And some do it as a temporary thing, until they can put together the resources and the sustainable profitability that makes it feasible to move the business out of home and into premises they regard as more suitable for business.

Some of us love running our business from home.

And with the technology now available and the ubiquity of outsourcing resources,  it’s easier than ever before.

Four years ago I started a series of posts here on the theme “Working from Home and Loving It“. Although the title was about “working from home”, which could still, and often does mean “working for the Man”, my focus there was on running a business from home.

Other posts in the series were:

• Working From Home and Loving It: The “Not a Real Business” Myth
• Working From Home and Loving It: The Isolation Myth

In that first post of the series I mentioned that over half the businesses in the USA are run out of people’s homes. I don’t know how many that is, but as of 2009 there were 27.9 million businesses, we could assume it’s somewhere over 13.9 million.

So while some people might think it’s an exception to run a business from home, from those figures it looks to me like it’s perfectly normal. At least as far as the US Government’s Small Business Administration is concerned, the “not a real business” myth is just that.

Do the people running those businesses from home love doing it that way, or at least like it? I don’t know of any statistics on that, but it would be interesting to have an idea.

And it would be interesting to know just what some readers of this blog might love – or like, if you prefer – about running their business from home.

For me, a few of the things I like most (actually *love*) about running my business from home are:

• 30 second commute
• dress as I choose (sometimes dress up a bit for onscreen conferences!)
• integration of “what I do” with “who I am”
• more modest outgoings on overheads mean more profitability

Care to play? What do you like best about running a business from home?

(And if you haven’t yet taken the plunge, what do you think you would like best about it?)

Image credit: New Home Office by Zach Beauvais via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

The post What Do You Like Best About Running a Business from Home? appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

In this post I share seven of the many mistakes when I set up my own business working from home.

Those mistakes surely cost me business and money in the short term, but I believe I learned from all of them.

I hope by sharing my experience I can help some others who may be establishing themselves in this way of business and life.

And from conversations with many home based business owners over the intervening years, it seems to me that these following seven mistakes were not just mine and are commonly made:

1. Not getting priorities right from the outset
2. Spending money before you make it
3. No business strategy
4. Not marketing the new business
5. Underquoting
6. No order book
7. Not thinking like a business owner

1. Not getting priorities right from the outset

When I first set up my home based business I spent too much time on setting up a spare bedroom as my office space, and getting my stationery designed and printed. I also spent a lot of time researching and deciding on the purchase of a computer, printer and fax machine (remember fax machines?).

So where was the mistake here?

The key mistake was in focusing on these things before I attended to more fundamental issues, like working out my business aims (beyond being free of bosses other than myself) and actually getting out and finding clients.

With my time over, I would:

• do some serious brainstorming about my business aims and objectives
• put the task of getting clients as my first and dominant priority.

Which leads me to my next, closely related mistake.

2. Spending money before you make it

The purchase of the technology for my business before I had any clients made sense at the time, but now I see it differently. I was buying expensive equipment – computers were not the commodity then that they are now – before there was any income lined up to pay for it. I was raiding my working capital before I had clients!

Likewise the design and printing of stationery.

It would have been so much smarter and more financially prudent to spend some time and energy in lining up clients and contracts and then committing to expenditures once I had some cashflow – or at least had contractual assurance of income to cover those expenditures.

3. No business strategy

In my working life before home business I had done a lot of strategic planning for major, multi-million dollar projects. And one of my strengths had long been, and is, an ability to think strategically.

So why did I not put serious time and thought into developing a detailed business plan?

I can only think I must have had a very simplistic or limited view of what was involved in establishing and building a business from home.

With my time over and the knowledge I now have, I would take time (while still in a salaried position if possible) to do some study of business planning and work out a detailed plan for my own business.

And I would use some of the excellent and freely available online resources I listed in my recent blog post, Looking for a Free Small Business Plan Template? Try These Resources.

4. Not marketing your new business

For many of us professionals starting out with our own home based business, marketing is something other people have done. Some professional service practitioners have a real aversion to doing any marketing or sales.

Looking back, I can see that once I had the first consulting contract for my new business I put my available time and energy into that.

Then I lined up another one and put my efforts into that.

I was doing some marketing, but not as a seriously planned and regularly evaluated process.

I would have been able to build much more soundly and effectively by having a documented marketing strategy from the outset and applying that consistently.

