How To Start A Small Business From Your Home In Nigeria

There are definitely benefits that come with starting and running a business at home. You don’t have to spend time and money commuting to work. And you’ll save on extra rental and utility costs. It’s great for an enterprise that’s just starting out—you get to keep more of your revenues as profit, and reinvest some of it into expanding the business.

But launching a home-based business isn’t all smooth sailing. There are a number of steps you need to take in order to succeed at it. This article explains those moves, so you can follow them when you’re ready to set up. Let’s run through them.

Come Up With A Business Idea

You will want to choose a business idea in a field that you’re skilled at. This will limit the errors you’re going to make as you build out. It should also be a business that has a good chance of thriving, given the realities of the market, industry, and economy in which it will operate. So it’s important that you test your idea with people who belong to the demographic that the business will be targeting.

Not all business types are suited for private residences. Whatever idea you come up with should be something that you can execute and run at home.

Create A Business Plan

If you’ve determined that your idea can sail, you should proceed to write a business plan for it. Your business plan should explain what your business is, what it does, and its target market and competitors. It should also contain information about the business’s founder(s), chart a course for its success, and estimate its revenues, profits, and expenses in its first few years.

A proper business plan will serve as a roadmap for your organization, one to which you can compare your progress over time.

Register Your Business

Next, you’ll have to register your business with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), a government body that has the duty of maintaining a registry of businesses in Nigeria. The registration requirements you’ll need to meet will depend on your company’s legal structure.

The CAC will demand that you propose a name for your business. You will do this in order to verify that the name has not been taken by another company. After securing a business name, you’ll fill out a form, pay the required fees, and have your application processed.

Create Separate Financial Records For Your Business

Separate your personal and business finances, and manage them as distinct entities. This will enable you to protect your personal assets from the consequences of your business failing if this happens. Open a business bank account, and get an accounting program that’ll enable you to track your business’s revenues and expenses.

You may be tempted to keep loose boundaries between both setups. But this will only muddle things up, and make it difficult for you to track and manage your business’s finances. So, maintain separate financial records for yourself and your business. Do this even if you’re running a one-man business.

Prepare Your Office

If you’re like most people, you’ll enjoy the comfort of working from home. But if you don’t set a boundary between your work and other aspects of your life at home, you may be less productive than you could be. Setting up a workspace should help in this regard.

Get the items you’ll need for work if you don’t already have them—tools, technology, and furniture. When you have these things ready, you’ll be able to start off.

Prepare And Execute A Marketing Strategy

The volume of demand for your products or services will depend to a large extent on the success of your marketing efforts. This is why you need to reach out to your target market, and get people interested in what you’re offering.

Word of mouth works; if your first set of customers are happy with what they get from you, they could refer their contacts to you. But you should also focus on connecting with your ideal audience via social media and email. Offline marketing methods like distributing flyers may prove effective as well.

Final Words

Starting a home-based business is often not as easy as many think. A good deal of planning and prospecting has to go into it if it’s going to succeed. But it’s certainly possible to establish and run an enterprise from home that does good numbers and grows quickly. It all starts with following the steps we’ve talked about here.