Home Based Businesses: A Recipe for Success?

Starting your own home based business is not always an easy decision to make. Home based businesses, after all, do not seem to be very secure, nor are they prestigious. However, before you get discouraged and start enumerating the reasons why you feel that your “little” home based business cannot possibly work, you should take some time to read the following stories.
A long time ago, there was a young drug store clerk named Asa Candler. Candler decided to start his own home based business after purchasing a beverage recipe from the town doctor for $500. That amount represented his entire life savings, but Candler was dedicated to making his home based business work. Today, that venture is a multibillion dollar company with an unmatched international distribution network. It owns the most recognizable brand name in the world. What is this company? You’ve probably heard of it. It’s called Coca-Cola.
One day, Anita Roddick, a British woman whose husband was frequently away on business, decided to make her hobby a moneymaking venture. Roddick, with little to do whenever her husband left town, didn’t choose to watch soap opera reruns or take aerobic classes. Instead, she took to concocting with various potions in her garage. She gave a few of these potions to friends and found out that they were very popular, so popular that she was soon selling them all over her neighborhood. This home business, from such inauspicious beginnings, is now an internationally-recognized franchise that does billions of dollars of business each year. What is this business? It’s called the Body Shop.
History bristles with examples of large corporations that started close to home. Truly, “great things start from small beginnings.” Did you know, for example, that Microsoft was started in a garage, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen? Looking at the company now, that’s pretty hard to believe, but it’s true. Back then, Gates and Allen were just two “geeks” who were more interested in writing software then they were studying in school. In fact, Gates dropped out of Harvard, worked on his home business, and produced MS-DOS – the rest is history. Bill Gates is, of course, currently the richest man in the world, and his company, Microsoft, dominates the software industry.
Now, you may never aspire to reach the heights that Candler, Roddick, and Gates have. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The purpose of this article has been to remind you that even the greatest of successes were at first small ventures, not unlike the one that you are planning to build. As long as you infuse imagination, creativity, and plain old hard work into your business ideas, there is no reason to believe that you will fail. Even if you do, you should simply pick yourself up, learn from your mistakes, and push forward. You never know: your home based business might become the next Microsoft, or the next Coke! Get excited and make it happen!