When my wife went to university in London in the eighties one of her professors was of the opinion that the education was wasted on women, since they would leave university, get married and have children. While nobody says these things anymore in public, we still seem to have the same mentality.

Today I travel around the world and speak with all kinds of people about micro-business, like home-business. Often the conversation includes the so called “skill shortage”, felt especially hard in Australia these days. When I question this alleged shortage, I’m always surprised about how little consideration is given to well skilled and educated parents - mainly women - sitting at home looking after the family.

After one of these conversations today, I was reminded of this professor and began wondering if he was right with his opinion in the final analysis? Trivially, his assertion that educating women is a waste, is completely nonsensical, but the final result to the economy seems to suggest his analysis could be right. How else can it be explained that we ignore this massive “skills resource” sitting at home.

The technology we at WinWeb have developed allows for work from anywhere at anytime, others have done the same in other areas? Where is this “skill shortage”? The truth in my opinion is more the fact that we often block this remote working possibility from our minds, but why?

If you consider the skills potential of parents, if each parent would only contribute one hour on average per week to their learned professions. This would be a staggering number of man hours per week.

The benefits for the home working parent would be very tangible too. They could show a almost uninterrupted work history, stay in touch with their profession and would therefor find it much easier to get back into full-time employment after the kids have grown up.

To often my conversation partners look somewhat bewildered at my initial suggestion, but then often admit they had never thought about this possibility.

It is not a waste to educate women or any parent, it is however a waste to treat parents as if they do not exist in work terms. I consider it an insult to each parent and unbelievably damaging for our economy. — ST.

When you talk about business, small business or even micro business, eventually the talk always turn to making money. How to make it, how to make some more and how to make sure the business keeps making money in the future. Most often than not people are surprised by my simple answer:

If you are passionate about what you business does, you will make money. If you are only after making money, you won’t.

I can proof that to you, too. My wife will always ask me why I can’t give up work, she will say you don’t have to do anything, why not stop? Answer: Passion. Why would people like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Rubert Murdoch carry on working, after they amassed not millions, but billions? Answer: Passion.

We are not driven by making money, but by making a difference, leaving a mark. We can’t wait to tell people about our “brilliant ideas”, even if they turn out not so brilliant sometimes. I got up today at 4:00 am, because I have a great meeting set up today, with some people I wanted to meet for some time, and I can’t wait to tell them my ideas about the future of our business, so I’m going over my presentation again.

I’m sitting here at 5:15 writing my daily postings to you all, you may think I’m nuts. Or you may think I’m driven by the idea to make small and micro businesses more successful, but whatever you think, it is not “my god is this guy greedy!”

Greed is NOT the same as passion! So be passionate about your business and your customers will love you for it. ST.

It may be that you have some spare space in your house, out-building, or you even a whole house, you can’t or don’t want to sell or rent out, then you could generate income by setting it up as a coworking space, a coworking wiki-site explains it like this:

Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.
Or, it’s like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture. Which is the opposite of most modern cafes.

All you need is tables, chairs, a WI-Fi setup and apparently a coffee machine and you are in business. But remember you will have people in your house every day, so make sure you are OK with that, before you start. Have a look at the website for coworking to get some more ideas, or read the blog.

It will be a great place for working, socializing, and getting ideas and help from others. ST.

NOTE: If you have any problems with setting something like this up, give our 24/7 live support a “click“, they can help you.

You may speak more languages and have market segment knowledge about a certain product or service. That is a great basis for a small business startup, two scenarios spring to mind:

Virtual Export Assistant: You may know, or can find a business which has a great product, but they don’t export yet. You could offer your services for a particular country and become their Virtual Export Assistant for that country. You use your language and local knowledge skills and open up a new market for this small business.

Virtual Import Assistant: You could source - using your language and local knowledge skills - products in other countries for retailers in your country of residence. Or you could help the foreign business to import into your country.

