26 Best Businesses For Mothers Staying Home In 2024

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26 Best Businesses For Mothers Staying Home

Let's talk about the best business ideas for women! It’s so important for our world to have women in business. After all, we’re half the population—that’s billions of women with unique ideas, skillsets, and visions for the future. Motivated women entrepreneurs can also struggle while deciding on the right business idea. For some new entrepreneurs, ideas flow freely but never work.

For others, ideas are vague and are never fully explored. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, the road to your success is the right business idea and, perhaps, some guidance from the right startup advisors. If you want to become self-employed but are not sure what type of business you want to start, remember a number of business ideas for women are plenty. You can start a small-scale manufacturing business or think big.

Why Should You Start Your Own Business?

Ladies, there are many benefits that come with owning a business, especially if you are a woman entrepreneur. For example, most business startups offer paid maternity leave. And, this doesn’t only apply to mompreneurs. If you are a single mom with no husband and kids, you can also take paid maternity leave. This benefits women because it’s a policy that is promoted by many companies. In fact, as a business owner, you have the right to paid maternity leave.

Running your own business offers many perks. Here are ten reasons to start your own business today!

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Each Day At The Office Will Be Motivating

When you’re working for someone else, it can be tough to find the motivation to do the best possible work. No matter how much work you put in, the owners of the company will get the ultimate rewards. When you’re your own boss, you’ll find motivation at work every day.

Following your dreams is exciting, and you’re in control of your own success. The day-to-day vitality of your business depends on you, so you’ll be driven to make each day as productive as you can. You’ll know that your own hard work and drive will help you reap the rewards, and that’ll keep the fire burning in your belly to make each day count.

You’ll Be Following Your Passions

Many entrepreneurs start their own businesses to follow their dreams and fulfill their passion. Following your dreams will fulfill you in a way that working for someone else may not do. You are in charge of creating your business from the ground up, so you can shape your company to be something you’re proud of and that you may even be able to pass on to your children as your legacy.

You Can Pursue Social Justice Or Support Non-Profits

One of the most fulfilling parts of becoming an entrepreneur is setting up your company for social gain. You can opt to support non-profits, charities, or community efforts with your profits. Or you can set up your business to solve a problem in your community or in the world at large – whatever your passion may be. For example, consider Snow day, a company started by teach-turned-entrepreneur Jordyn Lexton.

It’s a food truck, but it’s doing more than just filling the hungry bellies of passersby. Snowday employs young people that have been incarcerated (which makes it harder for them to find work) and helps them gain valuable skills and experience on the job. Starting your own business gives you a unique opportunity to make the world a better place.

You Can Achieve Financial Independence

Many people commit to starting a business with the dream of financial comfort. While it’s true that getting your company off the ground can take grit and result in some lean times while you’re getting started, the ultimate goal of being your own boss is cultivating financial independence.

With determination and hard work, there’s no cap on how lucrative your own business can be. If you aspire to build wealth, there’s no reason why you can’t achieve that goal. Starting your own business has several financial benefits over working for a wage or salary.

First, you’re building an enterprise that has the potential for growth – and your wallet grows as your company does. Second, your business itself is a valuable asset. As your business grows, it’s worth more and more. You may decide to sell it or you may hold on to it and pass it down to your heirs. Either way, it’s valuable.

You Can Control Your Lifestyle And Your Schedule

Perhaps you’ve spent years in the corporate world and you feel ready to turn over a new leaf after years of reporting to a superior. Starting your own business can give you a more flexible lifestyle and schedule so you don’t feel like you’re running in circles on that corporate hamster wheel. You can opt to schedule meetings around your family schedule or you can opt to work from home – the sky’s the limit when you’re the boss.

You still have to get the work done, but nobody’s looking over your shoulder making sure you do it their way on their time. Starting a business is hard work, and that flexible schedule may not happen right away. Even if you’re working long hours, however, you know that you’re doing it for yourself and your family and not for a distant boss or shareholder.

You Can Start From Scratch

This is your business! You make the rules. You’re not restricted by the standards and procedures of your boss or corporate culture. You can offer a product or a service that fits your vision. You can also build your company according to your own ideas. Maybe you’ve thought of a way to make processes more efficient.

Maybe you want to make sure your employees get fair wages and family leave time. Whatever problems you’ve encountered in the working world, you have a chance to do something different with your own business. Many entrepreneurs say that once they’ve sampled the freedom of being their own boss and calling the shots at running their own company, they’d never want to work for someone else again.

