Your Own Home Business

• Look for items at garage sales, flea markets and estate sales.


• Speak to manufacturing corporations and ask them if you can sell their products on ebay for them.


• Buy from wholesalers.


• Buy cheap items from retail stores.


• Negotiate with stores to sell their overstocked items.

• Look for items at garage sales, flea markets and estate sales.


• Speak to manufacturing corporations and ask them if you can sell their products on ebay for them.


• Buy from wholesalers.


• Buy opprobrious items from retail stores.


• Negotiate with stores to sell their overstocked items.

1. Keep it small. Larger items influence with them a host of issues, from storage to shipping and everything in between. Unless storage is not a problem for you, keeping more than a few large items almost can cramp up your extra rooms, bookcase and garage. The problem is that you need to be able to keep a large supply of items that you're selling to make any real money. Making $100 on a sofa is great, but it hardly pays the bills. If you have any ideas random quitting your job or supplementing your income, you will need to be selling a lot more of these. Heck, 3 or 4 sofas in a room should fill it up. So where are you going to put 10 of them? Keep your items small, and you can use shelves, drawers and closets for storage.


2. Can it ship easily? I know we covered the size issue in the previous paragraph, but it comes up plus here. Even if you find the perfect product, you must be able to ship it easily and cheaply. You may find a great deal on rocking chairs, but how are you going to get a box near at hand them? Not to mention, the shipping costs on large, heavy and prodigious items can be in the hundreds of dollars. Look for products that can ship for a minimum level of money. some from toothpicks to accounts payable ledger fit the bill nicely.


3. Find a niche! If you try to sell everything to everyone, you will end up selling nothing to anyone. The more specialized you become, the revamp your odds of chap able to offer unique items. For example, there are thousands of people on eBay selling DVD's. Prices have been cut down to nothing, and profits with them. The only way to make money as a DVD seller on eBay is to be one of the few sellers who have huge volumes. Starting out that way is very tough indeed. On the other hand, if you sell a specific type of DVD, like old horror movies or silver-print drawing sets, you will likely have ring the changes profit margins. The large DVD warehouses just can't move enough of them to make it worth their while. Come up with a few niches, and you should do pretty well.


4. Beware of seasonal items. Whitsuntide decorations may sell well from October until December, but no one will be them in April. If you will be selling seasonal items, make sure you know when their season ends, and don't get stuck with a lot of leftover products.


5. Fads can be great money-makers for short periods of time, but per that, good luck getting rid of them. Think of Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo and brass Patch Kids. All of these fads enjoyed phenomenal sales due to their intense popularity. latterly the boom, however, sales (and prices) dropped immediately. Ride the waves of popular items, but mind of their life-cycle. Prepare for the end of the fad, even as you are primal the selling.


6. Bring something unique to the marketplace. This seems difficult - and it can be. If you have abdominal epilepsy to something unique, such as a specialized book, health product or computer program that other sellers don't have license for, your products will be in demand. This tip is worth putting some time into. Think of ways to obtain such products, or modify existing ones (But be sure of your rights to do so!).


7. Sell what is in demand. Coins, stamps and other collectibles are daily and hourly in demand. They are easy to buy and easy to sell and ship. If you spend time researching the ones that sell the best, for the most profit, you can do very well in this area. Try to come up with unique ways of presenting these items as well.

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In today's show, I gave you:

• An idea to help your business to grow - How well do you make your money
  work?
  


• An interview with Jane Chapman who runs Positive Steps, a personal and business development company.
  Jane's company is based in Ash, Kent, and she specialises in training and facilitation, clinical hypnotherapy, personal, business and executive coaching.
  The website www.positivesteps.co.uk gives Jane's full contact details.

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How well do you make your money work?

Business success can kill small companies: as they connect well with their customers and sales start to grow, they forget to manage their working capital.

I saw this graphically when I visited a long-term client recently. Her team were working hard to meet promised delivery dates, customers were queuing to buy and the company was busy. Yet my client knew that the high revenues were barely profitable.

Tuning your working capital

When your order book is full and the company is growing, liquidity is the key to keeping your business alive: if you run out of money, the company dies.

The mug’s approach is to borrow more money (in exchange for share ownership or hefty interest rates). A better approach is to stop the leaks in your cashflow and to focus your working capital where it can do the greatest good.

Making many small adjustments

To improve how you use working capital, you need to work on all its elements:

1. Manage your production cycles – reduce dwell times, schedule ‘work in progress’ to meet the customer’s actual delivery dates, and identify areas of low value effort that you can avoid.

2. Manage your inventory closely – rotate stocks to keep ahead of ‘sell by’ dates, shrink stock by replenishing ‘just in time’, and plug leakage and wastage that shrinks your profits.

3. Minimise your debtors – deliver your invoice early, only give credit to people who don’t need it, take cash payments, and chase slow payments keenly.

4. Simplify your accounting – prune your paperwork to your current needs, insist on an electronic audit trail for all payments, and trim any expenses that yield low value.

Of course, you should be implementing these measures in your company anyway, but when success comes knocking on your door, taking these actions will ensure that success is good news, not bad.

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Adrian Pepper coaches owners of small businesses to achieve both business and personal goals - helping you to plan and make sense of your growth. You can contact him through Help 4 You Limited, on (+44)7773 380133 or by email.

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