How to Start a Home Based Beauty Salon Business

By Toni G. - a.k.a georgelarson, eHow Member

With skills for cutting hair, hair removal, facials, or nail care the possibility of starting a home based beauty salon is a real opportunity. There is a great demand for cosmetology services and, without overhead costs, providing the same services as a salon allows for competitive pricing. Here are tips for starting this home based small business.


Instructions:
   1      Cosmetology Experience

      Having salon experience will provide confidence for going out on your own. If there is no experience yet have a flair for hair design, manicures, or other cosmetology services start out by working on family, friends, and neighbors to be sure you have the skills that can be marketable. To get additional training check out local schools and colleges. Courses are affordable and you can be using the skills learned right away. Completing training also allows you to be certified and this certificate can be proudly displayed in your home based beauty salon.


   2.      Small Home Based Salon Business Legalities

      As with any business opportunity, it is extremely important that you follow local and state laws before you officially open your own salon. Register you small business with the Secretary of State Office in your State. (www.statelocalgov.net/50states-secretary-state.cfm) Check with local ordinances for setting up a home based service business in the home. There may be a need to insure your business, in case anything happens when a client is receiving services at your home. Contact your insurance agent to discuss what options are available.


   3.      Beauty Salon Space and Location

      There is a website that provides an interactive way to layout a beauty salon, no matter how large or small the space. (www.beautydesign.com/salon_planner.php) Locate a working space in your home where there is adequate space with access to water and electricity. If looking at the basement or garage ensure there is also adequate heat, air conditioning (if needed) and access to fresh air. Keep in mind that wherever the location there should be an entrance that is clutter-free and accessible for all potential clients. If this area is going to be claimed on income taxes for business use, the entrance needs to be specific for the home business.


   4.      Marketing a Home Based Beauty Salon Business

      If a business loan is needed, to purchase equipment and renovate an area for the beauty salon, a business plan should be written. Banks require this to secure a small business loan. There is extensive information on the Small Business Administration website for this and much more. (www.sba.gov). A marketing plan should also be drafted to be used as a 'roadmap' guiding all marketing activities to get you from start-up to a well respected and used small business. Here are some ideas for marketing a home based beauty salon.
      • Create and print business cards and hand them out to everyone you come in contact with.
      • Print flyers and/or brochures highlighting your services offered. A service business will get most of their business from referrals so give them to all your friends and family to pass out.
      • Leave your brochures at businesses where potential clients will see them, ie. bridal shops (bridal party hair and nail service), day care centers (for family cut discounts), etc.
      • Have a 'meet and greet' open house. Offer family discounts on hair cuts.
      • Have a special discounted service on each day of the week.


   5.      Pricing Beauty Salon Services


      Do a telephone survey of local salons in your area. Know what they offer and charge for those services. Price your services at a lower, yet competitive rate. You want the price to entice clients but setting the price too low may under rate the quality of your services.


Tips & Warnings :
Starting a home based beauty salon can be a very profitable business. You set your prices and hours of operation and are in control of the work-life balance. Start out providing limited types of basic services such are hair styling and manicures. As the business grows additional services such as facials, tanning, and hair removal can be added until satisfied with the small business in your home.

How to Start Your Own Highly Profitable Catering Business

Learn how to start a catering business, one of the most lucrative and profitable home business with a high potential for expansion and growth. It is both financially rewarding and fun.
by Jenny Fulbright
PowerHomeBiz Staff Writer 

The catering business

is one of the most lucrative and profitable home businesses with a high potential for expansion and growth. It is both financially rewarding and fun. Each catered event - whether birthday parties for children, breakfast in bed and intimate candlelight dinners for two, company dinner parties for 50 and wedding receptions involving a hundred or more guests -- is a new experience and challenge with a new group of people
 Whether you cater events on a full-time or part-time basis, the opportunities are excellent. However, catering is a demanding work, requiring stamina, ability to work under pressure, and excellent interpersonal skills. Your success will greatly depend on your reputation. To build a good reputation in the business, you should be willing to work hard and the ability to work under pressure. This kind of entrepreneurial business is definitely growing and becoming more popular with people of all income levels.
Demand for Catering
The demand for catering has increased tremendously through the years. According to the National Restaurant Association's 2008 Restaurant Industry Forecast reveals that social caterers are one of the fastest-growing segments of the restaurant industry, with sales expected to reach $6.4 billion in sales. As impressive as the figure may be, there is great likelihood that it still underestimates the industry, as many home-based caterers are not even listed in the phone book.
The increased demand for catering business is driven by the rising number of higher-income households, number of weddings and increased corporate events with companies, corporations, charities, civic groups, event organizers and individuals calling on caterers to host on- and off-premises events. Businesses of all sizes are using catered lunches, cocktail parties and dinner meetingto build their images and increase company sales. It is a matter of keeping up with the competition in promoting a company and/or product. H
Present lifestyles have also given way to increased demand for catered food service. Instead of laboring for hours, even days, in the kitchen preparing for parties or events, many homemakers now call on a caterer to provide sumptuous and unforgettable feasts for their guests. An increasing number of working mothers are paying to have catered birthday and graduation parties, as well as wedding receptions handled by caterers. The reasons are simple: if she is working outside the home, today's mother just does not have the time or the energy to do all the planning and staging of a memorable party.
Even the concept of eating out is slowly being changed by the business of catering: instead of going out to a restaurant to partake of a good meal, families can call on a caterer for that same great food.

