes would be that we speculate – we are overly confident or actually foolish to assume that if we spend our survival money (rent, food, utilities, etc.) that we will certainly see a return on our investment in plenty of time to cover it. This can be disastrous. There is nobody who can legally guarantee we will make any amount of money by any certain time.
If marketers make statements that we may interpret as such, we have to understand what they are saying is that it is possible. In fact they may be making money for some time and know what strategies work the best. Most if they are honest will tell you they struggled at first until they figured it out. Some will show us exactly what they do and will share documented statistics to prove it. It may be true. However that is no guarantee it will work the same for us – ‘results are not typical’. It really depends on how much we want it and how hard we are willing to work to get it. …and of course if we actually follow-through and stick to our plan.
So what we need to do the first year is set a budget and focus on how we will make money to survive, how we will manage our time and resources so that we start to focus our assets on our business. We can say ‘you can’t get blood out of a turnip’ – (where will we get the extra money to survive AND make a small investment – such as an affiliate program or two, and/or a few marketing tools or services to promote and advertise the business).
The first year we will decide whether we want a business bad enough to sacrifice – and while it is true people are cutting it pretty close to the bone financially, if we take stock of every dime we spend – we will see where we can find a few dollars to throw toward your goal; and then we can quickly determine which is the priority – e.g., is a $5 designer coffee more important; or going out to $10 lunch, how exciting is that? More examples are trips and all sorts of entertainment we can skip – staying home and saving $25-$50 for example. We should start to put that aside – in a savings account or somewhere even just on paper.
If we have plenty of money to survive then we can focus our attention on eking out the time we will need to spend planning and working on developing a home business over TIME. Be realistic – do you have 2 hours a day, or 2 hours a week; and again ask yourself where you can save time from – sometimes it matches exactly where you can save money. Funny how that works! 🙂