5. Underquoting

When I think back over the years about the times I have clearly underquoted, especially in relation to the scope and time demands of particular projects, my best explanation of why I underquoted is that I was either trying to guess what the client would think was a fair quote, or trying to accommodate a client who was offering only half of, or less than, what the real price of the work should have been.

And, quite probably, part of my underquoting was from being conscious of being a solo operator working from home and allowing myself to “think small”.

Nowadays I have a better sense of the value I have to offer and what that means in terms of remuneration. It’s still my brain, my expertise, my experience that is being hired, not the building I work in or how many or few people there are around me.

A good business plan can help overcome this particular bit of self-sabotage.

And as I have experienced personally, a good business coach can more than pay her or his way by helping us identify our real worth and potential value to a client, so that we get over any tendency to underquote or otherwise under-sell ourselves and what we have to offer.

6. No order book

I had been in business a while before a very experienced and wise businessman told me about the crucial importance of having forward commitments for business, or as he put it a well-filled order book. He pointed out to me that it was easy to dwell on current business as a mark of achievement but a better measure of a business operating well was to have an order book which was full for the coming six months.

Again, rather than just being grateful for a current contract, putting my head down and completing that, I needed to be continually and consistently devoting some serious time and energy to building the business and filling the order book.

7. Not thinking like a business owner

Like many people who set up a home based business, I did so after many years as an employee. I had learned to think like an employee and did not realise that just setting up my home office and getting some consulting contracts would not be enough to turn my thinking into that of a business owner.

And while I loved getting new business and being paid for my work, it took me much too long to realize that if I wanted to still be in business for more than a couple of years I needed to become much more focused on making a profit.

While of course still doing quality work.

Once I realized that in various ways I was still thinking like an employee I set myself to learn more about business and how to enjoy and relish the fact of being in business and thinking like a business owner.

That led in turn to a realization that I had some pre-conceptions and attitudes that could quickly undermine my dream of having my own sustainable business. See for example the item above about underquoting.

So as well as discovering I needed to learn some practical things about business administration, product development, marketing, sales and customer service, I realized I needed to sign up for some serious personal development.

Which I did.

But that’s a topic for another post (or several!)

Care to add to the list?

I’m sure I made other mistakes in getting started in home based business, but I believe I would have made faster progress if I’d identified and nailed, early on, the ones above.

Anyway, I am quite sure that having learned most of my lessons the hard way, through making mistakes and finding solutions, I am now better equipped to help others in my coaching. As they say, you can learn a lot from The School of Hard Knocks.

Do you have some thoughts to share on this topic of the mistakes people make in setting up and developing a home based business? Please feel free to share them in the Comments section.

Image credit: Home office, via Flickr, by newchaos, CC BY 2.0

The post 7 Basic Mistakes in Starting a Home Based Business appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

The links that were in that post were by now way out of date, so I’ve just removed them, but I felt the basic points made in the post were worth repeating and expanding upon in the new world of social media. These were that you can:

• use your blog as a journal, to map where you are going and track where you’ve been
• use it to get known
• use it to link and share with others in your line of business
• use it instead of a fancy web site – for which you may not have a budget right now anyway

Using your blog as a journal

This of course goes back to the origins of blogging (“blog” as short for “web log” etc) but still works.

I’m going to generalize wildly here, but I believe it is generally true that when we start a new business we are usually excited, inspired about what we want to achieve and how we aim to do it.

If not, why would we do it? To make money? That’s fine, but I doubt that the momentum can be built or maintained without some passion (as I indicated in a recent post).

So writing about what you are doing, sharing your excitement, sharing photos if you have them, is one way to build awareness of your business and to provide a reference point for friends and family to share with their circles of connections the word about what you are doing.

And you don’t have to blog just about your successes. Not that you have to share everything that goes wrong – that in fact could be a very bad idea – but by sharing some of the challenges you remind people that you are human, something a lot of businesspeople make the mistake of being unwilling to admit to.

I see it as a bit like those restaurants where the diners can see right into the kitchen, see their meals being prepared. And like the people in the kitchen, if we decide to share via our blog how things are going, we will need to be on our toes!

As with the chefs who open their kitchen to the patrons’ view, this one is probably not for the faint-hearted. But if you are good with that idea, you could make it a feature of your blog.

Use your blog to get known

Even if you decide to skip the previous suggestion and not use your blog to chronicle publicly your ups and downs in getting your business moving, you can certainly use it to get known.

