Incorporate Our Predictions into Your Business Plans

By Richard Henderson, Publisher of Home Business Magazine

Regarding my  predictions for 2010, I see bright spots for the home-based business sector. They're not all doom and gloom, despite how difficult economic times are. Times of economic turmoil are also times of great opportunity. To be able to seize that opportunity and capitalize on it, a business must be flexible and adaptable. Home-based businesses possess these qualities more than larger-sized small businesses, and are much more flexible than office-based corporations.

To overcome size disadvantages, I think that home-based businesses will grow in scopes of the types of business endeavors they accomplish in 2010. Through the organization of “Virtual Corporations (VCs)” — made up of networks of home-based workers — home businesses will become more capable. The need to minimize costs and overhead, and to gain access to better human talent, will drive home-based VC growth.

What does a VC mean to you? Think outside the box, beyond a home-based business that you operate yourself, independently. When you look at the troubled economy, and all the shake-outs occurring, is there a larger market developing that you could target with other entrepreneurs through a VC structure?

“New Media” will impact home-based businesses. As little as a year ago, it was OK to have just a good web site for your business. Not any more. Social media sites, hand-held devices, electronic readers, e-newsletters, Twitter, etc. — all of these new media components and more — are re-writing the rules for doing online business.

I wish I had the answers for using new media. My only advice is to study your business, its model, and the emerging online media outlets out there. Focusing on new media has become my biggest focus. I completely re-launched a new Digital Edition of Home Business® Magazine, and I am transitioning it into a major new circulation channel. I’m re-doing my business search engine and preparing to launch an e-newsletter. There’s a dozen more new media items I need to move up my to-do list. Have you drafted your “new media” to-do list? I bet your competitors are.

A dark pall over all of my predictions is the economy. Major factors will push the U.S. economy into a depression, if not in 2010, then soon after. One way to view the current recession that befell us is that it was, as one writer called it, a perfect crime. Over the last decade, our government pursued reckless deregulation and asset speculation policies that allowed many in our bloated financial and real estate sectors to grow fabulously rich doing nothing but circulating money and assets at high risk.

When the party crashed in October 2008, the Administration stepped in and socialized the risk, floating the losses as national debt for the public to pay-off. Money was skimmed off the top by amoral CEOs, real estate “sub-primers,” greedy financiers, and other financial manipulators. The money was never really lost; it just ended up in the pockets of those who helped commit this enormous economic crime. They got away with the loot. We picked up the tab. That’s the real crime.

It would be a crime for me to ignore it. And it will be a crime for you to not take time to map out your home-based business roadmap for 2010. HBM