Over the next few days I’m going to be looking at some of the issues relating to working from home.
For many self-employed people running small enterprises, working out of a home office can be a convenient and cost-effective solution. Many are able to sustain this in the longer term, renting off-site storage, warehousing or workshop space as required. It works best where your business lends itself to visiting clients in their own homes, or for distance selling such as online retail.
On a day to day basis, the advantages of working from home include:
•Saving time (and money) commuting - you can be at your desk within 30 minutes of waking up - less if you decide to do the first hour in your pyjamas! I speak from experience.
•There’s no office rent to pay - great for keeping costs down in the start-up phase of a business - and even your existing furniture and storage space can be rearranged or recycled to accommodate business equipment and supplies.
•You can work whenever you like, which can be helpful if you find yourself more productive at some times than at others. For example, I can get twice as much done in the early hours of the morning as I can after lunch.
So you might ask, what are the down-sides? Well, here are a few of the common pitfalls and over the next few days we be looking in more detail at what we can do to manage them:
•Dealing with distractions or ‘If you’re not in the office, you must be free to meet up for a coffee?’
•Keeping home and work separate or ‘Where did my home go?’
•Maintaining regular working hours or The ‘just one more hour’s sleep’ syndrome and
•Creating an efffective and desirable workspace or ‘I’m bored with my home-office but working in the local cafe/pub/garden centre is costing me a small fortune and the wi-fi is unreliable’
My own view is that you can run a successful small business from home, but as with anything you need to keep working at it. It takes time to get the right support systems in place and what works for one person won’t work for the next. But this process of trial and error is exactly what will help you build a workspace which works for you and for your business, so stick with it!
See you tomorrow for some tips on how to deal with distractions.
