Working As A Consultant From Home
Some people have a strong desire to work for themselves but never feel that the time is right to make a start
. However, a home based consultancy may well offer a low risk entry into business. It is a low cost way to start up and can provide an exciting and rewarding beginning to a self employed career.Firstly you need to see if working from home will suit you. You will have to ask yourself if you are self motivated and have the discipline to keep working when not under supervision. It can be very lonely working for yourself, especially at home with no colleagues to bounce ideas off. You will also need to be happy that your working environment will be conducive to your endeavours. It would be impossible to work from home if you are going to be continually disturbed.
The next step will be to assess your skill set and establish what services you can offer. For some this will be easy. For example a banker may wish to provide financial services and an accountant might want to provide business advice. If you do have a personal services skill such as these you will need to ensure that you intend targeting the appropriate level of work. It would be no use a lawyer working alone to target large publically quoted companies unless offering a very unique niche product.
If you do not have an obvious skill set, you will need to take a good look at all your capabilities and interests. It might be a good idea to write these down, together with an attempt to grade each skill and ability into 'little', 'medium' and 'lots'. Where you have a lot of knowledge you have a starting point for your business. Where you have perhaps an average knowledge but a keen interest, you might be able to quickly build this up by reading and research. Remember, to be able to offer consultancy services you only need to know more than your client does - not everything there is to know.
Some ideas worth considering are providing advice on applying for grant finance, bookkeeping services and building plot acquisition. There are many more of course but these are just three subjects where, after a couple of weeks of intense research, you could be knowledgeable enough to offer a valuable service to others.
Once you have established a service line that you would like to offer, you need to decide how you are going to market your services. Of course a good consultant will find their work by word of mouth, but you will have to start from scratch. As you will be working from home, a great place to start is by setting up a professional looking web site and begin to get it ranked by search engines such as Google. This is something you can do immediately, before you even decide to make the break from full time conventional employment.
With a great web site and a good idea of your business plan, you can start targeting local clients. Alternatively, if you are setting up a more specialised service you may need to seek customers on a wider geographical basis. Conventional advertising in newspapers and magazines is expensive and can be wasteful. Direct mailing to carefully selected businesses of the type that you feel might want your help will be more productive, especially if followed up by a telephone call and the offer of a no obligation visit.
However hard you market your home based consultancy it will probably be slow to grow. This should be expected and you must make provision for lower income at the start. To overcome this, present employment permitting, you can begin marketing to potential customers before leaving your job. Ensure that you have two or three clients before you go it alone. This will not only give you the confidence to start you business but will provide you with an income from day one.
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