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You Will Get Tax Benefits

Starting your own business takes funding and it may take some time to turn a profit, but you can start taking advantage of some substantial tax breaks right off the bat. Government programs support small business entrepreneurship and seek to reward these endeavours with impressive tax incentives.

You’ll want to work with a financial planner or an accountant to make sure you’re setting up your business in a way that will allow you to get the benefit of these government programs. Note that there are also a variety of programs aimed specifically at businesses started by women and minorities, so you may be able to get grant funding and other benefits to get your business off the ground.

You Will Have True Job Security

The stress of climbing the corporate ladder is real. You never know whether you’ll be promoted or whether you may be handed a pink slip – these life-altering decisions are in someone else’s hands and beyond your control. When you start your own company, you know you’re investing in your future and in your own job security. Moreover, should you choose to start a family business, you could be providing jobs for other members of your family, as well. Your destiny is in your own hands – no more layoffs in your future.

You Will Become An Expert At A Broad Range Of Skills

Part of running your own business is learning to wear a lot of different hats, especially early on. You’ll have to pick up a lot of new skills, from HR decisions to inventory management to customer service. You’ll soon become a pro in your own industry, as well as a pro at a variety of new skills you’ll learn on the job. As your business develops, you’ll continue to pick up new knowledge and abilities.

You’ll know how every tiny aspect of your operation works. You can’t get that kind of experience anywhere else. As your business grows, you may opt to continue manning the helm for those tasks you enjoy – whether that’s graphic design or accounting – but you can outsource those tasks that you dread. You can also turn those skills into new tasks. Who knows? You may even want to start another business!

You Can Be Creative

It’s up to you to decide what your business will produce, sell, or which services it will offer – that’s exciting! Rather than following the formula of those who came before you, you’re looking at a chance to develop a concept or an idea that nobody else ever has. Even if you stay mainstream with your product or service, each day as an entrepreneur allows you to find new, outside-the-book ways to problem solve.

Innovation and creativity are necessary traits for a successful entrepreneur, and you’ll hone those skills daily. Knowing that each day brings new challenges, exciting opportunities, and a chance to engage your passion is reason enough to start your own business. Knowing that you’ve decided to take control of your own future is empowering. What are you waiting for? The time is now!

What Are The Options For Women Entrepreneurs?

Our friends from Mashable share a bunch of useful tips on how to find the best business idea for women. Here are the best business ideas for ladies who are sitting at home.

While any woman can start any type of business she has the knowledge and experience for, here are some of our favorite and best business ideas for women!

1. Educational Services

About 77% of public school teachers in the U.S. are female. You’ve heard of male-dominated industries—education is definitely more of a female-dominated industry. If you love absorbing and sharing knowledge, then an education-oriented business could be a great fit. Often, these are flexible businesses where you can choose your own hours, work from anywhere, and keep it as a one-woman operation or scale it to employ others.

2. Tutoring In-Person Or Online

Women with academic skills can use them to help students succeed in their subject of choice. You can offer tutoring for elementary school students, high-schoolers, college students, or even adults. Learn more about starting a tutoring business here.

3. Teaching English Online

Since English is a global language, there's plenty of demand from adults who want to learn it and parents who want their children to grow up bilingual. There are already plenty of companies like VIPKID and Qkids where teachers can offer their services, but you can also start your own private teaching business if you have the marketing chops or connections.

4. Starting An Online Course

If you're an expert on a certain subject, building your own courses can be a highly efficient way to teach it to others. It's a lot of work upfront, but once you've written the materials or recorded the videos, the bulk of the job is done. There are a variety of online course platforms where you can build and sell courses.

5. Teaching Music

This can be a great home business for women skilled in an instrument. Advertise locally and have students come to you for lessons in piano, violin, guitar, or whatever your specialty is. You can even teach virtually. There are requirements to teach music in schools, but anyone can give private lessons.

6. College Prep

Due to competitive college admissions, many high-school students need extra help to set themselves up for success. With a college prep small business, you can offer SAT tutoring, help them write practice admissions essays, give advice on applying for scholarships, help them brush up on the subjects they're likely to face in their first semester, etc.

7. Design Businesses

Women unquestionably have an edge in the design industry. We quite literally have an “eye” for it: research shows that women are able to distinguish shades of colour that look identical to men. Depending on your other professional skills, this can spark several types of small business ideas for women.

8. Interior Design

Help people create attractive and functional spaces in their homes. Note that in some states, starting an interior design business requires that you have specific licensing.

9. Graphic Design

Use your art skills and graphic design software to make logos, infographics, advertisements, web banners, and more. This is a great small business idea for women who've already worked in a similar industry and are ready to strike out on their own. Learn some dos and don'ts of starting a graphic design business Web design.

