Unfortunately most start up small home businesses do not make it in the first six months of operations.

The reason for this is because their small home business idea is not workable in the real world when frequently they will look so good to us.

The secret here is to test them out on a small scale. Sort them out.

Another reason is they turn out to be too ambitious for their present circumstances.

You frequently will not have enough money to make it through this critical first six months.

In order to avoid the common pitfalls of small start up business, as much as possible, you should first take an inventory of available resources before embarking into any business.

This would be for a small or big enterprise.

Taking an inventory of your resources does not only mean financial resources but also other available resources such as talents, manpower, existing space in the house, equipment, available software and the like.

There are many small home business ideas that are very feasible depending on your present financial, reality based and knowledge circumstances.

This is why taking an inventory of your present resources will greatly affect the outcome of your small business venture. Let us narrow down our list of small home business ideas, let us focus on five areas where a stay at home mom could engage.

First, cooking is usually the forte of stay at home moms so let us explore the possibilities of a home based food business. If you live in a neighborhood full of busy people who do not have time to cook their own meal, you could get busy in the kitchen and cook for your neighbors.

Men will look at something like this and say, no way, that just will not work. Women, for some reason, will be more open to something like this which is good for them because their mindset can make it work.

Many people take lunch boxes to work and these lunch boxes usually contain sandwiches day in and day out. Most of us would welcome a variation in our lunch especially if these variations are home cooked. Sound good already? Good! Let us keep going.

Offering some tasty and delicious food packed in lunch boxes which people could pick up from your place on their way to work should be a good idea.

For your customers it will get to be an unbreakable habit real fast.

For creative stay at home moms, a small home business idea such as scrapbook making and handicrafts would be good for you.

Scrapbook making services could be profitable. A lot of people would like to put their pictures in nicely designed folders but never have the time to do so.

Professional athletes are a great target market for this.

They do not like to read articles about themselves in the papers everyday, during their careers, because it is very distracting to their mind sets.

They wish they had a service like this after their careers are over. That is too late.

There are thousands of professional athletes, men and women both, who would be glad to let somebody do the work for them for a fee.

Another option for you if you are artistic and really love handicraft is to design greeting cards.

Assembling greeting cards is really fun and many people would love to get a card made specifically for themselves.

You can even get your kids to help along by handing you over some colored papers and tapes. This small home business idea could be a very interesting activity for you and your children.

Handmade greeting cards are usually in demand during big occasions like mothers day, fathers day, Christmas, New Years and others.

You can expect to get big orders at this time of the year so it would be better to start making those cards well ahead of time to beat the demand.