So you want to work from home and you want to be successful at it, how do we start a small business from home? That's what we're here to discuss today right here on the Six Figure Mastermind. Stay tuned. So maybe you're like me and you've been staying at home and you're looking for a way to add value to your personal economy. You want to just start a business from home. There's a lot of different things you can do. In fact, one of my other videos is going to go through several ideas for you but before you consider any of them, there are some key points that you need to know. First and foremost, when you're thinking of starting a business from home, establish your product or your service. You need to create a product line or a service line. Whether it's coaching as a service or maybe e-commerce as a product. You're going to need it first of all decide what you want to do. Product based is really great because once the customer gets their product your transactions pretty much over and done. They're happy, you're happy, they have their product. You have your income, you're done. A service base is a little bit different. They're going to buy a package or a program from you and that's a service that you continually need to fulfill on. Maybe it's a long term fulfillment like a coaching program where your once a week for three months or maybe it's a service like you're doing hair and your spend a couple hours together cutting and coloring and washing, okay? Products and service have different benefits. Either way you go. But just pick what you want to do and I highly recommend especially if you're going to be working from home, pick something that you already like doing. The second thing you need to consider is that when you're working from home you need your own separate workspace. And I don't care if your kids are at home or if they're at school or wherever they are, your separate workspace needs to be just that separate place for you to work where everyone in the house knows that when you're in your work zone, that you are in your work zone. You know you need to make sure that they know how to get a hold of you. Especially if you're a single mom like me. Guys get this. I'm a single mom. I work from home and I've got five kids the youngest, just got out of diapers, okay? So they require some attention all day long. But they also know that my office, that's the quiet zone. They also know that if they're going to play, they need to either play quietly in my office or they need to play you know crazy downstairs. That's where all the noise level happens is downstairs okay? And I work from home in a way that sometimes requires me to be on the phone. So my kids know when I'm on the phone that it's quiet time. And when I show them that I'm on the phone and I do this – they usually go – oh okay. I totally understand. Alright, set up those expectations right out the gate when you're working from home. I have my workspace, I have my work zone and this is where it all happens. If you are creating a product based business from home, you need to consider where your product is going to be stored and you also need to consider what's called in the industry the min/max. Which means minimum inventory count and maximum inventory count. That minimum number and that maximum number are going to be established based on the number of sales that you do and the inventory needs to be able to be stored in your home. Which means if you have inventory that's any bigger than the loaf of bread, you may want to consider just drop shipping that directly from the producer of your item. Especially if it's an item that's less than 50 or $100. My rules for selling products out of my house are that it has to be small, it has to be light and I have to be able to store a lot of it sight unseen because the last thing any of us want is an overload of product, spilling off the shelves and dumped all over the floor before it can be moved out of the house. So consider that when you're getting into product based business working from home. Also when you're working from home you need to have what's called in the industry a POS. Now don't go crazy on me, that's not what it means. It's called a point-of-sale. It's just abbreviated to POS. And a point-of-sale can either be a Squarespace ,it can either be a Stripe, PayPal, Venmo. Whatever program you're going to use to accept payments electronically because guys you just got to face it, people pay electronically now more than ever. So you have to have a system that's going to receive those. Which brings me to my next point. You need a merchant account or a PayPal account. Now ,if you're just getting started and you're doing business from home, PayPal is going to be fine for you for the most part. When you get into merchant accounts, you're going to be doing that because either you're an MLM and you need your own private merchant account because PayPal doesn't like MLM's or maybe your product costs more than $1,000. That's when PayPal starts to be like okay I see that you're processing a lot of transactions. We may want to get you your own merchant account for this. But as long as your items and your products or your services are less than $1,000 and you're not you know doing an MLM through PayPal, you're definitely okay using that right out the gate. Now, if your business grows and you start processing volume in huge transactions, definitely look into getting a merchant account. A merchant account is like kind of a separate bank account that the bank is going to process. The merchant account owner will interview you based on your product volume and your product type to see which a merchant account it's going to be best for you. So just a heads up. It's okay to start out with PayPal or Venmo or Stripe or whatever it is but you may find yourself leveling up to a full blown merchant count if your business does well which we hope it does. The last thing you need to consider when you're running a business from your home is your advertising. What do you have to spend on a marketing budget and what are you prepared to do in order to market your product? Does your product need featured videos? Does your product just need great photography? Does your product need testimonials? You need to factor all of that in when it comes to getting your product or service in front of your market. So consider using social media, consider AdWords, consider where you want and how much you want to spend on marketing, okay? But you definitely need to get your product out there and when you're just starting fresh and brand new from home you're not going to go out and buy a billboard. You're not going to go out and you know print a million business cards and hand them out to everybody .You need to just get your product into people's hands first and foremost. Which means, part of your marketing investment will just come from a loss on the product for the people that first receive it in order to get those testimonials back to you. So consider you know taking a little bit of a cut just to get your product out the door. You need your beta testers, you need testimonials, you need word-of-mouth. So consider spending a little bit of your marketing right off the gate on gathering those things. Hey did you enjoy today's video? Leave me a comment, let me know what you liked in the comments below. Hit the subscribe button and before you leave, if you want to know what it looks like to work directly with me and building your six-figure business, hit the link in the description and let's chat.