Start-Up Costs
Catering offers an opportunity for starting a food service business with a lower initial investment than opening a traditional restaurant.
In the catering business, you can start as small or as big as your wallet will allow. The start-up costs for a catering business will depend on what you put in your kitchen and can range from $1,000 (if you work from your own kitchen) to $80,000 (if you outfit a professional kitchen). Most caterers do the cooking on-site, either using their own facilities or equipment provided by the clients. However, you would still need to do some prep-work in your own kitchen facilities (e.g. pre-cutting vegetables, etc.)
To keep your initial costs down, you can opt to start your catering business by renting items. You may rent the use of kitchen facilities, china, utensils, tables, tablecloths and linens, serving equipment and other staples. There are plenty of vendors exist to help you pull together the perfect event — decorators, designers, event planners, florists, bakers, and rental companies for portable toilets, cooking equipment, tents, chairs, linens, tableware, glassware, and silverware.  You can start buying your own equipment only when you have steady revenues. By renting equipment, facilities and supplies, you can use your first few months to build your reputation, develop some capital for investment and expansion and evaluate how much time and money you want to invest.
There is also the question of staffing, as it is nearly impossible to start a catering business solo. Check the costs and viability of hiring temp workers through the staffing agency vis-a-vis keeping employees in a payroll. Word of caution: when hiring temporary workers from the staffing agency, give ample time prior to the event to meet the people to see what they look like and whether they can complete the tasks you need them to do.
You can also take the start-up period as the time to determine the impact that this business will have on your family.
Income Potentiall
The income potential of catering depends on the size of the events you cater. Like any other business, however, catering requires excellent management and organizational skills for the business to succeed. Your ability to keep your operating costs down while maintaining a high quality service is also essential.
A quick survey of successful caterers across the nation shows that began with zero capital by working out of their homes. The basic starting up investment would appear to be around $500, with some big spenders capitalizing their idea with as much as $15,000 in order to get off to a fast start.
Many claim that profits in the catering business are the best in the food and beverage industry. An in-demand caterer in a large metropolitan area can easily gross upwards of $200,000 per year, while a small part-time caterer in a small town can count on at least $50,000 per year.
To cut down costs, you can employ several strategies to help keep your bottom line richer. You can use your house as your office, hiring employees and renting a kitchen in a nearby restaurant only on days you have catering events. With its seasonal nature, catering usually does not require a large number of year-round employees.

What You Need

The catering business is tough, with the details of preparing food off-premises and on-site for hundreds of people often times mind-boggling. It is not easy to cater to an event of 400 people, much more if you start to do thousands, some 60 miles from your home (what if you forget the sauce?). Successfully running a small catering business takes much more than a passion for cooking and a knack for preparing tasty dishes. You have to be a superb planner and manager as well. You need to be extremely organized, yet flexible enough to be able to deal with last minute changes. You also need a strong affinity for people and a kind of intuition as to what people enjoy in different environmental settings.
As the culinary sophistication and desire to be entertained of many people have grown, customers today are looking for the catered experience to be more restaurant-like. Many caterers are now offering signature dishes and house specialties as customers broaden their culinary experience. Others are offering family-style menu, especially for large informal functions and even corporate meetings..
Caterers today have to be adept not only in satisfying the taste buds but also excel in food preparation.  With the goal of wowing the socks off the clients, many caterers give ample focus on plate presentations, venue selection, and table decoration, among others. Some even hire artists to improve the presentation of the food, while some go to such lengths as indoor pyrotechnics, confetti guns and laser-light shows. Others employ in-house artists to customize each catered event from passing platters to plate presentations. Given the intense competition, caterers nowadays are prepared to do anything to keep the customer happy (and coming back for more).
You do not need special education or training to become a successful caterer. Although taking some courses at culinary institutes or vocational schools can help. Some start out by working for one or more catering businesses to get an inside look at how the business goes.
As with any business, your success will be directly related to the soundness of planning and the working of that plan. Start small and keep it simple. Understand exactly what your client wants, and give him what he wants in the way of service that reflects upon the client in a complimentary manner.

