Search
Recommended Products
Related Links

 

 

Informative Articles

Home Business Leads Can Turn Into $$$
Home business leads are one way to maximize the growth of your business. Every business owner wants his/her business to expand. Everyone is interested in qualified home business leads and prospects. Simply by using only interested and responsive...
Home Office Tax Expenses
Self-employed individuals often work out of their own home. If this is the case with you, here's a primer on home office tax expenses you can claim on your taxes. Home Office Tax Expenses America is a country built on small businesses....
How To Start Your Home Business, Once and For All, This Year
You've thought about it for awhile now. There's a good chance you've rationalized it and said, "Next year I'll get my own business started." Guess what? It's next year, and there's no better time than the present to get your home business...
New Homes Construction and Renovations Showing Nostalgia for Old World Flooring
As the home construction and remodeling season gets underway, architects, builders, and realtors see a booming demand from discerning homeowners, who are seeking the warmth and luxury of old-world wood floors in their new homes and remodeling...
Work At Home, But Don't Become A Slave To Your Business
Although the expressed reasons for wanting to work from home are many and varied, most home based business owners cite the ability to set their own hours as a major factor in their decision to work at home. However, many people that have work at...
 
The Homestead Revolution V

Part 5 of a 6 part series Do What You Love

Some of us can and sometimes do find work we love in the

corporate world. Sometimes the work would not exist except that it

has corporate support or subsidy. Often you can do the same or

similar work outside a corporate environment. If you have not yet

done so, ask yourself how you would spend your productive hours if

you did not require pay. How many hours each week would you spend

at this activity? A time budget makes more sense than a dollar budget.

What would it take for this activity to provide the income you desire

when you do require an income? The unincorporated, non money

loving world allows you to make such choices and find others you can

work with. Even the loner can tailor her business to meet her needs

without much or any assistance, if rapid growth is not an object.



I've been amused by the marketing changes I have seen in my

lifetime. I remember the milk man bringing dairy products to our

home. The egg man brought eggs. The bread man, bread and the

garbage man came and hauled off our waste. Then our small town got

its first supermarket and soon, only the garbage man came to our

home. The others were forced out of business. We saved money by

forgoing home delivery service. Today we have a proliferation of

convenience stores, often charging inflated prices to save us a trip to

the supermarket. Lesson? There are always enough people who will

pay for convenience and there is nothing more convenient, profitable

and environmentally friendly than home delivery service.

Many of us have dreamed of holding up in a store, five to seven

days a week, as our customers keep us hopping or biting our

fingernails. Now I see so many disadvantages to storefronts, I would

always give them a second thought, unless I had money and life time

to throw away. A storefront usually means you are not starting on a

shoestring or you will soon wish you weren't. Storefronts can be very

capital intensive and you must lure customers to your location, then

hope they will come and buy on a regular basis. Home delivery sharply

reduces start up costs and is the ultimate in customer convenience. In

the beginning you can afford to take a few minutes to chat with

customers. In a storefront, the customer comes and goes as she

pleases, may not want to chat while other customers are present and

may be shy about asking for your time. A customer on their own

property is a comfortable and often sociable customer. Home delivery

offers regular repeat opportunities for one on one conversation,

friendship and sales. Your customers are expecting you, not the other

way around.

In a storefront, you hope your advertising will bring new

customers. With home delivery, you knock on a door and find out if

you have a new and regular customer, in a few minutes. Your delivery

vehicle and satisfied customers provide cheap advertising of the

highest quality - such that money cannot buy. You determine their

regularity by your delivery schedule. In a storefront, your business is

split between regular customers and occasional customers. That

makes it difficult to plan inventory requirements, week to week. With

fresh food, this can be very expensive. I say, consider home delivery

to compete successfully with high overhead, corporate convenience

and chain marketers. The delivery business lets you start small with

your daily transportation, one, two or more sessions per week. You

can expand your routes and add to products and services as you

choose to grow. You can reinvest profits a storefront probably will not

allow you for years. It is the best way I know for the little guy to

compete with corporate marketers.

Lessons Learned

I recently tried to create a local food bank and home delivery

business combination with a partner. Neither of us got paid and there

were no profits during the six week trial. It was my intention to

provide marketing for local organic food growers and encourage more

local gardeners to grow surplus for market. I relearned an old lesson.

A shoestring business needs capital reserves until it reaches a

profitable volume of business. It needs subsidy from other revenue

sources or it needs to be profitable quickly. I have chosen the last

option for my next attempt to jumpstart local food production. I am

going to market value added products, beginning as a food processor.

I will start with a heavy duty juice machine and a few dozen

canning


jars. I will deliver fresh, organic fruit and vegetable juices,

door to door. Profits will allow me to purchase more jars and fresh

food stock. As the juice business grows, I will buy bulk organic nuts,

seeds, grains and build vertical stacking, sprouting cabinets. I will find

very palatable juice and meal recipes for the sprouts and add them to

my juice line. Now I have a bulk food storage operation for survival

purposes that also generates profits. As this business grows, I can add

fresh fruit, vegetables and a truck to deliver them to more customers.

Profits from this expanding business will let me add partners and we

can start planting our own gardens, vineyards and orchards to produce

food crops all year. Profits allow land purchases - land allows

expanded food production. Vertical integration at the local level. One

produces, processes and distributes much or all of her own products.

Gardens can be quickly profitable if we focus on the crops we are

buying for juice and sprouts, gradually replacing them with our own.

The profitability of my already established and expanding juice

business gets a big boost. We can add crops for sprouts, like

sunflowers, corn, pumpkin seeds etc. These can also be sold as dry

goods, further expanding our market. Vines can produce their second

year, as well as many perennial crops. Trees take two or three years

for dwarfs, three to five for semi dwarfs and five to seven years for

most standards. The idea is to get permanent and perennial crops

planted as soon as money and labor allows. Our basic business is

indoor operations at start up, except for delivery. We then add outdoor

crops to support the indoor businesses. We have built up our

marketing, so we can market your goods and others' as well. Surely

you will pay us well for our marketing service, which saves you much

time and money. You can focus on efficient, conservational production

at home.

Starting the Garden

Gardening has traditionally been very inefficient and resource

intensive. Square Foot Gardening is a simple and elegant system for

hobby or commercial growing, regardless of planting acreage. If we

are beginning in virgin soil, it will pay dividends to do preparation work

as much as a year in advance of the first beds, tree or vine plantings.

No matter what the existing soil type, any soil will benefit by pre

treating with water and enzymes, such as Nitron. This will soften

subsoil down six feet and more, especially with multiple applications.

Sow a deep root cover crop like alfalfa on the softening soil, which can

be used for animal feed, sprouts or compost. The deep roots mine

subsoil minerals garden crops can't reach and brings them to the

surface in the above ground plant. Dead alfalfa roots decay and allow

more air, water and enzymes into the soil. Soil and subsoil become a

huge sponge and we prevent the loss of valuable runoff to a neighbor's

property. It reduces the need to collect and store runoff as well. We

will be using no till garden methods but if you are going to till the land

even once, it will go far more quickly if the soil has been pre softened,

which is not expensive or difficult to do. We would simply do this on all

land we are likely to plant next year and the year after. We would

continue growing alfalfa or a similar crop on this softened land, until

we were ready to make beds and tree wells. This way, the land,

whoever owns it, will be ready when we are.

If we are growing organically or planning to, we also need to start

composting and worm farming - ranching ahead of time. In

composting we now have biological aids that minimize turning and

speed the process to give us a specially enriched product in two or

three weeks from the start. The biological helpers I know about are

called Effective Microorganisms (EM). There are other competitors as

well. Compost made with these helpers creates special micro

environments around plant roots that make the plants healthier, more

vigorous and drought resistant. They have also been shown to boost

the immunity of animals who get them mixed with food or in water.

Topically applied, these little bugs also promote the healing of wounds

on livestock and probably humans. I am devising experiments to see if

EM affects the growth and reproduction of earthworms.



About the author:

Ed Howes sought and found, knocked and entered. Now he sees things differently. To see more of what he sees, please do an author search here at Go Articles.