But remember you are working with small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants, you need to keep the price low for them. To do that you can offer your services to ten or twenty businesses, each paying you a retainer of about $200 - 400/£100 - 200, this makes it affordable for them and low risk, while presenting them with sales opportunities. If they pay you a small commission on top, you are generating a nice little income for yourself.

For this kind of service it would be advisable to get a low cost telecom service for your calls abroad, sometimes you can get fixed monthly subscription pricing for unlimited calls - have a look around.

Other than that your setup cost should be low, if you have computer, ADSL, and telephone. Monthly cost including telephone could be as low as $90/£45.

You can work from home, have your work-life balance and do it on a shoe-string - these are the business ideas I like. ST.

NOTE: If you have any problems with setting something like this up, give our 24/7 live support a “click“, they can help you.

With all the new mobile gadgets, with Wi-Fi and free data service, it is obvious that more and more people will consume their news and information electronically. This has been happening for some time now. Local news is still harder to come by, but you could change that with this little business start-up idea.

You could get some pre-designed portal software, blogging software or a forum to set up your portal and then write about local events, with things like this:

• Live events - like Live Jazz in the local pub,
• New Business launch - write about the company, people and products;
• Evening Classes - anything from cooking to phontography;
• Club News - what time they meet, run a prifile.
• For Sale Section - from paperclips to houses and cars

You get the idea, there are many more events you could report about. Take leaflets around to get it started and then get revenue from ad’s of local businesses, clubs, for sale ad’s, and get paid for event announcements. Have a look at your local paper that will give you some idea, what people want.

It will get you involved in many areas of your community you didn’t even know existed, get you out of the house, make new friends and earn you some money - what else can you want. One day Google may pay you some money to supply local news to them, who knows?

There is money to be made in each locality, be the first and hog the niche first. Work from home, keep it cost effective, then the set-up should be about $150/£75 and the monthly cost no more than $20/£10, assuming you have a phone, computer and broadband. ST.

NOTE: If you have any problems with setting something like this up, give our 24/7 live support a “click“, they can help you.

This question is hard to answer, because there are no simple answers here and the outcome of this situation could easily be fatal to the business and if you are personally guaranteeing this money - and you probably are - this could potentially be very serious for your personal life too.

The things that you need to do, in my opinion are:

• Find out why? If the reason given are not satisfactory, you will need to get legal advice.
• Try and extent the deadline? If that is possible reduce the overdraft as soon as you can, or negotiate a stepped reduction of the O/D limit, ie. by month or week.
• Try and change bank, ASAP.

People often believe it is somehow always their fault, if the bank changes their attitude towards them, that is not always the case. Banks will always try and make you believe it is, but in reality they my have new internal guidelines for handing out money - banks can get into “cash-flow” problems too. So - don’t automatically assume it is always your fault.

Banks may have the right to recall a loan or overdraft, but I’m not sure if they have the right to damage your business by doing so - especially if the reason for the recall is not your doing. So if it comes to the crunch, get legal advice. This is one of the reasons why I hate these, IMO, often legal but still unreasonable arrangements between banks and clients.

Many years ago someone made the the loan, O/D - umbrella analogy and it goes like this:

When the sun is shining your bank gives you an umbrella;
when it is raining, they need the umbrella themselves.

It is best if you do everything possible to not need banks in the first place, by bootstrapping, outsourcing, planning your business and keeping your fixed costs as low as possible.

Remember sometimes, attack is the best defense even with banks, they may need their money, but they do not need bad publicity either. ST.

I received this question form a lady working from home, she emailed and explained her business had started of well, she got some clients and kept her costs down. But her turnover is not high enough and she wants to grow her home business. Interestingly she does not want to grow the business more than 20 to 30%, she wants to stay at home with her business. This is not unusual for many small businesses and start-ups, a home business is an ideal way to run your own business.