It's common to see self-taught professionals in the tech industry, so you can easily find resources to teach yourself web design and start seeking clients. There are several different tech skills under this umbrella, including visual design, UX (user experience) design, and sometimes basic coding like HTML. Your goal is to make websites attractive and easy to navigate.

10. Skincare And Beauty

Despite women comprising the bulk of consumers in the beauty industry, only 29% of executives and board members at top beauty brands are women. In the top 100 beauty companies, only 10 had a female CEO. But since these products are primarily used by women, it makes sense for them to be created by women as well, right?

To help inspire beauty business ideas for women, here are 17 female-owned beauty brands spanning lotions, cleansers, skincare for women of colour, makeup, and more. A small Etsy shop or farmer's market stall can be the perfect jumping-off point in this small business idea for women.

Hone your craft with artisan soaps, dry shampoo, body butter/scrubs, or other natural beauty products you can make at home. Also, consider sensitive and minimalist skincare product ideas since there are fewer of those around.

11. Home, Life, & Financial Organization

It’s not just a stereotype that women are more organized. Research shows that women are more organized under pressure and better at multitasking. This makes them perfect candidates run businesses where these skills are paramount.

12. Virtual Assistance

For many fellow men and women business owners, virtual assistants are their lifeline—the ones behind the scenes who keep everything running. They typically perform a variety of administrative tasks like answering emails, organizing calendars, doing research or data entry, etc. You can work on them on your own as a side hustle, or scale up and hire other virtual assistants so you can take on more clients.

13. Professional Home Organization

Remember when everyone was talking about Marie Kondo? It illuminated the fact that many people aren't happy with the amount of clutter in their homes. However, sometimes it takes an un-emotionally attached third party to manage the purging process. With a home organization business, you can charge an hourly fee to declutter a home and restructure rooms in a better way.

14. Bookkeeping And Accounting

If you liked math in school and have a knack for numbers, you might make a great bookkeeper. Bookkeeping is a great small business idea for women because you can easily find free bookkeeping courses to get trained in the right skills.

You can often find flexible online work doing bookkeeping for small businesses, so it's a business you can have on the side or take full-time. Accounting requires more training but you can start by bookkeeping while you take your accounting classes.

15. Event Planning

Tying into the ideas above, event planning is another industry that involves a ton of multitasking and coordinating details. You can start a wedding planning business to help brides and grooms coordinate flowers, catering, DJs, photographers, and everything else that goes into the day. Or, you can focus on other types of events: corporate events, business grand openings, product launches, children's parties, etc.

16. App Development

Coding skills are easy to learn for free online and have a wide variety of useful applications (no pun intended). If you want to use them to work for yourself and build projects, you might enjoy focusing on app development programming languages.

You can build any kind of app you want, but if you want to add a female-centric twist, there are plenty of helpful apps built by women, for women. Think about the small problems you encounter each day as a woman and how an app could solve them. You could build one related to personal safety, making new female friends, personalizing skincare based on data, etc.

17. Caring For Animals Or Children

Do you love animals or kids? Get paid for it! Over 92% of childcare workers are women since moms usually prefer to leave their kids with female caregivers. Starting a home daycare can be an excellent business idea for women.

You'll need to obtain the proper licensing for your state, set up a welcoming care space, and consider how you'll handle a thousand things that kids can need. Animal lovers also have plenty of ways to turn furry friends into furry clients. Consider starting a business where you offer your services for pet sitting, dog walking, or grooming.

18. Foodservice/Catering

Got talent in the kitchen? Want to exercise your cake decorating chops more often than the occasional birthday? Start a food-centred business! Just keep in mind that with any food business, you'll be governed by your state's applicable requirements on food safety. You might have to rent a commercial kitchen or get your home kitchen inspected before you can start making sales.

19. Baking Business

Make cakes for special occasions, take orders for cookies and cupcakes, bake fresh loaves of bread, etc. This business for women can take several forms. You could get a physical storefront and start an official bakery, or offer made-to-order baked goods for pickup or delivery, or even sell them online if you're confident they'll ship intact.

20. Catering

You can also start a home-based catering business to prepare appetizers and meals for various types of events. If you can occupy a niche that's rare in your area (e.g. gluten-free or vegan catering), you'll be more likely to get attention as a new business.

21. Food Truck

Take your recipes on the road by investing in a mobile kitchen—a food truck! These can be costly to start up, so it might be wise to test your recipes and local demand on a smaller scale first. Of course, they're still much cheaper than a full-fledged restaurant and can give you more freedom with the business.

