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Posts Tagged ‘home-based business’

Pick up any “business opportunity” magazine at your local newsstand and you’ll see a glossy attractive publication designed to attract people who are actively seeking ways to earn extra money, buy a franchise, or open a business of their own. After all, it’s the American Dream to own your own business and get rich, right?

You’ve probably heard the old saying, “Most people are too busy earning a living to make any money.” Common sense tells us that we’re not going to get rich working for someone else, with the exception of lucky folks like those who started with Microsoft or Google in their early days and got rich through stock options. The average American employee lives from paycheck to paycheck with barely enough income to cover their living expenses, leaving nothing for investment toward building wealth for a comfortable retirement. Hence the allure of the “Business Opportunity.”

As you flip through one of these “BizOpp” magazines, you’ll see a wide variety of advertisements for different types of businesses, ranging from simple “starter kits” for around $29 all the way to sophisticated franchises costing $100,000 or more. For most people, it’s impossible to raise enough capital to consider opening a true franchise. The franchise fees alone are often prohibitive, running into tens of thousands of dollars even for the lesser known businesses, or several hundred thousand dollars for better known companies. And that’s not even including the outlay required to actually open the doors for business.

At the other end of the scale, most people are aware that the cheap starter kits and “business in a box” packages are basically junk. But that leaves a whole host of medium-priced business startup concepts, ranging in price from around $500 on the low end to $10,000 on the upper end. I refer to these as “pre-packaged business opportunities.”

To explain why pre-packaged businesses are usually a waste of time and money, I’ll use windshield repair as an example. As I write this, I’m looking at an ad for a training program that costs $3,000, including starter materials. In case you don’t know what I’m referring to here, the basic idea is that small chips, cracks, or holes in automobile windshields can be repaired using a special liquid material that seals and repairs defects. This is obviously much cheaper than replacing an entire windshield. Hence the “opportunity” to start a business that helps people save money on their windshield repairs.

Now, in case you’re thinking, “There’s no way I would want to be in that business,” please bear in mind I’m just using this as an example out of hundreds of possible different business concepts advertised in the same fashion. And of course there are many people who would be attracted to such a “business opportunity” — people who really like cars, people who already know quite a bit about auto repair, and so on. Plenty of individuals are attracted to a business idea like this, which is why this particular “opportunity” has been around for decades.

Now, here’s the real question. Can you seriously expect to shell out $3,000 for some starter materials and training in the windshield repair business, then put a sign out, and expect to start earning money right away? Of course not! This is the #1 flaw with pre-packaged business opportunities: you still have to figure out how to market the product or service on your own.

Let’s take a closer look at the windshield repair business. Let’s say your goal is to make $50,000 per year in net income. If we assume that you can charge around $50 per windshield repair, at a material cost of around $10, then you have a gross profit (not counting your labor) of $40 per repair. To make $50,000 net, you’d need to find 1,250 windshields per year that required fixing. That translates to more than 100 repairs per month, and you’d need to keep this up month in and month out to meet your income goal. That works out to 3-5 repairs per day, depending on how many days per month you work.

Now, if you had 1,250 cars lined up down the road, all ready for the repair work, it would be nice easy money, right? But FINDING those 1,250 cars and then SELLING those 1,250 car owners on your service will be the real problem. In other words, you don’t really have a windshield repair job here. You have a SALES job, pure and simple. Most of your time will be spent finding business. Obviously, finding one car at a time will be totally impractical. Instead, you’ll need fleet accounts with major car dealerships, auto repair shops, car rental agencies, and so on. And you can bet that a number of other people (some of whom bought the same pre-packaged business that you did) have also solicited the same companies for their windshield repair business.

So again, what you really have here is a sales job. If this were a truly profitable business, then the company selling you the “opportunity” would not be making all their money selling pre-packaged businesses to people like yourself. Instead, they would be making their money by rolling out the service across the country and selling windshield repair directly to fleet accounts on a nationwide basis. But they know that there is actually more money to be made in the BizOpp world, preying on people who have the dream of starting their own business.

The message here is that any pre-packaged business opportunity that sells in the $500 to $10,000 range is typically worthless and a complete waste of your time and money. Please bear in mind that these numbers are just a guideline, and you must always exercise good judgment when evaluating any business opportunity. Just because a “hot” pre-packaged opportunity is selling for more than $10,000 does not mean that it is necessarily legitimate. Many rip-offs cost a lot more than that. But generally speaking, the promoters of these schemes realize they are aiming at people who can’t pay a lot of money to get started in business. So the packages are marketed in a way that will maximize the number of people that can afford to buy in.

If you are serious about starting your own business, then a pre-packaged opportunity is not the way to go. It might seem like an easy answer to your problem, but the very fact that it’s being sold as a packaged business probably means that there’s no real money to be made without a long hard sales grind. You’re much better off doing your own research, coming up with your own business ideas, and then testing your ideas with small advertisements to see if your concepts have any real potential. That’s how many businesses get their start. You’ll have a much better chance of making it in the world of business or self-employment if you ignore those BizOpp magazines entirely!

A Marketing System was founded in 2004 to serve as a platform for a group of the top income earners in a Network Marketing Business to leverage their success by giving their trade secrets to EVERY member in their group. With close to over 100 years of collective network marketing experience between them, they created and refined a turn-key sales and marketing system that virtually anyone could have success using.

This newest and most powerful upgraded version has just sent the system skyrocketing in sales and memberships. New people with little or no experience in this industry are seeing almost immediate results from this newer system. People who have never been able to achieve success in the Network Marketing arena are now making money, many of them within their first or second week.

This newest system is a revolutionary Sales and Marketing Opportunity that essentially eliminates the individual marketer’s sales and marketing abilities as a variable for their success. The system generates leads, then filters and even qualifies them for you. Next, highly trained professional’s follow-up and close the sales in order to turn the prospects into customers. This eliminates any interaction between the System’s member and the customer until after the sale is made and the money is deposited into the individual members bank account!

This revolutionary way of marketing now levels the playing field in such a way as that new marketers are able to enjoy the same results as seasoned veterans. By removing the new marketer from the equation, he now can focus on building the business while “outsourcing” the most difficult variables which are the sales and marketing aspects of the business.

This System is the first fully “turn key” automated sales and marketing system ever created for Direct Sales Marketing and Home Based Business Opportunities. It eliminates the following aspects for the new marketer:

NO more personal selling, telling or explaining, EVER!
NO more buying leads or learning how to advertise (unless you choose), EVER!
NO more prospecting or dialing for dollars, EVER!
NO more struggling and frustration in getting started!
NO more long learning curves!
NO more wondering how are the successful marketers actually making their money!

Here is the BOTTOM LINE………………..

You can turn this system on and head out to the beach, go to the mall with the kids, or on a long overdue family vacation and your sales and marketing system will be busy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week generating, filtering and qualifying your leads. Highly trained sales professionals will be making all of your calls and closing all of your sales for you! They system is on Autopilot!

If you have been looking for a Home Based Sales and Marketing Opportunity that eliminates all of the boring, time consuming, and redundant things like selling and explaining, you have found it. This new revolutionary Marketing Opportunity is exactly what you have been looking for. Sound to good to be true? You will never know unless you take the time to look will you.

To your Success,

Dennis Hampton
Marketing Consultant / Manager
A Business Made Easy, LLC

PS. “There are 3 types of people in this world: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened. We all have a choice. You can decide which type of person you want to be.” -Mary Kay Ash

Evaluating the home business opportunity.

If you are serious about making money online, then you cannot ignore the possibilities that are offered by home businesses. These days, however, there are so many opportunities available that sifting the wheat from the chaff can become a real problem. Everyone who wants to earn some serious money must acquire some skill in evaluating home business opportunities.

Perhaps the first thing that you will have to learn will be to gauge yourself. Its cliché, but you really do need to know yourself. Why? Because you will essentially be working with yourself in everything that you do, you must at least be familiar with your particular traits, including your talents, abilities, and inclinations. Unless an opportunity “fits” you, you probably won’t be able to use it well; it may even be completely useless to you.

Consider this situation: you are offered the opportunity to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, one that deals in oil. Your current occupation is that of a kindergarten teacher specializing in art. Chances are, with a combination like this, the CEO position wouldn’t be a good fit for you. It’s an incredible opportunity, to be sure, but it isn’t one that really applies to the person involved. No matter how hard he works, the kindergarten teacher has, at best, a slim chance in making the opportunity work for him.

Conversely, if you are given even just a simple opportunity in an area that you truly love and are talented in, you will most likely succeed. Using our preceding example, let’s imagine that our kindergarten teacher, aside from his teaching duties, is also an amateur painter. He is given the opportunity to display some of his work in a small exhibition, and he works extra hard to improve his craft. In this case, the opportunity presented to him fits his talents and inclinations exactly, and can well be a stepping stone to greater success.

In evaluating home business opportunities, the lesson is this: choose the opportunities that suit you; in areas that you love and have talents in. You will never go wrong by following this path. If you are interested in plants, start a plant nursery. If you are a book lover, consider starting a book club. If you are passionate about beauty products, consider setting up a small shop, maybe even mixing your own concoctions. The possibilities are endless and infinitely varied. Whether you want to sell goods or to provide services, you only have to make sure that you provide a quality product at a reasonable price. As long you as what you have to offer is useful, you should be able to make your own opportunities, not wait for them to come by!

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