 Excerpt from
Bringing it Home: A Home
Business Guide for You and Your Family
By Wendy Priesnitz
Home business is ideal for those who are timid about being in business.
It allows you to start very small and learn as you go, picking up speed
as your knowledge and confidence expand. You can even start a home
business while you’re holding down a full-time job if the financial risk
of becoming self-employed makes it a bit too scary to jump in with both
feet.
Nevertheless, starting a business is an adventure. It’s full of
challenges and even a little bit of discomfort. Although home business
allows you to work inside your own structured comfort zone most of the
time, success comes from taking a chance. This book is designed to help
you minimize the risk, but only you can put yourself in the right frame
of mind.
Your Work-at-Home Lifestyle
In addition to motivation, dedication and effort, growing a successful
business in a home setting has its own unique set of challenges. And if
you plan to work by yourself, with no partners or employees, many of
these challenges can be so serious as to affect the actual viability of
your enterprise. That’s why it’s so important that you assess yourself
and your family to ensure you can meet these challenges. You also need
to put in place some emotional support systems to help out when times
are tough.
You will need to rely heavily on self-starting energy. This is usually
plentiful when things are going well, in both your business and personal
lives. When emotional or family problems arise, however, and your mind
is not wholly on business, it can be quite different. When you work for
yourself there is no boss to remind you to get on with your work.
And no matter how emotionally healthy you feel, there will be tasks that
you dislike. Dealing with administrative details like keeping the books
up to date or returning telephone or email messages may require a good
deal more self-motivation than creating a new computer program for a
client or mailing off your book manuscript to the publisher. But the
jobs all have to be done – and, in the case of most home businesses –
done by you alone. As a woman who runs a private home day care agency
puts it, “When you own your own business, you are it! If you don’t look
after it, no one else will. And because I also have a full time job, I
find myself juggling a lot.”
Because of the stress created by having the whole load on your
shoulders, you need to have in place a support network for dealing with
overload – both emotional and work-related. It’s good for your business
credibility as well as your personal mental health to have a colleague
to whom you can contract out work when a personal crisis arises and
clients are getting impatient. (A more in-depth discussion of time and
stress management can be found later in this book.)
In addition to having good time management techniques to keep the
administrative jobs up to date, you need to have a good attitude towards
those tasks. Don’t look at your business as merely performing a service
or producing a product; consider all the hats you wear – bookkeeper,
salesperson, administrator, and wastebasket emptier – as part of the
overall picture...no more or no less important or desirable than the
other aspects of your business. You’ll be happier doing the less
glamorous jobs if you think of them as welcome relief from the larger,
more creative tasks and schedule them for times when you need a break
from production. After all, you wouldn’t have a business for long
without them!
The Credibility Gap
Aside from stress, many of the challenges of combining living and
working environments revolve around your business image. It’s a fact of
life for home-based entrepreneurs that we have to work harder to
convince skeptical or suspicious clients that we are really serious
about business. Although attitudes are changing, there are still
some business people who look down on (or even actively discriminate against)
their colleagues who work from home, thinking that if the home-based
worker was really serious about his or her business or really successful
at it they would have a "real" business location.
In particular, this can be a problem for home businesses serving the
corporate sector. Many blue chip clients still cling to the bias that
home-based equates with instability (as in just doing this until you can
find a "real" job, non-professionalism, or
inexperience. Even if they accept the fact that you’re working from
home, they assume you’ll pass on your lower overhead to them.
Aside from feeling sorry for the fact that these poor souls haven’t yet
clued in to the new economy and discovered for themselves the joys of
the home office, there are things you can do to gain their trust...and
their business.
Creating a professional image is the first step to gaining the respect
of the doubters. Be professional, competent and assured. Answer your
phone properly. Invest in well-designed promotional materials,
stationery, and a website. And, of course, provide a quality product or
service, on time, all the time. (More about this later.)
Some home business owners find that one of the main barriers to creating
a professional image, and therefore to their credibility, is spillover
from family life. Spillover happens when your Labrador retriever answers
the door. It’s the smell of last night’s cabbage and fish dinner seeping
under your office door. It’s the sound of your teenagers fighting and
playing loud rock music while you are interviewing a prospective
customer in the next room. And it’s the frustration described by a woman
who manufactures covers for computers and cell phones from her home:
“One of my biggest problems is trying to remain professional when
someone is yelling, ‘Mom, Mom’ forty times in a row while
I am on the phone.”
