Part-time home business: 3 keys to high performance

You may be the classic 'serial entrepreneur' with several irons in the fire, hard-wired to look for new opportunities that leverage your creativity, work ethic, and people skills.

Or, you may be a cautious career professional looking for additional income streams to improve your bottom line or provide a hedge for the future.

In any case, the attractive qualities of any successful home-based business:

• low entry costs
• low overhead
• time flexibility

are also what make these opportunities a good fit when they are only one of several priorities to be managed. Choosing a home business that truly performs well with a part-time focus is the challenge.

Here are 3 keys for choosing a home-based business that will realistically and consistently deliver the results that meet your goals for a part-time endeavor.

1. Does the business generate passive residual income? Passive income is not directly dependent on your efforts, in contrast to most hourly and professional jobs where, if you don't work, you don't get paid. Residual income continues to pay you over time in connection with an initial, up-front effort. In reputable network marketing businesses, for example, your income is derived from both yours and your team's efforts. Stock market and real estate investments are other examples of passive residual income. Choosing a home-based business that generates reliable passive residual income, especially one that offers increased leverage as you grow it, will help ensure the 'part-time-ness' of your commitment.
2. What is the minimum weekly time commitment, what activities are involved, is the time scheduled or flexible? Based on credible examples, or your own analysis of what is required, determine if the business performs well at 5, 10, 20 hours per week. If the successful examples are all working the business 30 to 50 hours per week, you should adjust your expectations if you can only commit to 10 hours per week. Also, are the activities ones with which you are effective? What is the mix of marketing, order and inventory management, customer education and support, and recruiting? Is there a long or short up-to-speed process? Are you in control of when you commit your time each week? Are you expected to attend meetings or trainings at particular times, or is the business largely a matter of completing tasks on your own schedule?
   
3. What is the amount and quality of the help available to build the business? If an opportunity is presented as a do-it-yourself business-in-a-box, evaluate closely whether that has worked for others, and if the up-to-speed time investment is what you can live with. Will that type of business scale up to the size you envision through just your efforts, and those you recruit, or will you also benefit from the activities of the larger team?
   

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.

Who holds the secret to your home business success?

It doesn't take much homework on what it takes to succeed with your particular home business before you are exposed to more tips, must-do's, etc. than you can practically use.

If you are building a network marketing business, you've already been exposed to a dizzying number of systems, examples to follow, and sources of advice on how to make that business model work for you. As Jeff Olson puts it in his excellent book, The Slight Edge, if information gaps were all that holds us back from success, we would all be billionaires by now.

As I've turned the corner from corporate employee to home business owner I am intrigued with the way individuals boost (or retard!) all other efforts to produce results. On one level this is not that profound. It's obviously what allows one individual with the same opportunity and equipping as the next person to achieve higher and faster results.

This is particularly evident in proven network marketing home businesses, that more readily allow individuals to make up for disadvantages they may have in skill or experience 'mileage' - as level a playing field as you'll find anywhere in small business.

But from what I've observed I believe this how the 'individual factor' works:

success = (opportunity + skills/training) x individual effort x individual qualities

Simplified? Of course.

But think about most of the information that you’ve seen or read on how to succeed. Most of what I’ve seen offered this perspective:

success = (opportunity + tips/secrets of the expert you’re listening to) x individual effort

Now, I highly value all the tips and secrets that I’ve received from experts and winners in various fields. But those insights only got traction in what I needed to accomplish when they were individualized by me, for who I am in my home business endeavor. The degree of passion, perseverance, and effectiveness I experienced was related directly to how much I owned the principles that I learned, and really integrated them into what I was doing next.

I suspect most authors and experts would go along with this individualization observation, maybe even say that it is obvious, or generally understood as an unspoken requirement.

But I also suspect that I’m not the only one who ended up with the unconscious sense that if I could just become a clone of who I was listening to or reading, then I would enjoy the success that they achieved. And that represents the major difference in the two success formulas above.

Re-focusing on the individual ingredient has me excited. For although I cannot escape needing basic skills and the right open door to succeed, I already have one critical component for my success.

Me.

I am my secret weapon, I am my own wild card. And not because I’m a prodigy.

Consider a table set with all kinds of good food. It’s not a feast (or training table, or health regimen, or whatever) until it gets eaten. And more than one outcome is possible when it does get eaten! It could further my aspirations to be a chef. It could educate me on new frontiers of nutrition. It could enhance my performance as an athlete. That part is up to the one eating the food.

Me.

So who we are in our home business endeavor matters more than we realize.

Try looking at the training or self-improvement information you’re exposed to as something you ’eat’, rather than something you learn in the purely-intellectual, curriculum sense. Let it be part of you and the success journey that you’re undertaking. Rather than trying to mold yourself to whatever external model that information describes.

It’s way more fun. And very likely the key to ultimate success in your endeavor.