Business Starting Grants

where do i find grants to help with starting a business from home?

i want to start anon-profit business

Public Comments

1. It is hard to find grants to start a business. Unlike the myths that some perpetuate, federal government and even private foundations hardly give grant money for starting a for-profit business. One possible exception is for companies developing or exporting agricultural goods, including food and forest product. Another exception could be the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs http://www.sba.gov/aboutsba/sbaprograms/sbir/index.html , which fund the research and development of technological innovation that meets specific government needs. Your best bet actually will be from the states if they offer grant programs for women (or any other special interest groups -- minorities, women, disabled, veterans, etc). Or check with non profit organizations, particularly women organizations if they offer grants. Examples include Iowa Women's Foundation http://www.iawf.org/ New Mexico Women's Foundation http://www.nmwf.org/guidelines.html Even SBA does NOT give out grants. From the SBA website http://www.sba.gov/mostrequesteditems/CON_FAQ2.html "The U.S. Small Business Administration does not offer grants to start or expand small businesses, although it does offer a wide variety of loan programs. (See http://www.sba.gov/financing for more information) While SBA does offer some grant programs, these are generally designed to expand and enhance organizations that provide small business management, technical, or financial assistance. These grants generally support non-profit organizations, intermediary lending institutions, and state and local governments." Nonetheless, you can go to the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) http://www.cfda.gov and Grants.gov http://www.grants.gov - these are two sites created by the federal government to provide transparency and information on grants. Browse through the listings and see if you can find any grant that would support a for-profit venture. Here is a listing of federal grants for small businesses. See if there is any available for individuals for starting a business -- THERE'S NONE. http://12.46.245.173/pls/portal30/CATALOG.BROWSE_BENEF_RPT.show Most of the federal grants are given to specific target groups with specific requirements (e.g. minority business owners involved in transportation related contracts emanating from DOT - Grant#20.905 Disadvantaged Business Enterprises Short Term Lending Program Grants are also often given to non profit groups or organizations involved in training or other similar activities (grant 59.043 Women's Business Ownership Assistance that are given to those who will create women's business center that will train women entrepreneurs
2. When you're looking at working from home there's basically two choices. You'll either be working for a company, or working for yourself. I'm not sure how you'd work for a normal company from home but I'm sure most people working online work for themselves anyway. There's a lot of ways of making money online but most of them are scams or make next to no money. Don't even bother looking into things like rebate processing (just a scam usually or next to no money) multi-level-marketing, (only the original seller makes money) the paypal send a dollar pyramid schemes, (pretty sure it's actually illegal) surveys, (scam, you pay to sign up and they hardly send you any surveys)blogging, (legit, but you'll only end up making $5/month or spamming yahoo answers with links to ur blog lol) or data entry. (kinda legit but you have to pay to sign up then usually never get work) The more legit ways of making money online are affiliate marketing, or things like selling on ebay or selling stuff outsite ebay. I've been working at home for 3 years and I still run across new ways to make money online. Most of them aren't very profitable though. Anything you do to make money online is going to take a lot of work. The work's not always hard, but it's pretty much always time-consuming. Finding a legitimate way to work at home isn't hard. There's plenty of places you can pay for the information. One of the really hard things about working at home is staying focused. You'd be surprised how hard it is to just sit down and work at home infront of your computer for hours on end. There's some days I hardly make $50 because I just can't focus and other days if I'm having a really good day and working hard I'll make as much as $300. Like anything in life, you get what you put into it. One of the biggest things that's helped me is to not reinvent the wheel lol. See what other people are doing to make money online and just copy them.