In fact, that was my main motive in starting blogging back in 2003 and that decision has not only helped me promote my business locally, nationally and internationally, it has led to book deals, public speaking in Australia, the USA and China and, by no means least of all, a whole raft of friends and colleagues across the world.

There has been more to all that than just writing blog posts, but setting up the blog was a crucial step and continuing to blog has helped me maintain momentum and helped keep me up to date in my key areas of professional interest.

Through a blog, you can provide your clients and your prospects with a better understanding of your grasp of your field of expertise and also your style of communication and your values, than they are likely to get from one meeting with you, say at some networking function, or from a PR style brochure (offline or online version).

Use it to link and share with others in your line of business

One of the many great things about blogging for business is that it enables multiple conversations with your professional colleagues and peers. Even with your competitors!

The whole system of hyperlinking from and to blog posts, the use of RSS, and more recently all the cross-platform sharing with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and so on, give us unprecedented opportunities to share with others and learn from them in return.

I like to think of this feature of blogging as being part of an ongoing, international, virtual think tank.

And while there are many things we can share via other social media platforms, the long form style of blogging gives us, in practice, the opportunity to share at greater length, and in greater depth, than more instant forms of communication, notably Twitter with its 140 character limit, or Facebook, where the short and sharp usually trumps more extended communications.

Use it instead of a fancy web site

Actually, with the evolution of blogging platforms since I wrote that post back in 2004, it’s possible now to have a quite fancy site, but the key point I wanted to make back then is still relevant, namely that blogging software gives you the ability to have a perfectly good web site, even if you do not have a budget to pay a local web site developer the thousands of dollars they might indicate it will cost you to have a functioning web site.

Explaining how you do that, and particularly what it might cost, is a subject for another post.

In 2004 I suggested you might not have to outlay any money on the process, which was true in a sense, but could have benefited from a bit of explanation.

Even now, assuming you are going to pay for a web site to be hosted somewhere, it might cost you – even with a quite ambitious plan for a home based business, such as the HostGator Baby plan with unlimited sites – less than $7 a month.

Add to that a domain hosted by, say, Namecheap for under $10 a year, and you have a budget commitment of literally less than $100 for a full year’s operation.

That presupposes a lot of work by you to learn how to set up your site, configure it and manage it. If that bothers you, we can get you set up, through colleagues of ours, for under $1,000 provided you have a reasonably simple set of site requirements, and still very competitively if you have more complex requirements.  Just get in touch via the Contact page here.

Where to next?

Back in 2004 I was able to recommend some sources of advice and guidance on getting started with blogging. All the links in that original post are out of date so I’ve removed the links. Now I feel I need to provide some more up to date information to answer the “where to next?” question.

So I’ll be providing some information and links on that in the coming week. Watch this space.

In the meantime, any questions on the subject will be welcome.

Image credit: Hellenic Republic restaurant kitchen, by avlxyz via Flickr, Creative Commons licence

The post Start Promoting Your Home Business With a Blog appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

In that initial, overview post I wrote about building new networks:

As my handwritten scrawl shows, the first version of this was “Build your networks”. The trouble is, while the networks we have now might sustain us for a while, our new business focus may demand, not that we trash our existing networks, but that we complement it with new networks relevant to our marketing strategy.

If you are starting your business now or giving it a re-boot, social media offers you literally unprecedented opportunities to build amazing new, and amazingly profitable, networks.

Facebook network, first 100, via TouchGraph

I am not for a moment minimizing the importance of existing networks. Just the other day I was reflecting on the fact that a large proportion of my business over the past 20+ years has come, directly or indirectly, through networks I already had way back when I first set up my consultancy business, literally from my kitchen table. Which means that network has been worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to me.

Our old networks may not serve us adequately into the future

The networks we have when we leave the corporation or the government office may well deliver us plenty of business for a while, and hopefully for a long time. As I have just indicated, I have been fortunate. On the other hand, we need to accept that after a period of time those networks may not be able to deliver as they could before.

Ever go back to a place or group where you used to be a “somebody” and see no one you know or who knows you?

We need to keep building our networks and be careful not just to stick with the ones we know.

As my good friend and master networker, Bill Vick, likes to say about networking, you should dig the well before you are thirsty.

And it’s not just about networking with potential clients. That is thinking much too narrowly. We need to build professional networks in fields where we would like to work and do business. That includes networking with our competition.

