HOME JOB GUIDE : WHAT AND WHAT NOT?

Working from Home: What to Consider

Before Taking the Plunge

Topics Covered:

The Pros and Cons of Working from Home

Avoiding Home Business Scams

Preparing Yourself Mentally for Business

Working and Living: Don't Blur the Lines

Working Alone: Who'd Have Thought You'd Miss Your Co-Workers?

Working from Home: What to Consider

Before Taking the Plunge
 

The Pros and Cons of Working From Home

If you’re thinking of starting a home business, you’ve got to realize something about life. Life has a certain balance: there is no pleasure without pain, and there are no pros without cons. Here’s a look at the upsides and downsides of home businesses.

Pro: Independence. You do what you want, when you want. No-one else can screw up your hard work, and you don’t need to depend on anyone but yourself. Your days of being told what to do are over. And there’s no dress code, either! Many people who work from home admit to sitting around in their pyjamas all day, or even working in the nude.

Con: No Security. With independence, though, comes responsibility. There’s nobody to carry you if you do badly one day – if you don’t make any money for the business, then you don’t get paid. People like certainty in their lives (that’s why they spend big bucks on insurance) – it can be hard to live with this ultimate step into performance-related pay. You might find yourself quickly wishing you had a regular paycheque again.

Pro: Flexible Working. You decide your hours. If you want to take Wednesday off and work Saturday instead, then no-one’s stopping you. If you’d like to get up early and cram all your work into the mornings so you can have the afternoons off, then hey, you’re the boss. Such flexibility can be a massive relief after years of working nine to five.

Con: Work Never Ends. When you work from home, it can be tempting to be constantly monitoring things, even when you’ve decided you’re not working. The only person who can handle a crisis is you – and crises have a tendency to happen in the middle of the night, or on your day off.

Pro: Keeping All the Money. Everything you earn is yours to keep. It can be truly disheartening to work somewhere where cash is being handled, and realising that the takings for the day add up to a hundred times more than you got paid. You know that someone’s getting rich off your back, but it’s not you – working from home makes you the fatcat at the top.

Con: Doing Everything. Not all that money was profit, you know. It goes on things like marketing, management, stock control, deliveries, and so on. Suddenly you have to manage everything that goes on in your business – you deal with suppliers on one end and customers on the other, you have to do all the budgeting and spending, and you become your own marketing department. You get to deal with all the fun tax issues, too.

Pro: No More Commuting. Commuting is expensive, painful, and can feel like a complete waste of time – just think of all the time and money most people spend travelling to and from work. When you have a home business, you just get up and you’re right next to your workplace – isn’t that convenient?

Con: One Less Room. Your house can feel a lot smaller when you’ve had to set one room aside as your ‘home office’. When you’re not working, it just sits there, useless, and meanwhile your kids are getting upset at how small their bedrooms are.

Pro: A Healthier Lifestyle. When you only have an hour’s lunch break to do everything you need to do, you can end up running yourself into the ground and not eating properly. Working from home lets you do your errands when you want, and eat good food every day.

Con: The Loneliness. If you’re the only one around in your house during the day, it avoids distractions – but it can also feel very lonely. If you’re the kind of person who likes being around other people, you can start to get quite depressed.

But…

If you talk to anyone who works from home, they’ll probably say to you that, for them, the pros far outweigh the cons. Once you’re doing your own thing and feeling great, it’s hard to go back to a salaried existence – and remember, it’s far easier to work around your problems in a home business than it is to deal with any problems you might have at work.

Avoiding Home Business Scams

Now maybe the reason you’re interested in setting up a home business is because you’ve seen an ad somewhere, or you’ve been approached by someone. It was all about a great work-from-home money-making opportunity, and you’re excited. Finally, you can quit your job!

If you’re thinking of working from home by someone else’s rules, though, you have to realize that at least 99% of the offers out there are scams – after all, if it was that easy to pay a few dollars and make thousands, wouldn’t everyone be doing it by now? Here are the biggest scams out there, how to recognise them, and how to avoid them.

Location, Location, Location

Where did you see that work from home offer? If you got it in the post, or by email, or saw it on a poster taped around a telephone pole, then I can guarantee you right now that it’s not a legitimate offer. If you saw the ad in a newspaper, in a jobs magazine or on a jobs website, then it’s a little more likely to be legit – but not much. Always check out any offer, and assume it’s a scam until you have iron-clad proof to the contrary.

Envelope Stuffing

This is the most established work-from-home scam, and it’s been going for decades now. Basically, once you pay your money and sign up to work from home, you’re sent a set of envelopes and ads just like the one you responded to. You might make some money if someone responds to your ad, but eventually there just won’t be a market for it any more. Anyway, work from home offers like this are illegal pyramid schemes.

You won’t make any money putting letters in envelopes – get over it.

Charging for Supplies

The practice of charging for supplies is hard to pin down to any one scam – it’s the way almost all work-at-home scams work (including the envelope stuffing, above). You’ll be asked to make a small ‘investment’ for whatever materials would be needed to do the work – and then you’ll be sent very shoddy materials that aren’t worth anything like what you paid, and you’ll find that there’s no market for the work anyway.

