Wellness home business: 5 ways to keep it personal

Your wellness-based home business is in the double sweet-spot of small business:

1. Huge market: wellness goods and services are on a strong rise to be the next trillion-dollar industry.

2. Strong up-trend: home-based businesses are also on the rise, already contributing tens of billions to the U.S. economy, and accounting for more than half of small businesses. According to a U.S. Small Business Administration research report: “… the home has become a hub of business activity, entrepreneurship, and business creation.”

Great to be in good company, isn’t it?

With more than 60% of small businesses selling directly to individuals, the personal factors of your business are critical keys to your success as a home business owner. Here are five ways you can maximize the personal dimension of your wellness home business, and thus enhance your long-term success.

1. Be your own billboard. As an owner of a wellness business, you are obviously a champion of wellness choices. Are you a picture of wellness yourself? Do you use the products or services that you market? Do you have a strong personal story about their value? Do you make your general appearance a priority (e.g. with diet and exercise)? Are you a demonstration of the financial success of your home business opportunity?
2. Know what each customer values. Not all prospects - even those from your ideal demographic - have identical priorities. Do you know how each prospect assigns value to the investment that you are proposing? Do you have a strategy for demonstrating added value to each transaction? The first of Bob Burg’s 5 Laws of a Go-Giver is helpful here: “Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.”
3. Put a ‘face’ on every transaction. This is especially challenging with internet-based home businesses, where distance is the norm and you may never have a face-to-face meeting with many of your customers or partners. What is your strategy to know more about your customer than the specifics you need to complete a transaction? How many unique ways of communicating with your customer do you offer? Can customers communicate with you as readily as you distribute information to them? Do you know which is your customer’s preferred medium for communication?
4. Let your customer drive. Customer-initiated business is the most effective, and most profitable, for any size business. And it is the lifeblood of home-based businesses. In the arena of internet marketing, for example, one of the most powerful personalizing strategies is attraction-based marketing, where customers pre-sell themselves (e.g. with an internet search) on your products or opportunity prior to contacting you.
5. Join a successful team. Your business benefits from the personal dimension on the production side of your enterprise as well. Working closely with like-minded business owners toward a shared or parallel goal magnifies the impact of your individual efforts, improves your business knowledge, and offers more satisfaction in what you do day-to-day. If your supplier does not offer the team opportunities that fit you, explore concepts such as a home business owners community or mastermind group that is designed around specific success strategies or personal growth that will benefit you.

Review: 4 Hot Ideas for Starting a Small Business

Genesis: (n) "coming into being."

The mighty oak tree needs many things to grow to its full potential. But none of the growth takes place without a viable, healthy seed -- the acorn.

The seed of your small business determines a lot about how well, and how quickly, your business will grow. And how well it achieves your goals for the business.

This short article on ideas for starting your small business, "Starting a Small Business - 4 Hot Small Business Ideas", focuses entirely on this critical starting point stage.

Part of a series on small business topics, the author uses a conversation-starter style to get the reader to think about how wide the range can be of potentially successful small business concepts. While the four ideas discussed are pretty unrelated to each other, they all involve low-startup, flexible operation qualities that are well-suited to the small business entrepreneur who needs to start as a home-based enterprise.

The article is a quick read and useful thought-starter for the entrepreneur who is just beginning the 'homework' phase of starting a small business, or exploring new ideas for additional business opportunities.

Is online network marketing really network marketing?

A Google search for "online network marketing" just now resulted in nearly 23 million hits.

Thank you for reading. Good night.

Well ... the questions are obviously not whether there is activity with the online dimension of network marketing. Or whether there is interest amongst online prospects. But I have heard a few maintain that only traditional person-to-person prospecting is what counts.

So how does online network marketing resemble the network marketing we knew before the internet was so dominant? I wasn't building a network marketing business back then, but here's what stands out to me as I pursue both face-to-face and online aspects of my business today.

1. Regardless of how the door opens -- whether through online tools or on-the-street -- networking is most powerful when it's personal. And the internet is the preferred medium for personal interaction for a growing number of people.
   
