Running a franchise business out of your home can be a great success or a slippery slope to disaster. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach, but if you are aware of where the pitfalls are and avoid them, you could be setting yourself up for a great success. If you are not paying attention however and fall prey to the things that can happen to someone working from their home you could end up losing a great deal of money.

The greatest advantage of running a franchise out of your home is the greatly reduced startup and operational costs that you will incur. There are many franchise opportunities to run from the home. The most popular is probably franchise travel agencies but there are many others. The startup capital is so much lower because you don’t need to invest in the biggest cost in opening any other business… the real estate. Whether you’re renting or buying, acquiring the property to run a business in is almost always the most expensive startup cost, and when you work out of your home you eliminate that.

But what about all these disadvantages? There are quite a few. First of all, the convenience that can be a great asset if you are disciplined can also be your greatest downfall. When you’re working at home it becomes a little too easy to get up a half an hour later, or take an extra ten minutes to make yourself a better lunch. These little bits of time take bites out of your day one by one, and you will see a remarkable reduction in actual working hours unless you are very careful. There are also many distractions of phone, TV, pets, kids, and spouses around the home which can take crucial hours away from the business.

Another thing you have to watch while working from the house is the tendency to not market your business as aggressively as you should. When you have a store and you look out and see no one there you know something is wrong. But when most of your business is conducted on the phone or the computer it becomes a slippery slope to just convince yourself that each day is a slow day.

Don’t fall into that trap. Stay focused, take advantage of working from your home but don’t let any of the negatives win, and you could be set for a very lucrative and rewarding new career.