Home Based Business

It used to be that if you worked from home you would try and disguise the fact. I remember there was a television advertisement once for what we used to call a “telephone company” but which would now be called a telecommunications or media company, the point of which ad was that by using some of their technology you could appear to be a “real business”.

Nowadays I routinely come across people who have quite successful, even international businesses, who have no problem about acknowledging that they work from home.

Perhaps the fact that we know from the mass media that more and more businesses are home based is making “working from home”, if not yet generally a badge of pride, at least something to be willing to acknowledge, without feeling that your listener or reader is going to think you don’t have a “real business”.

And yet, and yet…

Yes, I am sure there are many people, probably in their millions, who still think it’s not a “real” business unless you put on a suit, or a dress, or other “work clothes” as the case may be, commute to an office or shop or other “workplace” and join the other people doing the same thing, and have people working for you in the same physical location, within an organizational and production framework that hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades or maybe a hundred years or more. And then commute home again in the evening.

And some of those people would undoubtedly think that if they were working from home that would mean they had fallen on less successful times. Which of course for some could be true.

So why do some of us feel quite ok - even, dare we say it, a tad smug - that in working from home we have a googd deal and even, perhaps, the better deal?

Here are five reasons off the top of my head. They are my subjective reasons and it would be interesting to know what reasons others have.

1. No Boss

There was a time, when I was younger and probably by definition more naive, that I used to be ambitious to climb in the organization, to get the better position, especially if it meant having an office of my own, a car, a secretary - first on a shared basis and later my own secretary - and I could make decisions for others to carry out rather than being at the mercy of sometimes eccentric, sometimes bullying, sometimes dumb bosses - with a few honorable exceptions who were smart, wise, supportive and admirable, but they were the exception.

I discovered that there was always someone higher up and that even as the chief executive of a company there was had a board and shareholders cracking their various whips. And when I got to that executive role and had a staff of twenty and a chairman and board of directors to report to I thought I was the bees’ knees, until about five minutes into my first board meeting.

I also observed that in the public service there was a head of the department, but then there was the minister, and then there was the cabinet, and then there were the voters. Funny thing, somehow that “chain of command” did not always lead to what the average citizen would in an honest moment regard as rational planning and decision-making.

Indeed I once pulled out of what I had been given to understand was a fairly assured promotion to a coveted position within a government department because, as I said to a clearly puzzled supervisor at the time, I couldn’t see myself being happy with arguing one policy position forcefully today and the opposite position equally forcefully tomorrow, just because there had been a change in the political wind. The supervisor was no doubt puzzled at my attitude because that was his normal working day.

If I have bosses now, it’s my customers, or me. Realistically, there is no boss in my business. And that works for me.

2. My Own Priorities

If you want to get on in the world of work and business as most people know it, you have to be ready and willing to drop today’s priorities, shift gear and respond to priorities set by others. If you have rational, well-focused management, that need not be a major source of stress, but in an age where one of the most in-demand products on the market is anti-depressants, you have to be very shrewd or lucky or both to get a bunch of managers and a board of directors where everyone is a fully-evolved, rationally-functioning person. Dream on.

I set my own priorities and I am fundamentally accountable to myself for meeting them. Which doesn’t mean I am not mentored of have no one else to be accountable to, just that the person or persons I am mentored by or accountable to are people I’ve chosen, not just someone who got a promotion ahead of me.

3. Healthier Living

When I worked in air-conditioned offices, as I did for many years, traveling to work for at least half an hour by bus or car, I used to get sick. The ‘flu came around and I got it. Admittedly I smoked for a long time, so that didn’t help. But now I work with the door and windows open most of the year and don’t breathe in carbon monoxide on a daily basis, just on rare trips to the city.

My desk is positioned to look out on the garden. There are lots of birds and the occasional water dragon darting across the lawn. The only irritant is the noise, from time to time, of the gardeners at work with cutting implements and leaf blowers - a small price to pay for living and working close to nature.

And because I eat at home there is much less temptation to have the less-than-healthy lunches I used to have. Not to mention the drinks after work, which always seemed like a good idea at the time.

I can get to the beach or the gym whenever I like, in ten minutes or less.

Generally, a whole lot healthier for me.

4. I Only Have to Deal With My Own Idiosyncrasies  

There was a time in my life when the average Dilbert cartoon would have been more painfully close to my day to day reality than I cared to admit. I would guess that any of us who have worked in any business or government agency, or organization of any kind, have found the biggest challenge to often be dealing with the idiosyncrasies - to put it politely - of others we had to work with, bosses, workmates and customers/stakeholders. Sure, they had to deal with our idiosyncrasies, but we didn’t see that as our problem . And when I was doing a lot of training programs I used to find that one skill people in organizations felt was really essential for them to do their job well but which they routinely did not feel they had to a high level was “dealing with difficult people”.

