10 Tips On Starting A Home-Based Business With Your Spouse

With extreme inflation impacting each household, savings are at a constant drop. The annual increment in your income is never enough! Under such a scenario, who would mind a source of extra income? Starting something of your own becomes an interesting opportunity to keep the money flowing. Isn’t it?

This is a great opportunity for all those who dream of setting up a home-based business. Now the perspective that we bring here is about venturing into this space with your spouse. How would you like that? Does anyone dream about co-managing a business with their partners? Agreed, that it is a great risk. Even when your partnership at home works well, doesn’t mean that you could be great at doing business together. Frankly, it can go either way.

So before you take the first step, it is advisable to understand the pre-requisites of a business that you share with your spouse.

Co-Existence

For those who are starting the venture and one partner acts as a silent partner, it still seems manageable. However, in case both of you are acting partners, it is a lot to think about. If you feel that you will not be able to deal with the constant scrutiny or deal with the others’ presence day in and out. Think through this idea again!

1. Are You On the Same Page: Why do you want to start the venture? Do you both agree on the aim? Are you working towards the same goals? Have you thought everything through thoroughly together? This includes your budget, who you’re with for your business electricity (you should be with the cheapest option), how you’re going to advertise your business, etc. Even a slight misalignment of the goals can cause great rifts between the greatest working partners. And, your marriage can be at stake here.
2. Think of a Business Plan: Each business requires a plan to begin with: outlining your investments, your competitors, your target areas, and the defined ways to achieve them. If you’re not sure what to do but you are confident you want to start a business from home, you could have a look into some products to sell on shopify? Once you outline the draft, you could take opinion from a business consultant to understand the viability of it all. Make sure that your plan includes security. This is something most home businesses forget about and so their resources get stolen and they can’t do any work. Make sure you have planned for a home security camera alarm system.
3. Separate out the Family and Business Matters: Howsoever smartly you begin your business with your spouse, family matters will keep cropping up. Shut that door, then and there. You need to understand that both issues have different requirements and space in life
4. Define Roles: Define yours and your spouse’s role, along with the role of your support staff. Outline the KRAs and Competency parameters. You will need all of these to align roles appropriately.
5. Communication: Keeping lines of communication open is a pre-requisite. Do not shut doors on each other’s’ ideas. It will lead to mayhem. Give each other both: the required space and opportunities to express, whenever desired.
6. Act as a Team: You are a team, so act like one. Especially in front of your customers.
7. Plan for Contingencies: Always start a business upon planning for contingencies. You must always have a Plan B. Help each other out whosoever’s fault it is.

The abovementioned tips will surely come handy if and whenever you decide to launch a business with your spouse. Now, let’s take a look at some of the best business ideas in this context:

1. Home Based Dealership: You can initiate a clothing business by bringing in traditional/low priced outfits directly from the merchants and reselling them online/physical store. You are effectively benefitting the merchant by removing multiple channels of sales. Enhancing their profit and yours too.
2. Manpower Services: You could well open an employment services firm that deals with blue collared workers or some white collared jobs as well. Connect with few companies or factories, requiring a regular inflow of works men on a contractual basis. You can then advertise your services to regions with high density of works men like welders, craftsmen, mechanics etc.
3. Home Tutoring: This is one of the most chosen for, home-based businesses by women everywhere. It is the sheer nature and joy that something like this brings about. The educated women of today are dealing with several responsibilities, both at home and work front. In cases wherein they are unable to do a full-time job, outside of the home, they can easily tutor children. This could be done through one-on-one classes, batches of classes at their own home or home tutoring by online/offline means. There are several online portals that assist students seeking home tuitions with tutors having the desired qualifications.
4. Freelance Writing: Both you and your spouse can be great freelance writers. You can choose to expand your team of writers, as the work grows. Initiate by reaching out to companies that outsource a lot of writing work, from their website content to regular blogs, and articles.
5. Creative Gifting Solutions: Home-based entrepreneurs like these use the easily available material to create creative gifts for children’s parties, return gifts, gift baskets etc. You could try and research on the net, to learn few essential tricks and identify cheap marketplaces to order the raw material from.
6. Home Baking: Ok, who wouldn’t want a piece of cake? Why not bring in your spouse for helping you with the piling orders. Let one of you look at the inventory of material, manage the orders, and deliver them. While the baking expert can create marvels through his/her baking skills.
7. Graphics Designing: Graphic designers help us all by designing the flyers advertising our businesses, informational pamphlets, advertisements etc. For home entrepreneurs like ‘home bakers’, a product catalogue will come in very handy. Wherein, clients can have a look at the different kinds of bread, cakes, and pastries they can order from.
8. Virtual Assistant: Employers worldwide are looking for virtual assistants to help them with day to day planning. You can organize meetings, respond to emails, enter the data or update their social media accounts.
9. Transcriptionist: You just need the gifted power of ‘listening’. Listen to the audio file and write what you hear. You could be working for a lecturer giving online lectures or a speaker. Just type in the speech in the desired language, without any grammatical and factual errors.
10. Corporate Trainers: Sitting at home, you can work as a corporate trainer and guide employees of a company on a chosen topic. It could be a team building session or a session on improving their communication skills.

These are some of the ways and means wherein you can involve yourself and your spouse in fruitful home-based businesses. If you keep in mind the tips shared in the article, it will be a smooth course for both of you. You could then take your pick from amongst the given ideas of business.

Monica Gill is self-driven person currently associated with SmileTutor the best maths tuition agency in Singapore. She is passionate about writing and collecting new books. She loves traveling whenever she needs time off of her busy schedule. Her favorite holiday destination is Hawaii.