If you have a brilliant business idea but worry your finances are holding you back, there may be a solution to your problem…
One of the main reasons women tend to hold back on starting their own brilliant business is a fear of the financial commitment involved. This is perfectly understandable. Setting up a business can be an expensive undertaking! You don’t know for sure when or even if you will start to turn a profit, and most people don’t have the capital to set themselves up without business loans or other outside investment.
A great deal of pressure is put on fledgling mompreneurs. Many women who have brilliant ideas for small businesses and the abilities required to make them successful never get the opportunity to prove themselves. If you have a business idea but worry your finances are holding you back, there may be a solution to your problem.
How to Fund Your Brilliant Business Idea on a BudgetClick To Tweet
Start smaller
If you have a grand plan to open a store in town, you will need a substantial budget to cover the start-up and operating costs of such a venture. One way to get over this issue is to start your business on a far smaller scale: for example, selling your products online from home.
There are two main models for selling from home:
- Importing or purchasing goods from wholesale suppliers and selling them on worldwide platforms like Amazon has become a popular alternative to opening a store. Plus, selling on Amazon Marketplace or opening an eBay store are sound business models. They require only a fraction of the investment of a bricks-and-mortar outlet. If you make your own products, you could consider a specialist arts and crafts platform such as Etsy, or a Shopify store. Using these global sales platforms does cost a fee and/or commission, depending on the provider’s requirements, but even so, you won’t have to spend anything like as much on marketing, website design and construction, and all the other aspects of selling online. Some platforms will also take care of all the logistics on what is known as the drop ship model, so you don’t even have to hold stock or organize deliveries to customers.
- Keep control of your business by having your own website and managing the operation yourself. You’ll need to have storage facilities for your stock. It will be more labor-intensive than using a sales platform. But, if you enjoy the process of running the business and have the necessary marketing abilities, you might be happier retaining control. Creating an effective website and running marketing campaigns will involve a higher initial outlay, but will cost considerably less than opening a real store in town.
Alternative premises
It’s not just physical or online stores that require a hefty investment. It can be prohibitively expensive to rent office space for a business. What are the alternatives for renting or leasing your offices? One possibility is to work from home. The viability of this model is dependent on whether you have a spare room in your house to accommodate a home office. You will need to be somewhere you can shut yourself off from the rest of the family in order to concentrate on your work. Many mompreneurs have taken over spare bedrooms, unused dining rooms, or had loft or garage conversions to make space for their businesses.
Apart from buying office furniture and equipment, repurposing a room needn’t be too costly. A conversion would be a more substantial investment. The advantages of a conversion or extension are that you will be investing money into your property. This could well be adding value to your home if you decide to sell it in future.
Garden offices, which are insulated summer houses, can make a good alternative if you don’t have the scope for repurposing a room. You could consider having a mobile office building, which could be moved on if you were in a position to expand in the future. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of a mobile office, check it out online and see whether this is an option that could work for you.
Side Hustles
One way that many moms have found into business is by starting with a side hustle. This could be anything that you do to earn additional money while retaining your main employment. The advantage is that you have the financial security of your regular income to rely on while you get your business off the ground. The only downside is that when you get home from a day’s work, you’ll need to get stuck into your side business each evening. You will need to find the time and the motivation to work in your spare time. If you don’t commit to your side business, it doesn’t have much chance of flourishing. Starting your own business is a significant commitment. If you have what it takes to be a mompreneur, the extra work of running a side business shouldn’t be too arduous.
Reinventing your business idea
If you’re struggling to see how you can achieve your dream on the funds you have available, you might need to rethink the whole idea from scratch. For instance, say you want to run a riding school, teaching people to ride on your own horses. Finding suitable premises and investing in livestock, their upkeep, staff, and all the other running costs would be prohibitive for most regular moms. However, you could look at how to find work as an instructor in a more modest way, such as advertising your services as a freelance trainer who teaches people at their yards on their own horses. From needing many hundreds of thousands of dollars to open a riding school, you now only have marketing, insurance, and transport to cover, yet you’ll still be pursuing your passion for a life with horses.
Whatever your idea is, don’t give up hope if you haven’t the capital to invest in a business. Look at the alternative ways you could get started, and if you are successful with your smaller venture, over time, you could well build it up to the size you first envisioned.