Now, spillover isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s a major
factor in the paradigm shift that’s allowing individuals to reintegrate
their family and working lives – in a way that’s both healthy for
children and positive for communities. If the home business owner is
comfortable with this integration, it can be positive on the business
side as well, especially in terms of increased creativity and
productivity.
You must decide how much spillover works for you and your business. For
instance, if clients come to your home, you need to give them your
undivided attention in a space that meets their professional
expectations. Your telephone communication with them needs to be
professional and uninterrupted. Ask yourself if the noises and smells of
home will be intrusive to your business activities.
Just don’t assume you have to hide the fact that you work at home. The
ambiance that can emanate from a home office can be a welcome change for
clients. Consider whether you can make your business location a positive
part of your image. Maybe your home location is an asset to your
business image because clients can reach you on weekends, or simply
because it illustrates that you’re riding the cutting edge of new social
trends. One woman I know who used to publish a home office magazine once went
to great lengths to convince her readers that she worked from home, when
the business actually operated from an industrial mall an hour’s drive
away from where she lived!
Children and the Home Office
Similarly, you can view the presence of children in your home as either
a challenge or an asset. Try acting professionally when your
two-year-old is whining and pulling at your pant leg while you’re
talking to a major client. Or when the lost gerbil suddenly is found
under your client’s chair.
Much of the advice given to prospective home business owners is that you
have to employ a nanny, put the kids in daycare full-time, or lose your
sanity in order to work effectively at home. This may be true for some
people, but since I believe that restoring the balance between family
and working lives is one of the main advantages of working at home, I
suggest you consider ways to make the two compatible.
My husband and I started our home business in 1976 in order to stay at
home with our two unschooled daughters. I don’t deny that it was a
challenge to balance the time spent nurturing children and business. But
the advantages to our family life and to our daughters’ development were
worth it. I also believe that the business benefitted, since my husband
and I weren’t wasting time worrying about how our daughters were faring
in daycare (or spending money on it!).
This balancing process does require a degree of skill and tolerance. One
young man I know is in the process of launching a home-based consulting
business. It is important to family finances that he get up and running
rather quickly because his wife is off work, having just delivered their
second child. One morning he told me this story. On the previous evening
he had worked late. He had just finished transferring some data onto a
portable hard drive ready to deliver to a client the next morning, when
the baby awoke for her two AM feeding and diaper change. In order to
allow his wife some much needed sleep, my friend looked after the baby,
prepared the drive for the courier and some dirty diapers for the diaper
service, and eventually stumbled into bed. In the morning, his actions
of the night before slowly unfolded. While a bewildered diaper service
clerk wondered what to do with a computer drive, the client opened a
rather smelly package. Fortunately, my friend was able to explain the accident and his client took it all in
good humored stride.
There is much more information about balancing family and business in
Chapter 9. But at this stage, it’s enough to know that good time
management skills, a sense of humor and a solid grasp on your priorities
go a long way towards helping you manage living and working under the
same roof. An office door and firm rules about working hours and
trespassing can also help.
And be realistic. Says one mother of three small children who runs a successful
bookkeeping business from home:
“In some ways I believe working at home has been both negative for me and
not as positive for my children, as was the original intention. Upon
reflection I recently realized this was because I was trying to do too
much. I very seldom had a baby-sitter and tried to do most of my work at
night and on weekends when my husband was home, in addition to all
the housework. But due to client demands, I spent a lot of time working
during the days, leaving the children to their own entertainment in the
adjacent room. As a result, I spent less quality time with them than when
I was working away from home. There is, I believe, a common
misconception that if you are a woman running a home business you can
somehow attend to your children and home to the same degree as if you
were a full-time mother. I am currently looking for a mother’s helper.”
Other solutions for this woman might have been to control the growth of
her business, or to discuss sharing housework with her husband.
Family members can be your biggest asset or your biggest hindrance. For
this reason, it can be beneficial to involve both children and spouse in
the planning of your business. If they feel a part of it, their level of
tolerance and understanding about your changing role within the family –
and the business’s place within their home – will be much greater than
if the enterprise is parachuted into their midst.
When you’re planning your home business, determine both your personal
and business needs for space, privacy and accessibility. Then set some
rules and structure your business space to reflect those decisions. Most
people who work at home feel it is important to have a separate room for
the business. Says one mother, “I have a room in the basement which has
the advantage of a door to ensure privacy. But, unfortunately, I have to
bring clients through the kitchen and toy-filled family room to reach
the office.” A work-at-home dad says that his office door has a lock, so
when he locks himself inside, the children know he is working and when
he isn’t in the office he can lock it and know the little ones aren’t
messing around with his papers and stamps. Fortunately for the kids,
this dad only works at home when his wife is at home to attend to their
needs!
