It's natural that most of the questions you will ask yourself about business location will be based on dollars-and-cents considerations. But part of the lure of business ownership is the ability to control not only how much you make, but how you make it.

Every business depends on its customers for its very existence. To a greater or lesser extent, most businesses also rely on employees and a variety of suppliers who provide needed goods and services. Locating your business where these three groups can get to you easily is vital.

You can get a good sense of the community surrounding your target business location by looking at basic data from the Bureau of the Census. For starters, Census demographic information can tell you the numbers and types of people who live in a certain geographic area, classified by age and sex. It can also tell you the number of households, the average household size, and the average, median, and per capita income levels in a given area.

Crimes against people and crimes against property can significantly add to your cost of doing business for many types of small businesses. Shoplifting, employee theft of inventory (sometimes euphemistically called "asset shrinkage"), and theft of business property are all too common and costly. Crimes against business owners, employees, customers, and others who enter the premises are less common, but can be more tragic and traumatic when they occur.

Business that sell their products or services to customers at the business facility have a strong interest not only in the general character of the neighborhood, but in the kind and appearance of nearby businesses and neighbors. This consideration is less important to businesses that don't have as many on-the-premises contacts (such as wholesale and manufacturing companies). However, just as a business should never completely disregard the appearance of its facility, it should not completely overlook the effect that the appearance of surrounding businesses and neighbors may have on how it is perceived.

Federal law frequently requires the owners and operators of property that is polluted with hazardous wastes to bear the cost of cleaning them up. This means that if you purchase a facility site that contains such pollutants, you may be forced to clean them up — and this could be enormously expensive. Although you would not be without defenses to such a government claim, merely proving that you in no way were the cause of the pollution is not enough. You must have had no knowledge of the condition, and you must have made a good faith effort to uncover any hazardous condition. Thus, it is vitally important that you avoid facility sites that may have been environmentally damaged by hazardous wastes.

No matter what kind of business you have and how you conduct it, if you own or rent a business facility apart from a home office, you do so in order to perform vital business functions there. This is true regardless of whether the facility houses your business headquarters and office, a retail store or a wholesale outlet, an inventory or equipment storage area, or a combination of several of these functions.

Before you can determine what you will need from your business facility, you'll need to take a hard look at your business. What are the essential operating steps that you must do to bring your product or service to your customers? In what logical order should these steps be done? How many employees will you need? Will they be using specialized machinery? In thinking about this, don't forget about functions (such as marketing, billing, collection, payroll, and facility maintenance and security) that are necessary to support the essential steps. Once you have identified the essential business steps, you will want to think about how these steps (and related administrative functions) will translate into facility needs.

Most small businesses don't have the volume of shipping or receiving to require full-blown truck dock facilities. But if your business does ship or receive either a large number of truck-delivered items, or such items include those that are too large or heavy to be lifted off a truck bed and carried through a door, you probably need a dock facility. Some businesses, such as manufacturers, may in fact have separate shipping and receiving docks.

The physical structure and layout of your facility should function as a tool that helps you to efficiently do all the things necessary to bring your business's products or services to its customers.

There are a variety of reasons why, at some point, it may be no longer desirable or feasible to run your business from your home. Some reasons relate to business growth, or its lack of growth. Others may have no direct relation to the business's performance.

When you visualize the ideal facility for your business, your thoughts may run along several lines. You may first think of the interior layout: the amount of space, how it would be subdivided into rooms or work areas to best serve you, and how it could be constructed or decorated to provide the capabilities and business atmosphere that best suits your operation. Or you may envision its exterior: its appearance (and that of surrounding buildings) and the impression that it conveys about your business, its location (on well-traveled streets, or tucked away in the country), and its provision for necessary features such as parking facilities and loading docks.

If you are just starting out in business, and you're selecting your first business facility, spend some time to consider what you need from your facility. This process will require a lot of cold, hard planning, as well as some measure of dreaming. (If you didn't have at least a little bit of the dreamer in you, you probably wouldn't be an entrepreneur!)

If you're thinking of starting a home business, or you already have one, you should find out what impact the local zoning rules will have on your home business.

If your workplace is also your home, local zoning rules may affect you. While some localities have no zoning laws related to working at home, cities and towns that do have zoning laws usually prohibit or restrict working at home. The main rationale behind these prohibitive or restrictive zoning laws is to maintain the residential character of a neighborhood. On the flip side, it is often illegal to live in some commercially zoned areas where you are running a business.

Let's say that you know that your locality has zoning laws that prohibit running a business in your home. If you already have a home business or plan to start one, what are the consequences of violating zoning rules? Technically, if you are violating zoning laws by having a business in your home, you can be forced to close down. On the other hand, you may be able to remedy whatever is causing a nuisance and your business will be allowed to continue operating.

If you have a home-based business, there are federal laws that regulate the type of work that can be performed there. For example, the Department of Labor, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, can restrict work done at home in order to enforce the minimum wage laws.

Setting up a home office means that you work and live in the same space. You may think that your home is your castle, but the government will beg to differ with you!

The two main ideas in creating a work space are functionality and cost. Your home office work area should allow you to perform all necessary duties of your business without unduly disrupting the functioning of the rest of your household, and should do so at a cost that does not put your new business too deeply in the hole.

If customers, suppliers, or employees visit your home business, you'll want to take all reasonable steps to make sure their visits are safe ones.

For the most part, our suggestions for acquiring equipment, tools, furnishings, and other business assets are the same regardless of whether you work out of your home or in a separate business facility. Essentially, you should look at such acquisitions as investments of your valuable capital that will be made only after a careful analysis of your needs. You should avoid acquiring any item that won't make you and your business significantly more profitable, efficient, or productive.

If contacting customers and suppliers is an important part of your business, you will want to set your work schedule according to their availability. When you start out in business, you may want to hold to the traditional business hours of your locale, or to the hours of your type of business. After you have been in operation for a while, you may get a feel for whether you could better serve customers and get an advantage over your competitors by adjusting your work schedule.

The area of your home where you operate your business — your workplace — will have an impact on the success of your business venture. To make sure that this impact is positive, you will need to organize it so that it becomes an efficient tool of your business. Your workplace should encourage productivity when you deal with customers or clients, suppliers, family, friends and neighbors, and yourself!

While working at home can provide you with a freedom from structure not possible in a traditional work setting, it can also result in loneliness and lack of concentration. However, if you make a conscious effort, these common pitfalls of working at home can be overcome.

Working at home will make changes in most people's lifestyles. For example, a person that walked 20 minutes each day to and from work now just has to walk across a room to be "at work." A person that played on the company softball and basketball teams now doesn't engage in any organized sport. Does working at home mean you get less physical exercise? It doesn't have to! Here are some suggestions for getting physical exercise when you work at home: