Home Based Business

One of the many things I’ve learned in the process of co-authoring a couple of books for the recruiting industry is that professional sourcing of suitable, available candidates is a skill unlikely to be acquired quickly and potentially worth excellent remuneration for those who master it.

But you would think that people looking for candidates for Google would have some good search tools available, wouldn’t you?

Jeff Barr’s Barr’s post Google Can’t Google? would have to make you wonder. A winceworthy post, I would think, for any of the recruiters involved. Jeff gets and shares a laugh over it.

And don’t miss the comments. Ouch!

For parents working from home and facing the prospect of children being at home on vacation for the next few months, Wendy Piersall has put together an amazing list of 94 ways to keep the kids busy without having to close the business down. A mother herself and a successful home based business owner, Wendy knows that of which she blogs.

It’s a whole lot more than a “things to do” list. There are activities for different age groups and there are links to resources, including - thoughtfully - resources for parents outside the US, such as this one for Aussie parents (who should bookmark the link to check out in December).

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Reading Jim Kukral’s blog, Marketing Ideas Online, is not good for my daily timetable. I tend to get distracted from what I’d intended to do.

I’m not complaining. It’s just that he’s always coming up with something of real interest and value.

Like today.

Something like an hour and a half ago I took his advice, dropped what I was doing and went to read this blog post on  Jeremy Palmer’s Quit Your Day Job.

Jeremy is an affiliate marketing success story and explains why he is changing his online marketing strategy and how.

Why did checking that out take an hour and a half? Well, I clicked on the link in Jeremy’s post to John Reese’s report The Re-Birth of Internet Marketing. I was well aware of Reese’s reputation as having made a ton of money online and I found it a fascinating document - lots of food for thought.

I liked particularly the emphasis on developing quality, content-rich sites and Reese’s admonition - “don’t sell to a market, serve it”.

Once you’ve been online for a while you know that there is never a
shortage of home based business “opportunities” on offer. Some of these
are excellent. Others are really disguised opportunities to lose your
money, your friends and your natural optimism.

So how do you
tell the difference? There’s the Three Step Character Building way:
Step 1 - Have Bitter Experience; Step 2 - Pick Yourself Up; Step 3 - Start Over.
Not recommended, unless you are really into character-building.

Another
way is to get some guidance. As a coach, I would naturally say, get a
coach. But I suspect that, given the optimism and sense of
bulletproofness that a lot of new home-based entrepreneurs have,
especially if they have been successful in executive or management
roles in the regular workforce, the idea that a coach might be needed
or useful does not readily occur.

Another option that has just come across my desk is a report from my fellow coach and home based entrepreneur, Laurie Hayes.

Like me, Laurie was once a government servant who wanted to chance her
arm as a business owner and eventually took the plunge. Only from
checking out her website it’s obvious that she did it more thoughtfully
than I did. Although she acknowledges she made mistakes.

Who hasn’t?

When you read Laurie’s report, there is plenty of
evidence of thoughtfulness, plus a good dash of passion about helping
others avoid basic mistakes in moving into a home based business.

And
a piece of good news, especially for people starting out in home based
business and wondering when the income is going to start exceeding the
outgoings, is that the report is free.

Here’s the link:

I understand from Laurie that the report was originally going to be
much briefer, but after she received a number of anxious calls from
people about an “opportunity” being offered, checked out that
opportunity and found a lot to be concerned about, she was fired up to go into more depth about how not to
make a mess of moving into home based business.

The result is
very readable, clear and practical (all that public service experience
in writing reports obviously wasn’t in vain ). I have to admit I also found it somewhat painful, albeit in a “no pain, no gain” sense.

If
you’re thinking about a home based business, or know someone who is, or
you already have a business from home and want to make it better, it
would be a smart move to get hold of this free report.

An idea whose time has come, I reckon.

I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be good to have an online focal point for the Australian blogging community. Even talked about it.

Meg has taken action and set up a community on the BUMPzee! social networking platform. For all the details, including how to join, step by step, see her post Join an Australian Blogs Community on BUMPzee!

And don’t forget to submit your blog or blogs when you’ve joined (you can submit more than one).

There were 29 members when I checked just now. I’m sure we can have a lot more before the weekend is out and then more next week. Pass it on.

Onya, Meg!

Greg Hoffman is used to advising and helping other people with their marketing.

In The old resume taped to box of Dunkin Donuts trick he writes about his current efforts to market himself for a job he has targeted.