How to Start a Cleaning Service

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty and appreciate the sense of a job well done, then a cleaning service might just be your perfect opportunity.

Editor's note: This article was excerpted from our Cleaning Service start-up guide, available from SmallBizBooks.com.

 
If it can get dirty, chances are someone will be willing to pay you to clean it.
And that's why few industries can claim the variety and depth of opportunities that professional cleaning can.

The cleaning industry has two primary market groups: consumer and commercial. The consumer arena consists primarily of residential maid services, along with carpet cleaners, window cleaners and a variety of other cleaning services required on a less-frequent basis. The commercial arena is dominated by janitorial services, which typically provide a wider range of services than maid services, along with other cleaning companies, such as carpet and window cleaners that target businesses rather than individual consumers. While it's recommended that you decide on a niche and concentrate on building a business that will serve your chosen market, it's entirely realistic to expect to be able to serve multiple markets successfully.
Before you leap into the cleaning business, it's important to look at it with 20/20 vision. Though technology has certainly had an impact on cleaning services, this is not a high-tech business. Nor is there any glitz to it. And there will be times when you'll have as much trouble as Rodney Dangerfield getting respect.
But the upside is that you can build an extremely profitable business that will generate revenue very quickly. Most cleaning service businesses can be operated on either a part-time or full-time basis, either from home or from a commercial location. That flexibility gives this industry a strong appeal to a wide range of people with a variety of goals.
Another positive aspect of the industry is that within each category of cleaning businesses are market niches and operating styles that vary tremendously. Salt Lake City janitorial service owner Michael R. says, "We offer a wide range of services to a very limited clientele. We have refined our customer base to a group that we feel we can best serve in a way that will allow us to maintain those customers permanently."
This means you can build a company that suits your individual style and talents. If you like doing the work yourself, you can stay small and do so. If your skills are more administrative in nature, you can build and manage teams to do the work. For people who like working outside, the opportunities in service areas such as window cleaning and pressure washing are abundant. Residential maid services offer fairly predictable hours; disaster restoration and cleanup can mean calls at all hours of the day or night.
Few industries offer this tremendous range of choices and opportunities, and the need for general and niche cleaning is expected to increase in the future.

Do You Have What It Takes?

The necessary qualifications depend, of course, on the type of cleaning service you decide to start. But for any type of service business, you need a determination to make the business work, a willingness to please the customer and the dedication to provide a thorough cleaning job.
Another critical requirement for the owner and the employees of any type of cleaning service is honesty. "Clients must have total trust in the people who come to clean their homes," says Fenna O, who owns a maid service in Orlando, Florida. This is important whether they're cleaning bathrooms every week or carpets twice a year--or dusting and vacuuming an office at night.
A maid service is probably the simplest business in terms of necessary cleaning skills. Janitorial services, carpet cleaning businesses and other niche cleaning operations often require the use of special equipment and/or cleaning solutions for which you must be trained.
Beyond actually being able to do the work, a cleaning service operator needs some basic business skills. You need to understand the administrative requirements of running a company, you should be able to manage your time efficiently, and you must be able to build relationships with your employees and your customers.

Franchise or Independent Operation?

That franchises will work closely with you as you start your business and take it to the point where it is running smoothly and profitability is an advantage, especially in the beginning. But you may find that once you become established and are financially secure, a franchise agreement is a decided disadvantage.
For people who want to own their own business but would rather choose an opportunity that has proven successful for many others rather than gambling on developing their own system, a franchise is the way to go. Also, most franchises provide a degree of marketing support--particularly in the area of national advertising and name recognition--that's extremely difficult for individuals to match.
In the long run, you'll likely invest far less money operating as an independent service than as part of a franchise. Also, as an independent, you're not tied to any pre-established formulas for concept, name, services offered, etc. That's both an advantage and a drawback. The advantage is that you can do things your way. The drawback is that you have no guidelines to follow. Everything you do, from defining your market to cleaning a bathtub, is a result of trial and error. As an independent owner, you must research every aspect of the business, both before and during your business's lifetime, so you'll start right and adapt to market changes.