Getting back to her question, there are really four answers:

• Increase the number of customers - this in turn will increase the your turnover, yielding the extra business you want, while at the same time make your business more recession proof;
• Increase the order frequency from your existing customers - this could be more difficult, you need to find out if you can replace someone else as supplier, or diversify your offering;
• Increase the average order value - same as before, offer higher quality or premium service.
• Increase your own efficiency - outsource more if you can, cut costs this will not grow your turnover, but increase your bottom line, so you can take more money out of the business for yourself.

Once you start thinking about these options you will find out what you can do, often it is a combination of things to do. But you need numbers, so plan your business, get an overview and find out where you stand.

Remember what you can measure you can manage. ST.

Disclaimer: As with any of my readers questions, I do not have all the answers and here on my blog I can only give you some ideas, since I know very little about your small business. If any of you can add anything here do so for the benefit of my reader, who asked the question and everybody else, leave a comment below - I’d be most grateful.

I’m sure you have some expertise in a special (niche) field, it could be something to do with your training and education, or a hobby you really enjoy.

You can make money with this niche knowledge, and the boorstrapper blog has a post today on how to do that. Raj has posted a great list with an easy step-by step guide on how to build your authority and it centers around setting up a website and blog, nothing could be easier, even if you are not a tech. geek. This type of small business venture is extremely ego-friendly too.

I find this kind of entrepreneurship especially useful for parents at home. Just think about the number of highly skilled moms and dads at home enjoying parenthood, but wishing at the same time they could stay on top of their professional game. This is a fun, flexible way to stay involved and great for any CV should you ever want to go back to work for someone else - although I doubt that very much.

Long before you make it into the top 100 blogs of just about anything, you will find people willing to pay you money for ads, white papers, speaking at events, invite you to product launches, etc. - you will be an authority in your field, it’s just a question of time and passion.

You do not necessarily have to be that good at writing itself (look at me!), use a spell-checker - but be passionate about your topic and people will read your blog and respond. It is the a great feeling to communicate with your readers world-wide.

One final point, blogs are being sold like hot-cakes for serious amounts of money these days, do not under estimate the selling potential of a venture like this!

So just one question then - what are you an Authority in - tell me, I will read it? Setup and running cost for this, $20/£10 per month. ST.

When you have internal meetings try to keep them short. I often see meeting in small organisations that linger on and on, often even about non - business issues. Large corporations have often the shortest meetings at director level, while lower down in the organisation the meetings go on and on, too. Don’t waste your valuable 9 to 5 business time like that.

Look at you calendar and write next to each meeting how long it should take and stick too it.

While it is important to socialize, you have to make sure your tasks get done on time, so calling a meeting for ten minutes to just discuss the issue at hand will instill a sense of urgency and focus into the participants of the meeting. If you allow the meeting to drag on, by the time it’s over nobody remembers what the meeting was about.

Let me say it with the words of the British chairman of Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd. Arthur Bryan, who had this advice for any small business:

The key is not to spend time, but using it.

Remember this is a rule for internal meetings, for meetings with customers this rule does not apply - within reason of cause. The customer should determine the length of the meeting. Suppliers will probably thank you for short meetings, so they too can get more done.

Meet with coworkers after work for bowling or golf, that will build your team spirit and give your team the social time needed. ST.

You are in a good position - because you will have to start your business by selling your service or your idea for a product, to make any money.

Bootstrapping is what you need to do, you can find information about this in my categories, about bootstrapping.

I can also recommend a great book I got yesterday:

Bootstrapping Your Business by Greg Gianforte (ISBN: 978-1-4196-6955-2)

In my last post, I touched on the cost to set up a home business. If you read some of the articles on the left hand side of my blog you will get a pretty good idea, what I would consider when starting out - so have a look.

As a bootstrapper you will order the second-hand books of cause, won’t you. ST.

Disclaimer: As with any of my readers questions, I do not have all the answers and this is not business advice, since I only know very little about your business. If any of you can add anything here do so for the benefit of my reader, who asked the question and everybody else, leave a comment below - I thank you for your effort.