2. It's about the numbers -- contact with enough people to connect with those for whom you can fulfill a need right now.
3. Network marketing businesses transcend distance very readily. The telephone was king for accomplishing this initially. The internet represents an additional tool for being effective at making a non-issue out of being remote from your prospect.
4. Your network marketing business also scales in size more readily than any other business model. The availability of online tools and communication only enhances that advantage.
   

So there are no big drawbacks in choosing to grow your network marketing business with an online approach.

But one important advantage is the degree to which you can leverage attraction marketing via the internet. In more ways than ever, your prospects are initiating contact with you, already disposed to look at your opportunity. And whether old school or new, that is the enduring success groove for any network marketing business. Be sure you're leveraging that for your business.

Making home business easy: to inventory or not?

What could be better than working at home, you say? Good choice!

So, how do you do that, and succeed?

Embarking on your own home-based business adventure involves a myriad of up-front decisions, such as:

• what type of business entity to create
• whether to operate a product-based business or provide unique services
• whether to invest in a franchise or develop a ground-up operation
• deciding what of kind of marketing is required

Each of these up-front choices can involve some heavy-duty homework to assess what is best for you, what offers the best prospect to achieve your goals for starting your home-based business. Not to mention what will help ensure that you get to spend time doing the things that you love to do. You're doing research that led you this far, so a tip-o-the-hat for doing more homework than many who launch into a home-based venture!

But there’s more.

If you choose a product-based business like I did, additional choices show up to say "you're not done yet". For example, should you market products that you manufacture yourself, or resell products that someone else manufactures?

Like the idea of skipping the make-it-yourself alternatives? I know what you mean. A key decision then for growing a product-based, reseller-type home business is whether you will inventory the products that you resell.

Managing a product inventory was not an attractive option for me in considering home business options. Devoting space to that, physically handling the goods, optimally choosing buy points to ensure profitability, analyzing turnover, staying ahead of shrinkage and obsolesence. Argh. Hats off to those who do those things well every day. But not what I wanted.

Enter the reseller option with products that are shipped directly to customers by the manufacturer. What's not to like about that? In addition to avoiding the requirements of managing a product inventory at home, I also miss out on order fulfillment, returns, shipping, and so on. Now you're talking!

Although I'm not devoting space here to the advantages of the other types of home businesses, there are tradeoffs. And there are certainly some requirements, or things to watch, with an inventory-less home business. Not necessarily downsides, but factors that can affect your level of success with this type of business. Here are a few that come to mind:

• Quality of your products - obvious, you say? You'd be surprised how many opportunities basically push their system, marketing thunder, etc. and place a low priority on the products themselves. Long-term success with consistent repeat business and referrals is not realistic without unique, top-drawer products.
• Quality of your supplier - you are essentially outsourcing critical aspects of how you will be perceived, and how you will succeed, to the company that provides your products, fulfills orders, and delivers to your customers. If they are less than excellent, it may cost you extra labor, customer satisfaction, and ultimately long-term business.
• Your commitment to effective marketing - whether you leverage the tools and systems of your supplier company, or use a roll-your-own strategy, your business will live and die by the effectiveness of your marketing. A wonderful place to devote much of that time you saved by choosing an inventory-less business!
• Your commitment to customer service - even with breath-taking products delivered by a best-in-class company, you have the most important relationship with your customers. And their experience throughout the lifecycle of your relationship is impacted most by the level of service you provide. Does the passion that launched you into your home business venture carry over into the long-term service experience that your customers have?

For me the choices narrowed the field to network marketing opportunities with proven performers. These opportunities provided the inventory-less style of product business that was right for our family (and my personal skills and priorities). Plus they offered a long-term residual income compensation structure that better leveraged our time investment.

I then found a unique internet marketing 'front end' that provided a turbo boost to that function of our business. So I can concentrate on doing my part every day in marketing that fits with who I am, and in surprising and delighting my customers with above and beyond service.