Starting a home business is great as you can run a business without leaving the house. Many ideas lend themselves to this concept, and they are perfect for mums that want to earn money while still being able to look after the family at home. You’ve got yourself a great business idea, and you have set up your home business. However, you seem to struggle to make money when you look at your profits every month. While many things can factor into this, here are three that could be preventing you from earning what you deserve:
Excessive running costs
Believe it or not, but many home businesses can have excessive running costs. You assume that it costs nothing to run a business from home, but that’s not the truth. The key culprit is your energy bill, which will go through the roof when you run a business. You use up loads of electricity working on a computer all day, but you can also use up more gas energy as well because you’re in the house and want to feel comfortable.
Therefore, you need to work on lowering these two running costs. Find things like spray foam insulation to make your home better at retaining heat, negating the need to keep your heating on all the time. Use eco-friendly equipment to lower electricity costs, and you should save a fortune.
A large tax bill
At the end of each fiscal year, you have to pay tax in one way or another. This can be via a self-assessment, or you might pay corporation tax depending on how your company is set up. In either case, your profit margins can decrease when you fork out a hefty tax bill each year.
Consequently, you can tackle this by learning how to legally reduce your tax bill. Certain things can be put down as business expenses, which get deducted from your final bill. It is well worth learning what you are allowed to put down as an expense as it can help you save a lot of money. Thus, your profit margins open up as you are spending less cash.
Poor marketing
Home businesses can struggle to find customers as they might rely on one form of promotion. Typically, this is word-of-mouth marketing, where you get friends and family to spread the word. When you receive customers/clients, you hope they further spread the word about your business.
This should form part of your marketing strategy, but you need to implement other means to generate more interest and find more customers. Set up a website and improve your SEO, get on social media, use local SEO as well, try digital advertising – the list is endless. If you have a strong marketing strategy, your business should make a lot of money.
Yes, these three things are something of a generalisation and your business might not suffer from them. However, there’s a high chance at least one of them could be the reason your home business is struggling to maximise its potential.