22. Photography

Circling back to the eye for design and colour, those are both involved with composing a great photograph. The money in photography is mostly in events like weddings, and it can be a difficult industry to enter. But it also makes a great side business idea for women, since you can schedule wedding or portrait sessions on weekends and still keep your Monday-Friday job. Learn more about starting a photography business.

23. Running An Online Store

With an online store, you have lots of flexibility and low overhead costs as opposed to a brick-and-mortar retail storefront. You can run your business through an established e-commerce site like Etsy, Amazon, or eBay, or build your own website on a platform like Shopify. The biggest question is what to sell—and that part's up to you. You can sell your own crafted items, flip garage sale finds, design clothing—whatever there's a demand for.

24. Opening A Bed And Breakfast

This idea combines a real estate investment (your B&B building itself) with the hospitality industry (offering rooms, meals, and hotel-style amenities). Usually, you can charge a decent rate per night for this kind of boutique experience.

It's much easier to find a building for a small B&B than it would be to open a full-fledged inn or motel. If you'd prefer to skip the “breakfast” part, you can also host short-term rentals through a platform like Airbnb.

A short-term rental business can help you cover the mortgage and taxes on a property and turn a profit, but they can also be risky during periods of travel uncertainty. Build a solid plan and don't over-leverage yourself. Your bills for the property will still be due even if no guests stay that month!

25. Writing And Blogging

Did you always get an A on your college essays? You might have a talent for the written word! Use it to start a freelance writing business or run and monetize your own blog on a topic you’re passionate about. This is my career, so I won't be biased: it can be a hard business to start. For every great client, you might encounter 10 who want to pay a penny per word.

You might get your start writing ultra-glamorous content about water filters and whether asphalt or concrete is better for driveways. It's all part of the journey! If you go the blogging route, it takes time to get established in your niche, start appearing in search results and turn it into a source of revenue. Learn about ways to monetize a blog here.

26. Anything That Fits Your Skills And Passions

Don’t force yourself to fit the mould of what you think women in business should do or be. If you want to start a business in construction, manufacturing, or another classically male-dominated space, and you have the knowledge to make it work—go for it.

You may face more of an uphill battle and encounter people who underestimate you, but someone has to change the women-in-business statistics. These business ideas for women are just a guide and can help you generate even more ideas!

How To Find The Best Business Ideas For Women

Own your time and make good money! You probably read this in a shady get-rich-quick scheme. No one really gets to do that… or do they?

The internet has exploded and given people all over the world the gift of opportunity. Backyard to bank balance success stories fill our Facebook feed, and social media celebrities are self-made millionaires. They all have the same running thread – the desire to make it on their own.

Running a business is no walk in the park, and not everyone can become a social media sensation. But a business or one with low or no investment is a definite possibility. It offers women who want to make money from the comfort of their homes, the opportunity to take it one step at a time and continue to fulfil all the other responsibilities that they are committed to.

The trick lies in marrying a talent with an idea and following it through. For any home-based business to work, skill is a definite requirement. One cannot become a successful home baker without knowing how to bake!

Identify a skill or talent that you think could be converted into a home-based or online business opportunity. Simply go through our consolidated list of business ideas for women who want to be their own boss and find out if you could be one of them.

If you are used to receiving compliments on your cooking skills then a business in food is what you should consider. One of the most popular small business ideas for women is a tiffin service. There are a host of aggregators that give home chefs a wider audience. Family recipes, traditional cuisines or simple home-style food is most sought after.

To start off, make a WhatsApp list of friends and family who always ask you to make them this or that favorite dish, tell them that you are starting out on your own and let word of mouth do the rest. Sites like Authenticook let you be a home chef on your own terms and host people for a fee.

If catering food is not your style, you could simply document your passion for it. It’s a great business idea for a lady sitting at home with a lot of cooking ideas up her sleeve. Instagram is filled with celebrity home chefs who are reaping returns on their talent in the kitchen.

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Bake That Cake

If you are the designated cake baker at family functions, then a baking business may be right up your alley. It is a great business idea for ladies with low investments. Services like Indulge by Innerchef give home bakers the opportunity to reach out to a wider audience and bake as per their capacity.

Good presentation and quality ingredients will build a client base. Over time you can choose to invest in a website to help you get orders directly. If you would rather bake for your family, then document your baking adventures. Invest in a good camera and share your passion to create a successful profile that would give you the status of an influencer like Sonali Ghosh of Sugar.

