Article Excerpt from Entrepreneur.com:

“I love talking about choosing a great home business idea because it’s one of the most exciting and fundamental parts of starting a work at home business. But thinking up a great idea is just the first step–it’s critical that you take the time to thoroughly examine the idea that’s to become your future livelihood. As most business owners eventually learn, it’s not the person running the business, the marketing or the employees that make or break a company’s success–it’s the quality and profitability of the idea behind the company.

When you go into business, you have to look at the idea or business opportunity driving it from a different angle than you might assume. Most people wrongly choose a business based on one of two personal biases:

It’s a business they already know. The hairdresser opens a salon, the lawyer his or her own practice and so on. Generally, a huge mistake. They’re thinking about the job–not the business. Just because you’re a good chef doesn’t mean you know how to run a restaurant. More important, it doesn’t mean a restaurant would be successful in your market.

It’s a product or service they’ve fallen in love with. Again, just because you love something doesn’t mean a profitable business will come of it. This is especially true for first-time entrepreneurs. Learning to run a business is hard enough; you don’t need to make it any harder by doing something you love rather than something customers love paying you a good profit for.
How can you be sure your intriguing idea is also something from which you can truly make a profit? Read Full Article Here.

Below is another great article excerpt from Entrepreneur.com:

“Starting a low-cost home business on the weekend is one of the easiest and most risk-free ways to dip your toe into the waters of entrepreneurship. It only takes your free time, a small investment in marketing materials and business supplies, and some hard work.

Michelle Anton and Jennifer Basye Sander interviewed more than 100 people living their dreams through weekend home businesses when they wrote Weekend Entrepreneur: 101 Great Ways to Earn Extra Cash (Entrepreneur Press). Here, we excerpt four great ideas for people who love to work around the house. If you’re already spending your evenings and weekends cleaning, organizing and improving your home, why not put those skills to work in a part-time business?

Holistic Housecleaning With Allergy-Free Products
Did you know that approximately 50 percent of Americans suffer from some kind of chemical sensitivity? Or that nationwide, every single day, 32 million pounds of household cleaning products are poured down the drain? Kind of makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?

Christmas Light Installer
This is a great seasonal business that specializes in providing the labor for holiday decorations. Once a year an opportunity to make excellent extra money arrives–installing and then later removing decorative outdoor Christmas lights for people who just don’t have the time or the energy to do it for themselves. Jennifer recently went to a spring dinner party at the home of a distinguished couple in their late 70s. Although it was May, the house was still hung with colored Christmas lights outside. These folks and others like them, busy or not quite in physical shape to remove their own lights, are your target audience.

House Staging
Have you ever been inside a house for sale, and although you liked the house itself, the furnishing and decorating gave you the willies? Some real estate agents insist that empty houses sell better; it allows a prospective buyer to “see” themselves living in the space when it isn’t all cluttered with the current owner’s things. “Less is more” when it comes to staging a house for sale, and an objective eye can help cut through the clutter that the longtime owner can’t see anymore.”

Read More from Entreprenuer.com

Entrepreneur.com

5 Home Design Businesses to Start

There’s a good reason why cable TV networks like HGTV, The Learning Channel and DIY Network have such a huge following from coast to coast: The home design and improvement industry is hot, hot, hot and is showing no signs of cooling off. There may be no better time than the present to tool up your skills and fire up your enthusiasm for a career in this creative and fulfilling field.

But while Americans are keenly interested in home improvement and home design and have made household names out of “Extreme Makeover: Home Editions” Ty Pennington, professional organizer Peter Walsh from “Clean Sweep” and other home design show hosts, the fact is many don’t have the time, talent or inclination to undertake such projects themselves. Or they enthusiastically take up a paintbrush, rearrange the furniture or make a stab at organizing their lives, then toss up their hands in defeat when they realize it’s not as easy as it looks.

All this means there are plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs like you to start what we are broadly calling a home design business. In our startup guide Home Design Services, we’ve outlined the information you need to start five different home design services: interior design, interior redesign, professional organizing, building preservation/restoration, and faux painting. Here’s a closer look at each of those businesses so you can get feel for the opportunities available in this industry, and what will fit your personality and creativity the best.

Click Here to Read Full Article from Entrepreneur.com

(FSB Magazine) — When a new product from Microsoft debuts, it doesn’t arrive quietly. Instead it gets tracked through the R&D pipeline by trade magazines, bloggers and carefully controlled announcements from the marketing department.

Small-business innovations don’t work that way. They tiptoe into the market, heralded by minimal PR (if any) and propelled instead by the inventor’s enthusiasm.

What makes that more ironic is that small businesses these days come up with better ideas more consistently than their corporate competitors. “Rates of R&D growth among small firms tend to have been higher than among large R&D-performing firms,” says John Jankowski, director of the R&D Statistics Program at the National Science Foundation.

To find these innovative companies you need a field guide, and that’s were FSB comes in. Exploring everything from ocean-generated electricity to six-foot roses to an ATM for books, the stories on the following pages offer a preview of the companies, products, people, trends and ideas likely to make news in 2007 – all from the world of small business.

Read 10 big ideas for 2007 from Fortune Small Business

Falling fuel prices may seem like good news for entrepreneurs. But a properly designed gas tax could be even better.

(FSB Magazine) — Like many entrepreneurs, Tedd Saunders finds most taxes annoying. He co-owns seven East Coast hotels, including the Lenox in Boston, and would love to see the estate tax gutted. He also rankles at a hotel room tax levied by lawmakers in his home state, dubbed “Taxachusetts.”

Yet Saunders supports a higher tax on gasoline – even though it would raise costs for his employees who commute to work by car and might boost prices charged by his suppliers.

Says the hotelier: “We need to make tough choices to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and to recognize this looming crisis of climate change and what it will do to our lives and our businesses.”

As FSB went to press, the cost of gas had plummeted 26 percent since July, to a national average of $2.21 a gallon. In the past that would have been considered good news, but the reaction today is decidedly mixed. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 59 percent of respondents nationwide said they would support a gas tax if it would result in less fuel consumption and less global warming.

Read Full Article from Fortune Small Business