The home business works very well for a variety of tradespeople providing domestic or contract services. A case in point: A home based gardening business can be very profitable, and if you're working locally, you can cut your costs to almost nothing.
Example: Sam Brown, Gardening Services
Sam is a qualified horticulturalist, with trades certificates, and his wife says he's got green toes, not just a green thumb. Sam's an enthusiastic professional gardener, able to turn a suburban desert into an oasis.
Sam had tried operating out of a shop, but found the overheads impossible. He broke even, perhaps occasionally did a bit better, but in his line of work, just maintaining his equipment could make the difference between a profit and a loss. It wasn't working. This is a common problem for businesses of this type.
Fortunately for Sam, his wife, doing his books, realized that their garage would do for a workshop. All the money being used to pay rent and costs could be profit, if he worked from home. Most of the business was local, anyway, and they had a phone and a website people could contact.
It didn't take long to persuade Sam, who was by now heartily sick of seeing all his money vanishing to pay other people. He moved all his equipment home, terminated the shop lease, and went to work contacting their clients about his new business arrangements.
For the first time in his working life, Sam started to keep the money he made. His clients weren't even slightly affected, in fact he picked up more new business from nearby neighbors who saw the sign outside his house than he'd been getting from the shop.
The move back home also turned out to be a lot easier than Sam expected. He needed local government approval to use his home as a place of business, but that was pretty straightforward. He wasn't operating a workshop, just sharpening his gardening tools and parking his mower in the garage, so there weren't any special requirements for noise, or emissions from machinery, etc. He also had to make sure he stored his gardening chemicals safely in a locked fireproof steel security cabinet, but he did that anyway. Apart from that, he only needed to transfer the address of his local business license, because he was staying in the same line of business.
The result of the move was that Sam is now making ten times more money than he was making at his shop. He gets to see more of his family, and he's had to put on staff to deal with the new business the home based operation is getting.
