Starting a catering business from home can be a great career for people that enjoy planning, cooking and working with customers. The job of a catering business from home is to ensure meal, appetizers, desserts and drinks are perfect for client’s event. Catering services are used for conferences, birthdays, anniversaries, and, of course, weddings.

In fact, you can specialize by doing only wedding catering and keep yourself busy and your catering service growing. You need to be creative and have a great deal of knowledge about food. However, this is just tip of iceberg. Catering can be hard work.

The first step in starting catering company is to create a catering business plan. This plan will be needed if you try to get a loan to help your catering business get off ground. It will also help you organize yourself and your business, by answering questions, and ensuring your services are professional and dependable.

When you start a catering company you will be required to have many licenses and certifications, and must adhere to Health Department regulations. You will need to contact your local Health Department for specific regulations, certifications, licenses, and insurance information for your area. The Health Department also usually requires an inspection of area to be used for your catering business.

With your catering business start up, you have to decide what types of food you are going to offer. Once you have decided on food, you need equipment to prepare food and a way to transport it. Some places you will be working will have a kitchen that you can use for final preparation, but majority of work will be done at your location.

It doesn't matter whether you are selling odds and ends on eBay from your living room or something larger and more complex,

Business plans are excellent and necessary. Far too few of us self-employed and freelance people use them.

They force us to spell out our objectives. We have to assign numbers to our expectations and assign a time-line to our goals. They become our roadmap keeping us on track.

But I suggest that you can't make a business plan that is worth anything until you've done your homework.

And that means knowing what you want to do and how you want to do it. And determining that there is sufficient demand for your product to generate enough income to cover your costs and allow a profit.

In other words, before business plan comes research.

If a body of knowledge already exists, it makes sense to tap into it and save yourself some work. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics and other such sources, for example, publish a great deal of demographic information. Some of it is very useful.

But it is also likely that as a creative sole-proprietor, meaningful statistics don't exist about your specialty.

Many micro-businesses target a very specialized niche. And many owned by creative types exist to sell a product or service that don't follow well-worn prototypes.

It is particularly difficult for such people to find meaningful published data.

If you fall into these categories, you'll have to generate your own information.

There is more to your research than just purely business information. You are building a life as well as a business.

Are demands and conditions of your proposed business compatible with life you want to create?