Now I only have my own idiosyncrasies to deal with. And if a client or supplier has idiosyncrasies that stress me out too much I can decide I don’t need or want that client or supplier any more.

5. The Technology Has Arrived

When I think about the power and reach of the technology available now on the desktop at home, and increasingly with Web 2.0 applications accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection, I remember with some degree of disbelief the sense of lesser business capacity I had when I moved nineteen years ago from having full access to the computing and telecommunications power of a big organization to having an ICT infrastructure of a fixed line telephone and fax machine (for which I suddenly had to pay all the bills myself) and a PC with a 40 Mb (!) hard drive and stacks of floppy discs.

Now I can work from anywhere in the world, with free international and local telephony via VoIP, and a laptop computer with the sort of storage and computing power that once we used to have based in its own air-conditioned room, with someone attending it to make sure it worked.

And did I say I can go to the beach when I want to?

Surfs up! I’m off.

Working From Home Rules OK!

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A couple of days ago I wrote about the “mini-blogging” phenomenon of Twitter.

And now I’ve noticed a post by Neil Patel which lists several steps for using Twitter to increase traffic to your site. He says:

The post is well worth reading in full. The underlying strategy of the steps outlined is to get as many people as you can to “friend” you. I’m still coming to terms with this and am having a challenge with others who want to friend me but don’t reveal anything about themselves in their profile - sometimes just a username which could be that of a robot. Doesn’t this seriously devalue the meaning of the word “friend”?

I admit I’m not comfortable with using “friend” as a verb. What’s wrong with good old “befriend”? Then again, “befriend” seems in my mind some process between people, exchange of ideas, conversation…

“Tag - you’re my friend”?  “Twit - you’re my friend” could be misinterpreted (”who are you calling a twit?”).

But really, making friends is as easy as that? I suppose, as long as you are ok with that rather loose use of the word “friend”.

On the other hand, as Robert Scoble observes in the video linked from my previous post about Twitter , you can easily get rid of names from your list of friends, or “friends”, if you don’t want them there.

Anyone who has an RSS feed from this blog will presumably have just received half a dozen copies of the same post, about Australia’s Anzac Day.

My apologies.

The multiple copies were not due to an excess of national spirit. Basically I was doing a minor edit and thought I’d just re-saved the post, not realising I had generated a new post. How that became five or six I have no idea.

It’s not the first time that has happened, although previously not with so many copies.

The challenge for me is that I have blogs also on the WordPress platform, which handles editing and re-saving a previous post differently. With WordPress, if you edit an existing, published post and hit Save, it simply edits the post. With Blogware, the underlying platform of this blog, hitting Save gives you a new post, unless you go through the steps to configure the saving process for re-publishing at the original date and time. Logical enough, but I prefer the WordPress version where I don’t have to think about it or do all the re-configuring.

Presumably I got the steps wrong this morning. Something about getting up at 4am for the dawn service, perhaps.

This is a personal post for a special day.

Because today, April 25, is a special day for Australians. Although we have an official national day, Australia Day in January, today, Anzac Day, has much more significance for most Australians.

The Australian War Memorial site explains why.

I understand that even after reading the War Memorial explanation, perhaps you have to be an Australian or a New Zealander to understand why the anniversary of a day of a bungled landing under withering fire and the beginning of a campaign that was to end in military defeat and withdrawal is a day of quiet pride and reflection for Australians.

But this day was truly a defining moment for a young nation.

I recalled another day, long ago, standing with my mother at the war
memorial in the little country town of Tumbarumba and my mother showing me the names of young men, boys, she had known growing up in
that town and who had gone off to World War I. What lives in my mind is my mother pointing out the clusters of family names, names - she told me - of
whole groups of brothers who went to war, some never to come back. What anguish for their mothers and the rest of those left behind.

And as I stood in the half light of dawn this morning at Currumbin Beach with thousands of others, and listened to the commemorative service, I was struck by how many of the crowd were young people. This was no celebration of war. This was a mass pausing for respect to be paid to those who richly deserve it, those who died far from home and those who returned, some to bear terrible burdens of physical and mental suffering.

It was a quiet, reflective celebration of the peace that we enjoy, in no small measure due to the sacrifices of Australian men and women in past times of great conflict.

So I was really pleased that the veterans had approved having a rock concert on the beach as a later part of the day’s events - they knew what they and their mates had gone to fight for and it wasn’t for people to go around with long faces looking serious.

And seeing so many young people standing quietly and respectfully in the crowd today, I felt a great sense of confidence about the future of our beloved country in their hands. A true blue mob indeed.