While the delivery of the box of donuts with resume attached is the focus of the post, I noticed also that one of the steps Greg has taken to get noticed for the job is to send a message to the owner via LinkedIn.

That’s one of the great things about LinkedIn, that you can make contact either directly or through an intermediate contact who - if you use LinkedIn as it is intended to be used - knows and trusts you. Which should improve your chances of a successful contact.

If it is not a direct contact, it can happen that one of the people in between neglects to forward your request, or chooses not to.  That can be annoying or discouraging. I do try to make a point of moving such requests along as quickly as I can and, where appropriate, with an accompanying, supportive message.

Ideally, when LinkedIn works the way it’s supposed to work, donuts should not be needed.

According to the Sydney Daily Telegraph, mobile/cell phones are to be blocked in the Sydney central business district during the September APEC event featuring George W. Bush et al. In its typically thoughtful and restrained style, the News Limited tabloid proclaims that this proposal “ignited Sydney today“.

According to 7News, the area of blockage is indicated as being “the size of a football field” (they don’t say which code).

Yay! I thought. No loud, inane, one sided “conversations” to bear if you happen to be on a bus in Sydney while the President is travelling through town.

Actually, I was not really surprised to hear that the prospect is causing some public angst in Sydney. The “where are you?” brigade no doubt distressed at being unable to be able to ask someone “What are you doing?”.

But then I re-read the article in the Daily Terror Tele and found that the mobile network is to be blocked for all of two minutes. And it’s just for the US President. No Black Hawk choppers jamming the mobile network for the likes of China’s Hu Jintao or Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Wow! Those Sydneysiders must have got to be even more dependent on their mobile phones than when I lived there not so long ago.

Two minutes.

Via Boing Boing

I admit to being generally pretty bullish about the advantages of working from home.

And if you had asked me until today whether I knew any reason why an entrepreneur with a business startup and working from home couldn’t succeed, I’d have said, in principle, no. Of course it would depend on a lot of circumstances, the nature of the business, equipment needs, staffing needs and so on. But in principle, no.

After all, Google started off in a garage. As did Hewlett-Packard.

So maybe, working from home-with-garage would qualify?

As I say, I would have thought so, but that was before I read entrepreneur Ben Barren’s post from yesterday BRW Fast Starters Issue: “Knowing what you now know, would you start a business
again?”

Among various statistics which he quotes from the Business Review Weekly special Fast Starters issue he is commenting on, this one jumped out for me in terms of working from home (note - these are for Australian companies):

As Ben comments:

Although I haven’t yet seen the BRW article, I’m assuming the article does not provide statistics on whether in the pre-startup phase a lot of businesses haven’t been developed from a home office.

Or even from a garage.

The expression “Don’t give up your day job” is used often in an ironic
or even sarcastic sense, when, say, someone who is tone deaf has
delusions of being a famous pop singer.

It can also be very good advice for someone contemplating setting
themselves up in a full-time home based business. Darlene McDaniel at
Small Business Boomers poses the question When Should You Quit Your Day Job?

While she doesn’t provide the answer - as she points out, it’s a
question each person must answer for himself or herself - she offers
some sage advice:

One thing I would strongly recommend is to set yourself a realistic
timeframe for reaching the point where you can confidently ditch the
day job, with some checkpoints along the way so that you can adjust the
timetable, forward or back, depending on how you are tracking with your
for-the-moment part-time business.

Of course, some people don’t have a choice about when they quit. They are “outplaced” or whatever the current weasel word for “sacked” is, or they have an accident or develop a medical condition that precludes their working in a regular job. And I’m pretty sure there
have been some great home based businesses established by people who
were put out of work and could not get another job.

But if that’s not
your situation and you can manage the juggle, it’s hard to beat the
value of having a regular paycheck come in while you find your feet
with your new business.

For one thing, if you do have your basic expenses covered, when you are marketing yourself you are less likely to
have the anxious, “please hire me I have a family to support” look one
sees on the face of a home based business person who has made the jump
too soon and is struggling to manage. Guess how eager people are to
hire you if you look and sound like you are begging?

And imagine how much more satisfying it could be, on the day you hand
in your resignation, knowing that you don’t need that job anymore. But don’t be too rude to the boss or your now-to-be former colleagues. They may just miss you so much they’ll want to hire you as a consultant. For much more than they were paying you before, of course.

Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it.