This article is from my UK newsletter but, reading through it, it is very appropriate to anyone running a business from home, even if it's an offline business.

Walk Don't Run

How many advertisements do you see in the various home business magazines that give you the impression that you can start your own business and then become a big, money making, success straight away?

Earning money from running your own home business is, of course, possible as you can see people doing it all the time.  Some are very well run family businesses while others are simple, one task, jobs that bring in a small extra income to fill a gap.

However, most people who think that the ‘get rich quick’ theme is easy to achieve are soon brought down to earth with a bang when they try the new business opportunity and find that it soon all falls apart and they end up losing any investments made.

They often try again and again but, still, it all ends up being a waste of time and money.  But it needn’t be just as long as they don’t try to run before they can walk, so to speak.  Trying to earn an extra income by running your own business is a two-fold task. 

Firstly, you must learn how to RUN a business, that being, a business of any kind.

Expecting to win over customers when you’re clearly only offering something that is available from any other person, who’s not really an official business either (but paid a commission for ‘selling’ a product) is foolhardy.

Secondly, you need to learn how to sell the particular product or service that you’ve chosen to get involved with. 

I could give the same product to two totally different people and one could be a roaring success with it while the other a total failure … why?, it’s the same product.

It’s all down to how you promote your business and how you run it.

Everything from your filing system to customer service is paramount to how successful you’ll become in business.The successful person will know all about planning ahead and projections.  Knowing what results they are likely to get all makes good business sense.  You must have a business plan.

The person who fails will blindly start that major mail shot with absolutely no idea of what to expect.  After spending hundreds of pounds or dollars on it, it’s only when no replies are received that they realise that their mail shot has been yet another failure.

The successful person will deal with a customer complaint in such a way that the customer will go away happy with the outcome and deal with the same business again.  The unsuccessful person will lose that customer forever because they didn’t know how to deal with it over the telephone.

Big sales come to the guy who promotes his product by way of that flyer that has been designed to sell the goods and win over customers every day in a continuous flow.  Nothing like this happens to the guy who puts out the third generation photocopy of the misspelled, grammatically incorrect, mess of a flyer that he’s just sent out.  

First you need to learn how to run a business, then sort out your product.

How quickly do you turn around an order?, Do you present your paperwork professionally or on scrap paper?, Do you honour guarantees?, Do you know how the law stands on distance selling?, What is your follow up procedure for ‘back end’ sales?, How are you on ‘link selling’?, Are you paying the right amount of tax and National Insurance?, Have you got a Data Protection Act number? … do you really need one?.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when deciding to work from home, running your own business.  For example, if you keep customer details on file, You MUST register with the Data Protection office so they know who you are.

When you sell ANY product through mail order to people living anywhere in the UK they are entitled to a full refund if they are not happy with what you have sold them … for any reason, within the first seven days..  The law states this under the distance selling rules.

You’ll find that all those successful in selling any product or service are good at running a business, that’s without anything to do with the product or service in question.  However, look at the failures, and you’ll find that they don’t know the first thing about running a business.  85% of those starting a new business fail within the first two years … don’t be one of them.