Lest we forget.

If you are work from home and are vaguely interested in what’s happening with new Web applications, every day’s email and news feeds can brim with temptation to explore the latest new thing, rather than getting on with your planned work. For those who make a business of exploring the latest new things, there is no conflict.

Take Twitter, for instance.

And some who have tried to understand Twitter and given up might well say, Yes, take Twitter - a long way away.

Others are either more curious or are even Twitterholics.

Just over a month ago I posted a fence-sitting podcast on the subject at Business Blogging Show.

I’ve since asked others and had mixed reports, but more people I
respect as knowing about these things seem to be getting on board, and
I’d hate to miss out

For the sake of anyone who is not on Twitter or hasn’t figured out what it is, the Wikipedia explanation is:

Twitter explains itself more pithily, with less emphasis on the technology and more on the social networking aspect:

There is an interesting video on chrisbrogan.com, where Robert Scoble talks with friends about Twitter. Dr Robert Pepper asked “what is Twitter?”

Some quotes from Robert’s contributions:

Benjamin Higginbotham has a short but helpful post on Technology Evangelist - Twitter is best explained through Twittervision:

He believes Twittervision and Twittermaps demonstrate what Twitter does, what it makes possible.

When you click on Twittervision you get a moving map of the world, with instant flagging of Twitter posts. Be warned - it can be hypnotic.

With Twittermaps I can define my location. And in fact I can have several locations and Twitter which one I am in at present.

I’ve now installed on this blog (left sidebar) a couple of Twitter components:

A Twitter “badge” where I post items about what I’m doing/thinking and with a link to my Twitter page, under my Twitter (and MyBlogLog) handle of “beachblogger”.

And hyperlinked pictures of  Twitter friends.

I imagine it’s fairly obvious that Twitter could be a real distraction for anyone working from home. Can it also add value? My guess, picking up on a comment in the video linked to above, is that depends on the business context each person works in. For me it makes sense so far to explore it further, I think mainly in terms of the possibilities of “mini-blogging” and of course social networking.

Nearly two years ago, in May 2005, I posted here about a home based business success story, the star of which was someone I’d heard speak at a government-sponsored business seminar in a local town.

It was a story about someone building a “serious”, million-dollar business from their home. Something I thought a few readers of this blog would find interesting.

Clearly some people have found the post of interest. It keeps coming up, even nearly two years on, as the “most popular article” in the stats report from the blog’s hosting provider, BlogHarbor.

The post was Internet Security Home Based Business Success.

Why so popular?

Is the interest in internet security, home based business, or success? Or all three?

Or is there a tag in the keyword list for the post that is attracting visits? The keywords are: norbas, security, purehacking, northernrivers, lismore, internet, homeoffice, homebusinesstips, homebusiness, hacking, hack, government, dsrd, creditcards, computers, business.

One idea I have to try and get some insight on this is to do some posts on internet security and some on home based business success and compare the results. But do I need to put myself to that task?

And it could take some time. So if anyone has a key to this puzzle, I hope you will share it.

Hope you don’t  mind me sharing this. It’s really bugging me.

Maybe it’s the onset of Anzac Day, prompting from Kathie, Melbourne’s well-known determination not to be outdone by the Emerald City, or frustration that the Great Aussie BloggerCon has not yet materialised, but more probably a result of the flurry of Aussie blog ranking/discovery/revealing of the diversity of the Oz blogosphere, started by Craig and kicked along by Meg, Duncan and others. Or Melbourne starting to get colder and people looking for a greater variety of indoor activity .

Or all of these.

Whatever the reason, Darren and Alister have taken steps to emulate the Sydneysiders and get a bloggers meetup group going - at last glance it had 42 members, which is impressive seeing it’s only just been announced.

Alister has all the details in his post - It’s time for Melbourne (AU) Bloggers to Get Together! - including how to sign up.

Good touch, Alister - the (AU). It will be a bit far for blogging Melburnians in Florida USA, Québec or Ontario, Canada, or Derbyshire in England, although they will no doubt be welcome if they choose to join and attend.

And in fact wherever you’re from, if you are going to be moving to or visiting Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, not inappropriately dubbed long ago Marvellous Melbourne, it would be a good move to join the group (I have, so now it’s 43), so that you get alerts about when the meetups are on, just as I do for the Sydney group although I’m only there infrequently.

It would be really good if there were the numbers for a Gold Coast group. Or maybe we should go for Brisbane?

A front page article in today’s Australian Financial Review, which is the closest thing the country has to an official journal of record of the business and financial sectors, is headed Home work brings new challenges,
by Fiona Carruthers (the article does not have a permalink and will no
doubt disappear into the archives soon, but it is today one of the free
articles so  you can read it for however long they decide to leave it
accessible publicly).

