You have decided that you want to work from home. Starting a business from a home base can be very daunting for most people. You probably have an idea of what you would like to do and where you would like to be in say a year’s time. Before you launch yourself into your chosen business you should first pause a while to develop a work at home program.

A work at home program will set out the route map of how you get from where you are at the moment (having no business) to where you have decided you want to be in the future. It could set out steps for development in one, two and three years for example.

Such a program will act as a business plan for you to follow as you set up your new home business. It will allow you to measure your success rate in terms of whether or not you are meeting your targets at the set milestones and gives you the opportunity to make changes in good time if you find you are straying from the plan.

A work at home program is effectively a business plan. Not only will it allow you to measure your success against your expectations, it will also act as a testing ground for the idea you have decided to put in place. As an example, let us say that you have decided to set up an eBay shop. This is a very feasible business opportunity and one that is providing a lot of people with a healthy income already – many of them working from a home base.

You will first have to decide what you are going to sell, where you are going to get your products from and how big and buoyant the market is. You will need to assess the competition and decide frankly how much of your product you will be able to sell and at what price. You will also need to factor in the time needed to establish your presence as a trusted seller.

This information will allow you to do some simple financial projections that will tell you when you need to buy stock and when your business might start being profitable. If you have been honest with your estimates – it might even tell you that the business is not viable and save you from wasting your money on this particular venture.

Other aspects to include within your work at home program will be:

1. Overhead costs – estimate what you will need to outlay

2. Advertising costs and when you should be doing this

3. Logistics – can you really run the business, pack the goods and take them to the Postal Service all by yourself? If your plan tells you that to be profitable you need to sell 100 items every day, consider how long it will take to process these 7 days a week!

4. Finance needed

5. Do some “what if” scenarios. If you only sell half the items you hoped to – would the business still be profitable or would it actually cost you money?

6. Most importantly set your timetable and if this includes an allocation for time to spend on the business, make sure that you follow this!

There are many reasons for wanting a business opportunity based from your home. You may wish to escape the pressures of working in a city environment. You may wish for the independence of working alone, without supervision. You might want to be your own boss and working from home is the best route to achieving this. It might even be the case that you need to look after your children but also need to earn an income in between the feeding and cleaning!

The reason for wanting your home working to be a home based business franchise could be that you are looking for the added certainty that a franchise gives of providing a business that will work. Franchises are one way of going into business for yourself with the added back up of the franchiser to provide a tried and tested business plan, training and a wide range of support.

A home based business franchise is not going to be the type of business you normally associate with a franchise operation – such as Macdonalds, Pizza Hut or Prontaprint. However, many substantial franchises can be run from a home base so long as you have an office area from which to manage the business.

Consider a cleaning franchise? There are two ways that you can start this type of business, either leading a cleaning team that goes around your clients’ premises or as a manager of several teams. In both cases the critical point is that the work takes place at clients’ premises! You do not need a factory or staff facilities. Because the operation is a franchise you are supplied with materials and other consumables on a regular basis and do not have to locate bulk purchases of cleaning fluids for example yourself. Therefore stock storage is not a problem.

What about buying an accountancy franchise? You can work at home on your clients’ books and records, visiting their offices when necessary.

Many other franchises can be packaged into a van – vehicle valeting, wall tie fixing, window replacement and many more trades type businesses. These can be administered from your home computer and the tools and materials kept in you van.

To be truly home based so that you can keep an eye on a sleeping baby perhaps you may want to consider a business that can be managed from your kitchen table. As these types of businesses are getting smaller they become less attractive for the franchiser to develop into a package to sell. Therefore, one word of warning, if the business is not regulated by a recognised trade body such as the the British or American Franchise Association or similar – view any business opportunity with a certain amount of caution. Do your due diligence properly and be aware that the smaller the business, the less likely it will succeed as a franchise chain. Home based business franchise opportunities usually mean that you are based at home but still have to take the services to the customer.