Don’t deceive yourself. Having business equipment in your home office doesn’t make you an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs must be visionaries. The mindset of an entrepreneur is always focused on the future. Instead of defining themselves by where they are at present, they define themselves by where they know they’ll be in the future.

Now is the time to start realizing your dreams - to take that first baby step toward having the business you envisioned back when you were slaving away for a thankless boss at a company that couldn’t care less about you.

If your business is just treading water, the first thing you need to do before you can transform your home-based business into everything you dreamed it would be, is to figure out what type of entrepreneur you really are. To be successful, your business ought to match your personality. Do you only want a small business that meets your needs and provides a decent livelihood? Or do you want to build it into a mini empire? Try to visualize the perfect business for you.

I’ve discovered two very different types of home-based entrepreneur. I call them the ‘Growth Maven’ and the ‘Lifestyle Guru’.

‘Growth Mavens’ know how to dream big, and have the ambition to match. A typical Growth Maven runs her business from home to cut down on overhead, but she dreams of the day when she’ll be sitting in a suite on the top floor of her own office building. She believes in a future where she’s the next mega-star like Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, or Martha Stewart - people who started their companies as a home-based business and turned them into multi-billion dollar empires. She knows that there is no limit to how much money she can make, and she has the drive to constantly innovate her business. But first she needs to move the business out of her house.

The ‘Lifestyle Guru’ made the dream happen the first day that he didn’t go into the office. His dream was to leave the soulless corporation behind and be his own boss. He hates the commute, the suit and tie, the cubicle, the office politics, and the crazy, overbearing bosses. He wants more-to not just feel like he is pushing paper until 6 o’clock. He wants to feel a sense of contribution and pride in his work. And he wants to do it his way.

The Lifestyle Guru wants to work in her bathrobe and take a break in the middle of the day to play outside with her kids. She’s ok with cleaning out her inbox late at night when the rest of the family is asleep. Sometimes she’ll work on a weekend, but sometimes she won’t. Her work fits in with the rest of her life, not the other way around. She knows there’s a limit to how much money she can make, but she’s bringing in a comfortable income and has more leisure time to spend with her loved ones. When it works, her life is pretty darn good.

I’m sure you already know whether you’re more of a Growth Maven or a Lifestyle Guru, but if you want to verify your gut feeling, I have a short quiz available on the web and in my book that will help you know for sure.