Self employment becomes an option when people have enough experience in a business and know enough about how business operates to make it a real option.

Will your business idea work?

This means:

Some people have quite literally started with no more than an idea, and made it work. Others have built businesses from scratch. Large scale businesses and corner shops are all businesses.

All successful businesses have one thing in common.

Successful businesses all meet a need of customers.

The busy mixed business store supplies customers because it's convenient. The big corporation produces things people want and need.

Customers benefit from getting the things they want. The entire global market is based on supply and demand.

These are the questions you have to ask yourself:

You need to do some market research for this.

• Who buys your kind of products?
• What do they want?

What are their interests? How much do they spend? What sort of volumes can you sell? Should you sell your product to retailers or wholesalers? Should you just sell your idea to a manufacturer? Can you create an online business in your line of work?

You see how basic this really is. This information is bread and butter for any business, and you do need to know.

How can you do business?

You'll have noticed that how you do business is a fundamental part of this whole process. It's critically important, too. Some people can do business with just a phone, others need a factory, a team of researchers, and a fleet of trucks. Doing business costs money, too. Those costs can make or break your business, if you let them.

You have to know your costs.

This is absolutely essential.

Don't just jump in and wait for the bills to arrive. Successful businesses stay well ahead of their costs, and don't get taken by surprise.

Example:

Say an IT expert wants to run his own business. He can work with any system on the market, and he's actually pretty good, and up to date. His specialty is security.

Some questions for this guy:

So far so good. Now it gets a bit more difficult. This is another basic element in self employment, and it's genuinely tricky.

Prices:

You'll notice that the original basic business idea of being an IT security consultant has got pretty complicated, in a hurry. He's his own boss, anyway you look at it, and that means thinking like a boss, which is what he's doing.

The guy doesn't have much in the way of costs, and it's probably just as well, if he's relying on local businesses as the main customers.

He's not spending much, but using up time which could be spent on other jobs. So he's already in a situation where he has to decide how to operate his business to get the best returns.

This is a pretty straightforward version of a home-based business, in an industry where demand is pretty high, and continuous.

There's another side to the answers to those questions, and it's why this particular business will succeed. The IT guy has some advantages:

Who needs IT security? Everybody. Local businesses, particularly.

Of course they do. They can't get service from non-locals without waiting for ages, and booking an appointment with someone. This guy can be there in half an hour. This is a service they really want, and need. They'll forget about the competition.

How do you do business? At the lowest possible cost to yourself. Sounds obvious, but unless you know your stuff pretty well, not so easy to achieve. It also means you don't have to charge as much, and you're that much more competitive.

Costs like these are potential killers. He could spend weeks paying for any one of them, if he had to do any of these things.

Actually, if he does it right, he may never need an office, or a workshop, or even an answering service. That would save tens of thousands a year.

Business overheads are no joke. They're expensive, continuous, and you can find yourself quite literally working for no other reason than to pay them.

We've also got a suspiciously good match between this guy's business and the needs of the local market.

But that's how successful businesses are made.

He does know his market. It's no coincidence that he's decided to set up shop locally. In fact, it's more than likely one of the local businesses suggested it to him, by asking for help with an IT situation. Equally likely is that somebody just mentioned the local businesses were sick of not being able to get IT help, particularly with security, when they needed it.

Successful businesses don't just happen.