HOME BUSINESS IDEAS

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Best Home-Based Business Ideas

Organizing garages, advising eBay sellers, collecting debts, and pet-sitting are ideas for starting a business out of your home in 2007.
by Karen E. Klein

Is this the year you'll to start a small business from your home? If so, what opportunities provide your best bets for success? Menlo Park (Calif.)-based Homestead Technologies, which helps entrepreneurs design and maintain their Web sites, has come up with a list of the best home-based business opportunities for 2007. Manvinder Saraon, the company's vice-president of marketing and business development, discussed a few of them recently with Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow.

How did you determine which business opportunities have the most potential for home-based entrepreneurs in 2007?

We looked at the business areas where there's a lot of spending going on and the areas that are hugely popular right now. We also looked at commonly held "pain points" for consumers, and trends where there are markets breaking out. We also looked at how difficult it is to get started, in terms of experience, education, and money. For instance, we feel that one of the best opportunities presenting itself for the home business market is being a garage organizer.

Why specifically focus on garages?

Because there's been a popular trend toward home makeovers and interior design and closet organizing for a few years. You don't have a big barrier in having to educate the marketplace about whether this is a valuable idea. But the one area of the home that's not been focused on so far is the garage. And garages of typical Americans tend to be very cluttered. So there's a market there, and it also presents easy entry: You don't need a specific degree to organize a garage. You're offering your skills and your time and hard work.

What are some other categories with a similar familiarity in the marketplace?

Another one is a niche market created by the eBay phenomenon. There are more than 700,000 businesses selling on eBay, and many of them recognize that they would be more successful if they had access to market research like pricing strategies, shipping information, and product analysis.

Home-based entrepreneurs who have some experience with eBay themselves could provide educated recommendations to these sellers or would-be sellers on a consulting basis. It's a classic business-to-business niche, but with an application in a new and growing marketplace (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/7/06, "EBay Sellers Go Back to School: 10 Tips").

A similar idea would be doing specialized outsourcing jobs. Outsourcing is integral to many firms that have limited resources and need to focus on their core competencies, and a lot of companies prefer doing business with other small-business owners. So we could see home-based entrepreneurs doing outsourcing jobs for small companies.

What kind of outsourcing services would they provide?

It depends on their backgrounds. They could specialize in business functions like sales, customer service and support, human resources, recruiting, accounting—any competency that they have and that a small business cannot afford to build in-house, or chooses not to establish in-house. For instance, there are people who love interacting with the public and who are very good on the telephone. Small companies could hire a home-based person like that to answer telephone or e-mail inquiries and take orders, as long as they can get them the proper training and familiarize them with the company's products, policies, and services.

One of the specialized services that we pull out for inclusion in the list on its own, by the way, is running a home-based debt-collection agency. There is so much outstanding debt that we currently have more than 6,000 debt-collection agencies in this country. But we believe there is going to be more growth in that area and more fragmentation in terms of individual debt-collection services popping up to specifically service small businesses.