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Exactly how much humiliation can you endure? A home-based catering business is only for those foolhardy enough to choose a life of solitude and politics. My grandmother was a caterer. My mother picked up the business, and now, I have somehow fallen into a catering career that I never foresaw.

The first question you must ask yourself before you open your home business is if you want to open your lifestyle to your state Health Department. To have a home catering business, the state Health Department must inspect your property in order to properly license your business.

Can you live without pets? Are you willing to give them up or keep them outside at all times? Do you have a garage where you could place a second kitchen? Do you have proper accessibility for that garage? Are all floor surfaces in your kitchen slick enough to be mopped? Do you want the Health Department to have access to your home at any time? Can you fit a three-bay sink in your current space? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you might want to look at opening your business in a storefront.

This is the much more advisable option for two reasons:
1. It gets you out of the house and the Health Department out of your personal life.
2. It gives you the opportunity to open a small-scale restaurant in part of the storefront for more stable earnings.

The bad news about catering from a storefront is that oftentimes your busiest dine-in times will be the same time you are setting up a dinner on site. That means you hire help, which is preferably family because you don't have to pay them.

Malcolm X's oft-quoted fragment, "By any means necessary" best describes the operation of such a business. You will learn how to beg, borrow and sacrifice to make it thrive. You will cry; you will laugh; you will hurt; you won't sleep. And after all the work is done, you are blessed with two more honors. You get to clean up the mess and you get to pay taxes.

Learn more about this author, John Hale.
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