Children can be involved, even at an early age, in your business. Our
daughters were a great source of casual labor for our home business,
they were always guaranteed a part-time job – at least until they
discovered that outside jobs were better for their social lives!
Our eldest daughter – now supporting
herself with a home business – became self-employed when she was eight.
Since she was home-educated during the years she could have attended
elementary school, she received most of her education through our home
business. She says she began reading because when she was five years old
we were sorting 50,000 copies of
Natural Life Magazine for a bulk
mailing. The magazines were stacked everywhere in the house, including
the bath tub; she says she learned to alphabetize in order to help sort
those magazines by postal code so she could have a bath! Aside from
participating in menial labor, she and her sister were often included in
business brainstorming sessions and sometimes provided very creative,
simple solutions to business problems.
Certainly there were times when it would have been easier to have the
children in school and the business in a downtown office. But our family
weathered the experience with patience, organization, flexibility,
employees who knew that reading to children and answering incessant
questions were part of their job descriptions, and the understanding
that integrating the various parts of our lives was a desirable goal.
But most important of all was our certainty that running a home-based
business made an important statement about our priorities in life. It
was about the fact that we were part of a movement of people searching
for collective solutions to the challenge of finding an economic base
that would allow us, as a family, to maintain our cultural and family
identities.
By the way, we found that kids can also be a great source of stress
relief, providing a reason to take a breather and be silly for a few
minutes!
Home Office Isolation
Ironically enough, in light of all these interruptions from others, home
businesses can also be plagued by a shortage of people! For some micro
business owners, isolation strikes the killer blow to their home-based
enterprises. That’s why I stressed self-assessment earlier: It’s
important to take a hard look at your personality to see if you can work
alone, or if a shared business space might suit you better.
There exists a wide variety of shared business space opportunities,
especially in urban areas. A group of home business owners might pool
resources to rent storage space or hire administrative help. And in many
cities, there are an increasing number of businesses that will, for a
monthly fee, provide you with an office, administrative and reception
services, photocopiers and other equipment, and use of meeting rooms.
Coworking spaces
are another great resource, especially for those times when you really need some exposure to other business owners.
Isolation might not seem like much of a problem if the nature of your
business is such that you are primarily dealing with clients on a
face-to-face basis at their place of work. But even then, as an
entrepreneur, you need the creative stimulation of talking about your
business to people other than clients. You need to talk to your peers.
Overworkers Anonymous
Another big challenge to some people who work at home is workaholism.
Starting and growing your own business is an exciting challenge. But
often people become so caught up in their enterprise they lose the
balance in their lives. Such people must learn to build some fun time
into their schedules – time to be lazy, time to enjoy themselves and
their families.
One father who works at home puts it this way, “It’s easy to seduce
yourself into thinking you’re being accessible to your children because
you work at home, but they never see you anyway and if you’re there,
it’s only in body your mind is on your business.”
This is a real trap for many women also, especially those who try to
combine a home business with little children. The temptation is to try
to have it all. As a result they exhaust themselves, snatching bits of
time when the baby is asleep and working late into the night. This is
where goal setting comes in handy (and keeping those goals in front of
you to remind yourself why you are doing this in the first place). Don’t
forget that you are in business for yourself so you can have more
control over your life. So don’t let the business take control.
Getting Down to Work
While overwork could be a problem for many home-based entrepreneurs, the
challenge for others might be getting down to work in the first place.
Surrounded by all the household tasks that are forever begging to be
done, those with little focus and self-control worry that they might
never stop puttering around the house long enough to accomplish any
business. And take it from an accomplished procrastinator: A good deal
of will power is needed to work at home. When I am faced with a work
deadline, I have the most dust-free house on the block and the sharpest
pencils.
Not the least of the temptations to be found in the home environment are
calories. Says one corporate executive turned consultant, “I put on ten
pounds during the first few months of working at home because whenever I
took a break from my work, I just wandered downstairs to raid the
refrigerator.”
Once you have mustered sufficient self-control and motivation, and
decided on strategies for dealing with all these challenges, you are
ready to start work. So squelch the urge to trot down to the
refrigerator, or to sharpen up a dozen pencils. We’re going to get down
to business!
This excerpt from Bringing It Home: A
Home Business Start-Up Guide for You and Your Family by Wendy Priesnitz
is copyright (c) Wendy Priesnitz, 1996. This
book is now out of print.
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