It’s not about home based business - that
will be the day, when “the Fin” runs a front page article on home based
business - but about “the trend for staff to work from home”.

Several
examples are provided, such as KPMG’s senior research and development
tax concession manager who works full-time from his home and farm near
Canberra, not in the Sydney KPMG office. Many home based business
owners would relate to the dilemmas he faces.

“It’s not easy
when I’ve got a few cows to calve, I’ve told my wife I’ll pick the kids
up from school and I’m on a deadline on a project for a client,” he
says.

Maybe not the calf-delivering bit.

According
to experts quoted in the article, advances in technology are a big
factor in companies loosening their formerly more rigid attitudes about
people working from home. Especially access to broadband.

The article caught my attention because, while this blog is called Thinking Home Business, there are some
common issues for people working from home, whether for their own
business or as employees in someone else’s business.

And I’ve been noticing lately that a high proportion of visits to this blog seem to come via the Work From Home category, or more specifically via one of the posts in that category. Which suggests to me that there is a lot of interest in the concept of working from home.

Perhaps the interest is more in terms of working from home than in having a business from home. And I don’t know of any research on that subject, here or elsewhere.

Many of the personal and organisational disciplines required are the same and there are a lot of technology issues which are shared.

There are also differences, including both the greater freedom and usually some specific additional pressures you have from owning your own business..

But there are enough common issues that, for anyone still employed by others and contemplating setting up a home based business at some time in the future, it could be a very smart move to get a taste of how that might work, by negotiating with the current employer to be able to work from home, for at least part of the week.  That way they could get some idea whether working from home really suited them.

It would probably not be a good idea to inform the average employer of the longer term game plan, lest the employee be seen as unloyal or uncommitted (let’s not get into how loyal or committed corporations are these days). And in any case, if the experiment doesn’t work out, it would be less stressful to just quietly slip back into the previous Monday to Friday at the office arrangement.

As I’ve suggested, working from home for someone else is not the same as having your own business from home, for example in terms of being directly responsible for all the business processes and having to generate regular income once the paycheck from your former employer is no more.

But it could help as a test.

Like, just how good are you at not raiding the fridge at frequent intervals when it’s only a few steps away?

And will you get anxious and inefficient in the absence of a regular paycheck? Will you miss the company of your fellow-workers, the intra-office gossip, drinks after work?

I like the life. Not everyone does.

Craig Harper, a motivational speaker and among other things a blogger, is based in Melbourne, Australia. He has quietly put together a list of the top 100 Australian blogs (right sidebar of blog), with the measure of topness being their ranking on Technorati .

Apart from the ranking aspect, this is a great contribution for those of us who would like to know more about who the other Aussie obsessives bloggers are.

The stats are interesting. Darren Rowse of Problogger fame has an incredible ranking of 59. James Farmer’s Blogsavvy is not far behind at 96. And Darren has at least one other blog in the list - wouldn’t surprise me if he, and James, had more.

The indefatigable Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneur’s Journey is in the top ten. His Small Business Branding is also in the list. Does this man sleep?

Alister Cameron is in the top twenty. See also: Shai Coggins, Duncan Riley, Sarah Goldstein (The Bargain Queen), Ben Barren, Dipping Into the Blogpond’s Meg (who has her own list, which will be the subject of another post), Senator Andrew Bartlett (who may well be the only real Aussie pollie blogger, although I have been challenged on that and would love to be proved wrong on the matter), Trevor Cook, Frank Arrigo, Kathie Thomas (the Virtual Assistant) and Craig Harper hisself.

If I’ve omitted anyone I know from this mini-list, it’s probably because I don’t recognise your blog name in Craig’s list: so please ping me about that.

Actually, I don’t envy Craig the task he has set himself to list these blogs and update the list as new contenders come to his attention.

Barring a prominently displayed Aussie flag or other overt signs of national origin or allegiance, some blogs just won’t be noticed as being eligible for the tag. For example, this blog and another of mine, Business and Blogging, were not in the first cut, although I’m happy to say Craig included them after I modestly drew them and their respective Technorati rankings to his attention (hint: if you’re not in and your stats indicate you should be, email Craig from the link on his site).

Meg’s list, also very interesting, is drawn up with a different measurement framework (I don’t rate in that list ) and as mentioned above I will post on that another time.

This is all good stuff. I know we will get that Aussie BloggerCon together one day (just that I won’t be announcing it as definite until I’m absolutely certain - like maybe at the opening session).

I wonder will someone among the more tech-savvy of our tribe come up with an OPML or two for these lists and do a share?