There are limitless ways to design your business to bring in cash.  Some are passive forms of income and some require daily work.  Here are just a few examples to help you write this part of your business plan.

1.  Trading time for money:  This is one of the fastest ways to get the cash flow going.  This might be custom sewing, babysitting, house cleaning, painting, construction, teaching music lessons, tutoring, etc.  The biggest downfall to this plan is it requires time to make money and the hourly wage is set–so in order to increase your income you have to spend more time.  A lot of mamas need to spend their time in other ways.  This is not a bad way to start the cash flow ball rolling, but I encourage you to build a next step into your plan that will allow you to increase your salary without increasing your time spent.

2.  Trading Product for Money:  If the product is one you make yourself, then you are also trading time for money.  Under this level, there are several options.  You can carry an inventory (be sure to plan for space to store it, )  You can drop ship or basically sell a product that another person manufacturers and ships, or you can sell used merchandise (your own or other you have purchased at garage sales) on ebay or craigslist.  The big risk here is you can end up with product that doesn’t sell, losing part of your investment money.  Drop shipping fixes this, but you also earn a much lower percentage.  If you are trading product for money, aim for 50% or more in profit off the sale price of the item.  Ideally you’ll want to sell a product that runs out, like household supplies, groceries, candles, or cosmetics.  This keeps your customers coming back for reorders.  It is less expensive to keep a customer you’ve already won, then to constantly seek to replace them.

3.  Trading information for money:  This can be based on the other types of businesses but greatly reduces your time spent and increases the possibilties for profits.  If you have a fantastic house cleaning business, you could teach others how to keep their own home or to build a profitable business of their own.  If you enjoy custom sewing baby products, you might publish your original patterns for a profit.  This way you only have to create the item once, but you can sell it thousands of times with no new time spent.  Within your field of expertise you can create ebooks, electronic patterns, videos (homemade is fine if it is clear and gets the information across,) teleseminars, conferences, etc.

For the most profitable business, you will have more than one way to make money. Perhaps while you are still doing custom sewing, you launch your pattern business.  Or clean houses and teach housekeeping classes at the same time.  The trick is to never stop learning and perfecting you skills in your chosen field.  Be the go to expert that everyone is searching for.  And be confident in your knowledge while still recognizing the need to learn more.

Many of the popular companies you recognize (such as Dave Ramsey, Pampered Chef, Gooseberry Patch, Mary Kay, and Thirty-One) started with someone in their living room.   It grew to something much bigger, because they constantly reevaluated their business plan and changed slightly the way they made money until it grew exponentially.

*************************************************************

Pricing

Basic Economics tels us:  The higher you price things, the less you will sell.  The lower your price things the more you will sell.  But if you price things too low, the perceived value goes down and the item becomes less desireable.  There’s a pivotal pricing point that you will find from experience. 

To become a millionaire, all you need to do is help 1 million people enough that they each give you $1.  My home state has 5 million people, I only need to reach 1/5th of them to become a millionaire.  The United States has 307 million people.  The world has 6.9 billion people.  Find a way to reach them and you have it made.  Or, offer a product for considerably more and reach less people.  I have a friend who offers a detailed online seminar twice a year for $1,000 each to only 200 people each time.  But when she fills both online seminars, she makes $400,000 a year. 

There are also simple ways to earn money with a blog.  We’ll talk about this on Saturday.  Friday, I want to go into some business housekeeping such as staying within the law, building your business without debt, and basic record keeping skills that will make you happier at tax time.  Monday I’ll show you the best and lowest cost ways I’ve found to advertise.