For instance, I have a network of coaching colleagues now, which did not exist before 2002 and one in social media, a network which did not exist for me before 2003. I could think of many of those people are competitors. I choose to think of them as colleagues.

And in fact those networks have been immensely valuable in terms of building my business, as well as in providing me with new, trusted friendships and professional alliances. Not least, they have also provided me with opportunities to serve the community, in various not-for-profit organizations within those networks.

I also have a network, small so far, of business colleagues in China or who are very experienced and knowledgeable about business in China.

It gives me great confidence to be able to tell clients that if I don’t know the answer to a question I can probably find someone in my network who does.

Look for scope to expand specific networks

As our business grows and changes, and as we get clearer about what we really want to be doing and the areas we want to focus on, it is a good idea to look at our networks and see where we need to do some more sowing and nurturing to make particular parts of our network grow.

There are now some great visualization tools that can help us with that.

As well as TouchGraph which produces visualizations of your Facebook network, as above, one tool that seems to offer scope for some interesting analysis and strategizing, is the LinkedIn Maps tool from LinkedIn Labs, which produces visualizations like the one below. I’m just familiarizing myself with this but already I can see some scope for thinking about my network and taking some strategic action to expand it in various sectors.

I haven’t figured out the key to the clustering of several groups under various colors. It does look as if:

• the pink group, bottom right, is a coaching sub-network
• a small, light orange group top right is a China network
• the reasonably large, orange group, bottom center, is pretty certainly a social media network

Still working on the others, but the power for me of this kind of visual presentation is that it raises questions which I can usefully address in working out my own roadmap for engagement via LinkedIn for the next year and beyond.

For example, should I be looking to build a bigger coaching network, or say a bigger China network, and how would such decisions relate to and serve my business objectives?

Share your story

I would love to hear some stories of how your networks, old or new, have helped you in business. And of course I’m happy as always to respond as best I can to any questions about how to apply some of this thinking.

The series: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 1: Know Your Market Worth : Starting a Home Based Business Series

Tip 2: Build an Order Book: Starting a Home Based Business Series

Tip 3: Build New Networks: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 4: Ask for Help: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 5: Love the Business You Are In: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

The post Build New Networks: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business appeared first on Thinking Home Business.

And my assumption is that home based businesses generally do not have PR agencies on call to handle their media engagement.

It follows that, in that respect at least, work-from-home professionals have in the past been operating at a disadvantage to any corporate competitors, when it comes to getting their story out.

Social media, and more pointedly the social media release, a template for which Todd Defren famously debuted back in 2006, changed that paradigm forever.

The term is pretty clichéd now, but in the PR field, social media has levelled the playing field. There has been a dramatic shift from the long-established format and process of issuing press releases into a completely new way of communicating your message. And, acknowledging my own bias but being confident nevertheless in my assertion, in that process the social media release platform PitchEngine has led and is leading the way.

The key point I want to make in this post is that PitchEngine is an ideal resource for home based businesses, as well as for other businesses small and large. I have become even more convinced of that since I wrote here a year and a half ago my post PitchEngine Works for Small Business Too.

PitchEngine is easy to use, as long as users can get over the idea that they have to be PR experts to use it and just think of it as a way to get their story out, especially via the social web.

PitchEngine is economical. Check out the prices here: Basic at $39 a month is perfect for any home based business.

PitchEngine is environmentally friendly – 100% wind-powered.

PitchEngine is friendly, knowledgeable and helpful people.

Naturally, we’re actively, attentively on Facebook and Twitter too.

PitchEngine Founder and CEO Jason Kinztler, a.k.a. New Media Cowboy, is passionate about helping businesses get their story out and PitchEngine is his creation to help them do just that in the new economic world of social business. This is how he puts it:

PitchEngine isn’t a wire service or a “free distribution tool,” as some bloggers like to put it. It’s a platform for getting the word out about your business or brand. Whether the mechanism be email, text message, tweet or post, PitchEngine provides an easy way to to package and share you stories. That, coupled with our new Search Meets Social™ offering provides a new, more innovative approach to public relations that’s both traditional and consumer-facing.

And if that’s not enough to arouse your curiosity, you can try PitchEngine free for thirty days.

If you have any questions, please ask in the comments or send me a message via the Contact page. If I don’t have the answer I will call the PitchEngine folks in Wyoming and get an answer for you.

Do you have a PitchEngine success story to tell? Please share it.

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