Are you thinking of leaving your full-time job to start your own business? Many women today are considering starting a home-based business, and there are many who started out this way and now run full-fledged companies with employees and revenue in the millions. So, yes if you’re willing to take a risk and work hard, it can be done.

How do we know this? Well, many of the women-owned businesses that attend our WBEC-West annual conferences and even serve as mentors for our Ambassador program started out this way and have never looked back.

If you’re not sure how to start out here are a few business ideas to get your creative juices flowing and get you inspired:

1. Accountant

   Bookkeeping for small businesses can be a great way to start an accounting business. With some experience behind your back you can move on to higher accounting levels and work up balance sheets, income statements, financial reports and more depending on the needs of the client. With the right licensing, tax accounting is also a huge area that offers a lot of potential. As you bag a few good clients and they’re happy with your work you can look forward to repeat business from them and once you get to the point where you feel the workload is overwhelming it’s time to start hiring help and growing your business.

2. ConsultantTo be a consultant, you need to be an expert in an area. Perhaps you did marketing for many years for an apparel company or you were a top project manager for an IT firm, or maybe cooking or photography has been a long-time passion of yours and over the years you’ve garnered a lot of good experience. You could use this expertise to either start your own business or consult and help others do similar things without making the same mistakes that you made along the way.

3. Event PlannerThe first step to good event planning are good business relationships. You’ll need to visit every potential location and work with the manager or person in-charge to tour the site and learn what’s available and what’s not available at that location. For example, how many people can the site accommodate, does it have AV equipment. catering options etc. By creating a database of key features you’ll be able to pull up a few locations and recommend the right venue to potential clients. You can start with smaller events like parties and as you gain more experience move up to corporate events and even full-fledged conference event planning by when you’ll have an entire team of staff working with you.

 Some more business ideas you can look deeper into: