Thinking Home Business Working from home in a networked world

My friend and colleague Lonnie B. Hodge and I have launched a web site for Social Media Consultants and PR 2.0 Specialists.

Elsewhere I’ve posted a bit about how the site came about and what it is intended to achieve.

From a Thinking Home Business perspective - i.e. that of the usually solo entrepreneur working from a home base - and considering a few comments we’ve had already, I’ve started to think the site could get quite big, even a bit overwhelming.

Are Lonnie and I prepared for that?

Yes and no. We are open to the idea and we are confident we can find a way to deal with growth.

But do we have a detailed plan? No.

I know some people would find that idea quite daunting, irresponsible even.

But we are being as open as we can be with people. Anyone who reads what we have put on the site will see that we are not hiding the fact that we are making it up as we go along.

We’re not risking financial capital - it’s a (free) WordPress site we are using to get started and maybe to continue. We are investing some time, certainly, and if it all finishes up looking like a bit of a pipe dream we could have some egg on our faces. But we can live with that.

Basically, neither of us can resist the opportunity to play a bigger game, risky as it may be. Boldness + a modicum of risk management should see us through. Working from home doesn’t mean you can’t be bold and dream big.

Are you playing a big enough game for your talents? We’d love to hear about it.

If you aren’t, would 2009 be a good year to test out one or more of your dreams and play big?

Rainbow Bay, Queensland, Australia, early this morning

I said “I have to get a picture for my blog!”

He smiled and posed.

“What’s the name?” I asked

“Santa”

Of course.

Between the usual demands of the festive season and the lure of the beach, I doubt that I’ll be doing a lot of blog posting over the next few days.

Wishing you a very happy Hanukkah, very happy Christmas, and very happy whatever other greetings of your preference, dear readers.

“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good” might not bring instant encouragement for people who have been “downsized”, or put out of their jobs, however that may be described by whatever weasel words are in corporate HR vogue these days.

But one area in which I see potential gain for many people is in a field I know a bit about, coaching.

For people who want to get back into a paid job as quickly and as effectively as possible, it could make good sense to find a coach who specializes in helping people with that process or an aspect of it, for example effective social networking for business or how to prepare for and conduct yourself in an interview. That can help the person seeking a job and of course it can also help the coach.

For others who may be thinking of something more like striking out on their own, now might be a time to look at professional coaching, a business which many people run from a home office.

About six years ago I was at a bit of a crossroads myself, not that I’d been put out of work - I’d had my own consulting business then for about fourteen years so I was the only one who could “downsize” me. No, it was more that I was restless for a new professional challenge that the consulting work I was doing then was not giving me.

I will always be grateful to the friend, himself a coach, who encouraged me to look at becoming a coach.

My first reaction was “that’s not me”, but as I researched the industry I started to see that this could be something I could enjoy doing and which could be personally and professionally satisfying.

And I will always be grateful that in the process I teamed up with Coachville, a global community of coaches and a provider of extraordinary resources.

True to the spirit of its founder, the late and extraordinary Thomas Leonard, whom I was privileged to meet and observe demonstrating coaching, Coachville is always coming up with new angles on coaching, new programs to help keep coaches at the leading edge (or ahead of it, sometimes!).

The latest offering, the Coachville Business Academy for Professional Coaches, is to my way of thinking extremely timely. The programs to be offered by the Academy are clearly focused on helping coaches establish and grow their businesses to be financially viable as well as rewarding in other ways.

I’ve posted some thoughts about the Academy initiative at my Des Walsh dot Com site. In that post I mention that on Monday, December 22, Coachville CEO Dave Buck will be hosting a  teleconference call which is being billed as a preview for programs about to be launched by the Academy. There are actually two calls, presumably to accommodate people with different timezones.

The first call will be at 12 noon on Monday December 22 - Eastern time USA; the second will be at 7 pm ET, Monday December 22. I will be tuning in to the second, because the first will be in the depths of night my time!

If you are already a coach, or someone you know is, or if you or someone you know might be wondering whether coaching could be a cool thing to get into (hint: it is) then I commend Dave’s call to you. It will give you a sense of the Coachville “style”, which is special.

There is a pre-requisite for participating in the call, namely to be a member of Coachville. There is no charge for that and you get access to some great resources online. So the steps are, if you want to participate and are not yet a member of Coachville, go here to join Coachville. Once you are a member - or if you are a member already - you register for the call here.

If you have any questions you would like to fire at me after reading this post and don’t want to use the public comments, please get in touch via the Contact form on this blog.  Or contact Coachville directly.

Image: “Cat out of bag, almost” by Plong, via Flickr: Creative Commons license

Over the weekend I posted a message on the LinkedIn Bloggers group, of which I’m co-moderator, sharing some thoughts about how we could generate wider awareness of the group’s existence and in the process hopefully attract some more people to become members, so that they too can benefit from and contribute to our discussions.

I’d headed the message, whimsically as I thought, “How About We Let More People in on the Secret of LinkedIn Bloggers?” I talked about the fact that LinkedIn Bloggers was not easy to find via online search (we were showing up in only the most oblique fashion) and I invited suggestions about how we might let more people know about the group.

The post has generated some excellent suggestions already. And a surprise.

The surprise was that I discovered that at least a couple of members had the idea that the group was now, or in the past, meant to be kept for practical purposes a secret, or at least not publicized. I would not wish to discount that I may have made some remark in the past that gave rise to such a misapprehension, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what that might have been, or when.

The important thing is to move on.

Our team of moderators is keen to do so and we are looking at ways to share the story of LinkedIn Bloggers.

Some background

LinkedIn Bloggers on Yahoo! Groups is a forum, established early in 2005, for discussing how blogging and related technologies, such as podcasting, video blogging (vlogging) and wikis can support members’ professional networking using the professional social networking platform LinkedIn. The only pre-requisite for membership is to be already, or to become, a member of LinkedIn (basic membership is free).

Note: There is some potential for confusion in the fact that there is also a LinkedIn Bloggers group on the LinkedIn Groups site. Membership of that group is via the original group on Yahoo! Groups. About a sixth of the members of the original group have joined the group on LinkedIn. Currently  it is only on the original group, on Yahoo! Groups, that any discussion or information sharing takes place.

On the original LinkedIn Bloggers group we have a broad-ranging membership. We have been fortunate in having been able from the outset to attract people at various levels of knowledge and skill in the broad social media space, from top bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers, leaders in search, providers of corporate blogging services, organizers of major conferences and others, through to people just starting out with blogging and even people just thinking about blogging and other social media.

Given the breadth of membership and our desire to welcome and assist people new to blogging, podcasting and so on, we’ve always had a culture of  “there are no dumb questions”: LinkedIn Bloggers continues to be a community where people - and I include myself very definitely - get answers from a range of experts, for questions or issues on which it has proved impossible or difficult to get informed, unbiased advice elsewhere.

At this posting there are 897 members, which is not huge growth in three and a half years. It should be said that the moderator team have never been into growth in numbers as a priority, preferring to put our  energy and time into doing what we can to “hold the space” for useful and enjoyable conversation on matters of shared interest.

But knowing that many people find it helpful to belong to the group, we’ve decided to take some concerted action to make the story better known.

The campaign begins

In coming weeks we will develop some initiatives to translate that decision into some practical action.

If you are already a member of LinkedIn Bloggers, I hope you will give some thought to how you can help share the story.

If you are not yet a member and the idea of the group appeals to you - and if you are a member of LinkedIn or happy to join LinkedIn - please think about joining us. If you do that, please read carefully the instructions on the LinkedIn Bloggers home page, especially about sharing with us your LinkedIn profile link.

Note that the url for the group is a .net one: http://www.linkedinbloggers.net