Passion For Fashion

For those with a passion for fashion who are looking for a business idea in India under 10 lakh, opening a small tailoring boutique may work well for you. All that is needed to start off is a minimum of 300 sq ft of space with a set of sewing machines and one tailor. The total running expenses per month would be about 40,000 to 1 lakh depending upon the area that you choose.

Platforms like Shopify and Facebook shop allow you to reach a bigger audience and showcase your designs. Online payment gateways make the entire process so much easier. Anita Dongre of AND and Global Desi fame famously started in her balcony with two sewing machines. Prompt client servicing and innovative designs could help begin your success story.

Crafty Ideas

If you are great with your hands then a good home-based business for women is handmade craft supplies. The world is seeing a shift towards handmade as it is authentic and unique. Websites like Shopify offer the opportunity to set up shop online and sell your creations from the comfort of your home.

Stationary to handcrafted book covers, great ideas can be used to create handmade goodies that can pay good money. Backing your creativity with good quality and unique products will help build a loyal customer base. Reaching out to party planners who design wedding and party favours is another way to make this work. They are always on the lookout for unique products and services.

Resell To Your Social Network

Reselling is fast becoming a popular online business idea for women in India. Apps like Meesho enable women to act as resellers to their social networks from the comfort of their homes. This is an internet-friendly version of the earlier offline “home sales” or “garage sales”, where women would call their friends and neighbours home to showcase sarees, suit pieces and jewelry among other items.

Stock Trading

The stock market has a huge potential for becoming a home-based business for women. A large number of market-savvy housewives are turning the stock market into their office. They look at earning extra cash by stock trading.

Stock trading can be done from anywhere, even parallelly with a job! It allows you to decide your risk appetite and earn using your financial skills. There are sites like FundsIndia that offer help and advice with playing the stock market and making sensible investments.

This option is great for those with a financial services background who have taken a break from work. But that does not mean that those without such a background can’t learn to become stock market pros. An appetite for risk, however, is a must.

Social Media Influencer

Social media has become one of the biggest places to generate brand awareness with millions of eyeballs to be caught every second. Becoming a social media influencer is a great idea for a business in India with low investment. Any talent that you are passionate about can help you become an influencer.

Makeup, travel, food, fitness and fashion are the main areas where social media influencers operate. Daily conversations about your area of interest supported by pictures, videos and blogs would help garner a growing list of loyal content consumers. Your phone camera can be your gateway to big opportunities. Brands associate with influencers who can engage their followers.

So reading and keeping up with trending topics will help connect with more people and build larger audiences. The key remains regular creative and value-adding content that you enjoy. A successful influencer takes about one to three years to gain popularity. A lot is dependent upon the quality of content.

Freelance Content Creator

Those with good creative skills can choose to make an online home business out of it. From written content to photography, graphic design or animation, content is king. Today, more than ever before, brands are leaning towards working with freelancers. There are several content platforms like Witty Pen, Fiver, Behance etc that help those looking for freelance content creators find people like you.

Creating a profile on the relevant platforms and putting your portfolio out there goes a long way in helping brands find you. Most content creators start their business with no investment. You can choose how much work you want to take up and set the pace to suit your schedule. Really good content creators are always in demand and the creative space is filled with success stories like Alicia Souza.

Finding Startup Advisors

Entrepreneurs often work alone. And while the freedom of being your own boss is great, you still need a coach or advisor to come on board with your business, especially if you’re in an industry with a lot of competition.

Finding startup advisors may be your last shot to change your business idea, get new customers, or achieve a breakthrough. At New Frontier Ventures, we help entrepreneurs identify their startup’s best business idea so they can execute their strategy and hit the ground running. So, if you want to start a business, let us find your business idea and advice.

Conclusion

If you don't know what to do, maybe there is an option for you. You just need to think it through! If you have some business ideas, then you'll know which one could be the best for you. You'll know what type of business to choose, you'll know what you should do and, most importantly, you'll know how you can bring it to life.

All in all, you must not worry about business ideas for ladies because if you put your mind to them, there are a number of good ones! You should choose a business idea for ladies that will become profitable for you and that can support your financial goals and dreams. Once you do that, your business will become successful, that’s all there is to it.

I trust you enjoyed this article about the Best Businesses For Mothers Staying Home. Would you please stay tuned for more articles to come? Take care!

JeannetteZ

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Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? I would love to hear from you. Please leave me your questions, experiences, remarks, and suggestions about the Best Businesses For Mothers Staying Home in the comments below. You can also contact me by email at Jeannette@WorkFromAnywhereInTheWorld.com.