Your business runs from home. Its growth plan shouldn't live on the fridge.

Why growing from home is its own problem

A storefront business and a home business face different constraints, so the advice should differ too. Generic small-business plans assume a sign, a lease and foot traffic. You have none of those, and you have constraints a shop owner never thinks about.

• Privacy. You may not want strangers to know where you live, which changes how you list your business online.
• Blurred hours. The office is down the hall, so admin slides into evenings and nobody counts it.
• Travel as hidden cost. If you go to the customer, every kilometre and every parking hunt is unpaid time unless your price covers it.
• Neighbours and bylaws. Customer visits, signage, parking and storage can all be limited by your municipality. Rules vary by city, so we always send you to your own town hall rather than guess.
• A ceiling. At some point the garage, the driveway or the spare room simply runs out.

None of these are reasons to stay small. They are reasons to plan growth around how a home business actually works.

What we help with

We work on five decisions, each with its own service page.

1. Pricing and profit. Work out your real hourly cost, including the time you never invoice, and set rates and minimums that cover it.
2. Getting found without a storefront. Set up search, maps, referrals and local presence so a private address is never a weakness.
3. Scheduling and capacity. Group jobs by area, protect admin blocks and stop the calendar from deciding your evenings.
4. Solo to first hire. Test whether the numbers can carry a helper, decide what to hand over first and plan the paperwork questions to take to the right offices.
5. The leave-home decision. Put a real cost on moving to a unit, shop or office, and set the signals that tell you when.

Not sure which one is yours? The services overview explains how to choose.

A quick test you can run tonight

Divide what you earned last month by every hour you spent on the business, not just the billed ones. Suppose a mobile dog groomer charges $85 an appointment and does 60 appointments a month: $5,100. Billed time is about 90 hours. But add driving between homes (25 hours), messaging and booking (12 hours), cleaning the van and restocking (10 hours) and bookkeeping (5 hours), and the real total is 142 hours. Subtract $1,200 of monthly costs and the true rate is about $27.50 an hour, not the $57 the owner had in mind.

That gap is where most home businesses lose their growth money. Our pricing guide walks through the full method with a worksheet you can copy into a spreadsheet.

Proof from our HVAC work

Our case studies come from home-service companies in heating, so treat them as evidence of method rather than a forecast for your field. These are results from our HVAC work:

• GasBoilers.ca, the gas-boiler division we built for CANRO Heat, covers 26+ BC communities; its Google rating stands at 5.0★ from 76+ reviews.
• BCWide.ca reached 3× leads in 90 days.
• CanroHeat.ca saw 250% lead growth.

What transfers to a home-based business is the service-area approach: showing up clearly in the places you serve, earning trust through reviews and real information, and making it easy to call. More detail is on the results page.

Who is behind BusinessHome.ca

BusinessHome.ca is part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group of companies, a Canadian group headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is led by Ali Sedighi, MBA in Technology Management, who has more than 17 years of marketing and business experience starting in 2007, and has built 150+ live HVAC websites. You deal with Ali directly. Read more about us.

We are a Canadian business consulting service. We do not give legal, tax or accounting advice, and we never do the hands-on service work for your customers. When a question belongs to a regulator, a municipality or the CRA, we tell you so and point you to them.

Wherever you work in Canada

We work with home-based owners in all 10 provinces and 3 territories, by video call or in person as well as by phone, text and email. Climate, distance and local rules change how a home business runs: a winter route in Saskatoon is not a winter route in Victoria, and Quebec has its own language rules for advertising. The areas page has a page for each province and one for the North.

Ready to talk it through? See pricing, browse the FAQ, or go straight to contact. The first 30 minutes are free.