If anyone asks for money upfront, run. A real company should be willing to deduct any ‘fees’ from your first paycheque – if they won’t do that for you, then that’s because they don’t ever plan to pay you.

Working for Free

This variation on the scam is common with crafts. You might be asked to work at home making clothes, ornaments or toys. Everything seems legitimate – you’ve got the materials without paying out any money, and you’re doing the work. Unfortunately for you, when you send the work back, the company will tell you that it didn’t meet their ‘quality standards’, and will refuse to pay you. Then they’ll sell on what you made at a profit, and move on to the next sucker.

Never do craft work from home unless you’re selling the items yourself. Note that you don’t need to be selling to consumers (you could be selling to wholesalers), but you still need to be the one deciding what you make and getting the money.

Home Typing, Medical Billing, and More

There are lots of work-from-home scams that involve persuading you that some industry has more work than it can handle, and so has to outsource to people working from home. For example, you might be told that you’d be typing legal documents, or entering medical bills into an electronic database. These scams have one thing in common: they all say that all you need is your computer, and they all then go on to say that you need to buy some ‘special software’.

This software might appear to be from a completely unrelated company, but don’t be fooled – the whole reason the ‘work-from-home’ ad was there to begin with was simply as cynical marketing for the software.

As you can see, running a ‘home business’ that just involves ‘working’ for one company is a bad idea. You don’t know who you’re dealing with. Here’s the clincher, though: even with entirely legal work-at-home offers that do pay you for your work, you still won’t make anywhere near as much as you can with your very own home business. So why bother with them at all?

Preparing Yourself Mentally for Business

People say that starting your own business is difficult. Guess what? They’re not kidding. Starting a business, in many ways, is a lot like having a child – and would you just have a child without thinking it through first? Before you get started, there are lots of things you need to think about and discuss with anyone you can.

Can You Afford to Fail?

You might have heard the old saying ‘only gamble what you can afford to lose’. Well, however you approach it, starting your own business is still gambling. A massive percentage of businesses fail in their first year. If your financial situation is such that you agonise over every small amount you spend, starting a business is probably a bad idea.

Put it this way: do not expect to succeed. Expect that you will fail, and always try your hardest not to. You’ll be pleasantly surprised if things go your way. Note that this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t believe in yourself and your business – simply that you have to realise the kind of odds you’re up against, and stay realistic.

Will You Stick at It?

You can’t get halfway through all this and have a sudden change of heart, or feel like you’re doomed to fail. All successful business spend plenty of time doing badly before they start to pick up. You need to prepare yourself for a steady stream of failure being slowly replaced by success. Don’t expect the world all at once.

Could You Take the Stress?

Starting a business is one of the most stressful things you can do. It will affect you mentally, physically and emotionally. You need to be strong to deal with this kind of stress, and you need to have someone to turn to for support.

Are You a Survivor?

There are some people who always seem to make it in the end, regardless of what life throws at them. You need to be the kind of person whose response to things going wrong is to work harder and get it fixed, not someone who cries and goes into hiding.

Many entrepreneurs say that this, more than anything, is the secret of success. You need to be a ‘never say die’ kind of person. You need to be always ready to try again, no matter what gets thrown at you. Remember that it’s not when things start to go wrong that you fail – you haven’t failed until you’ve given up.

Be Prepared to Work Hard

If you’ve been doing a standard nine-to-five job, you’re probably used to a world where it’s someone else’s responsibility if the work doesn’t get done – you work as fast as you can for the hours you’re told to, and if it’s not done on time then it’s the manager’s fault for not hiring enough people. When you work on your own, though, there’s no-one to blame – the buck stops where it starts, with you.

You Need to Satisfy Every Customer.

When you run a home business, you can’t afford to lose any customers. You need to always be nice to them, trying to meet their needs. You have to remember that you’re the most senior person they can talk to in this organisation, and you have to act like it – when there’s no-one other than you to handle complaints, you have to either give in to customers at every opportunity or watch them take their business elsewhere.

Do You Really Love What You Do?

If you don’t love what you do, then sooner or later you’re going to want to stop doing it – and when you run a home business, that’s difficult. Besides, you can’t run a home business if you’re always sitting and thinking about how great it’ll be when it’s the weekend. No, the only way to succeed in home business is to be absolutely sure that you really love what you’re doing. If you can think of another job you’d rather have, then you’re in trouble.

Think of it this way: could you run up to someone on the street with a leaflet about your business, and tell them all about it in a way that would really leave an impression? It doesn’t matter whether you actually could or not – if you think everyone will be interested, then, believe me, they will be.

Working and Living: Don't Blur the Lines

When you're at home all the time, people have a way of giving you everything to do, with no regard for your job. It can be very hard indeed to keep your family life separate from your business when you work at home -- in fact, this is one of the most common reasons home businesses fail, and their owners come away all too glad to get back to the corporate grindstone. If you don't want to be driven away from home business, here's what you need to do to keep your family at bay.

Work Time, Home Time

Make a schedule for when you're going to work and when you're not, and stick to it. This doesn't have to be inflexible -- it's very silly to only work nine to five every day, for example -- but it still really needs to be there. Without a plan, you're inevitably going to go too far one way or the other, and either work far too much or nowhere near enough. You might find it best to a new plan at the start of each month or week, so that you can still respond to changes in circumstances.

Yes, I know it can be difficult to draw clear lines between family time and work time, especially if your family is around for some of the hours that you want to be working. The only thing I can say to you is that it's important to keep on trying, because the moment you give up everything's going to come crashing down. Whatever you do, don't let your family anywhere near your office space.

Fit Errands Around Work

People will obviously be upset if you absolutely refuse to run their errands -- is it really so much trouble to run down to the bank when you're at home all day? -- but you can't let them take away hours from work. You should make your response automatic. When someone asks you to take an hour out of work to do something during the day, tell them that you'll have to make that hour up at the end of the day, so they shouldn't expect you out of the office until an hour later than usual.

Don't Do Chores

It can be tempting to do the laundry or the dishes when there's a load of them to do and work seems slow, but don't give it to it during your working day. Chores eat up an amazing amount of time. One thing you can do to help resist the temptation is to wear better clothes than you usually would when you're working -- not a suit, but something business-casual that you wouldn't really be willing to wash dishes in.

Have a Business Phone Line

You need a phone line that's just for business to let clients leave messages for you when you're not in the office. Say exactly that in the message: 'I'm not in the office right now, but please leave your name and number and I'll get back to you'. Whatever you do, don't be tempted to take business calls after-hours, or give out your personal number to business contacts -- this is a sure-fire way to never stop working. Turn off the ringer on your business phone when you leave the office for the day.

With Children, All Bets are Off

If you have children at home during the day (if they haven't started school yet, or it's a school holiday), it can be very difficult to maintain a sensible work pattern. They will come and bother you at every opportunity, because they miss you and want to see you. They'll even cause trouble just to get you to sort it out. They wanted to come and bothered you at your office job too, you know, but they had no way of getting there.

So what can you do when there are children in the house? After all, it's harsh to just ignore them, isn't it? The best answer I've found is to hire a babysitter, who can keep the kids entertained while you work. It could get expensive, but it shouldn't be for long, right?

Working Alone: Who'd Have Thought You'd Miss Your Co-Workers?

Remember co-workers? Those annoying people who you're forced to share an office with -- some of them friends, but most of them insufferable. If you're anything like me, one of reasons for starting a home business was to get away from these people. And yet, when you do work at home all day, every day, you might find that you start to miss that kind of companionship, and feel more than a little lonely.

All Alone...

Picture the scene. You get up for another day of work. Your husband or wife has already left, since they have to get up earlier to commute to their job. Your children are at school. All the neighbours are at work. Your house feels deserted, and your neighbourhood feels like a ghost town.

It's all too easy to become enormously demotivated in this situation, and to begin to feel like your work is pointless. Worse, when you get stuck or something bad happens, you have no-one to turn to -- at work, you were all in it together, but now it's just you, out on your own.

Even if you don't feel like it will affect you, this lack of human interaction could actually cause you quite a few problems. You could find yourself being more irritable than usual, lacking in energy, or even feeling upset or sad without being able to figure out the reason why. All of these feelings can be related to home-worker loneliness.

However, the good news is that there are several solutions:

The Power of the Web

Since you've presumably got a computer and Internet access on your office computer, you might find it worthwhile to get on a search engine and find a few forums for your industry, especially ones dedicated to people who run home businesses. You might think what you do is too obscure, but it's a big web out there.

Finding friends on web forums can be good for replacing the lost interaction with co-workers. More than that, it can offer you a good outlet for your frustrations and problems -- many of the people you're talking to will have been through the same thing themselves, and will be more than happy to sympathise with you and offer advice.

There's one thing to be careful of, though: don't let chatting about everything and nothing on the web interrupt your work. Give yourself a certain amount of time each day to talk to your newfound 'colleagues', and don't go over it. You don't want to be sitting there pressing 'Refresh' on a long discussion when you should be getting some work done, do you?

Get to Know Your Clients

Here's a good way to turn your loneliness into an advantage: make your clients your friends! The customers that will be the most loyal to you are the ones that trust you and know you, and going to meet with them sometimes as a friend can be rewarding on both a personal and a business level.

Associations, Groups and Societies

If you look, you might be surprised at how many things there are out there that you could join. Perhaps your area has a Homeworkers' Society, or an association for your industry that holds regular meetings? Go along, and you could find some new friends, as well as some good business contacts. Two or three groups should be enough.

Go to a Coffee Place Sometimes

You've seen those people who seem to be doing work in Starbucks, right? Well, they've figured out something valuable -- being at home alone all day sends you crazy, and it's nice to get away sometimes and have some coffee while you work. Over time, you'll even become a regular, and people there will start getting to know you.

Use Your Breaks to Contact People

Most people have a list a mile long of friends and family that they've been meaning to get in touch with for ages, but never seem to have the chance. A great thing to do can be to make a big list of all these people, and then phone or email one of them each week, in one of your breaks. Not only does this fight loneliness, but it's also a plain fun and nice thing to do