CHALLENGES OF WORKING AT HOME

After the introductions, critique of employment and the several reasons why many opt to work from home, you might be motivated to go out there and give it your best shot. 

Now before you do anything rash you must make sure you could really handle it.  Running your own show does offer a lot of advantages, but working at home has a few pitfalls as well.

The truth is that it has many challenges. Probably more than most “regular” jobs. Those who work at home confront new puzzels every day. How much to pay in quarterly taxes and how.  Shopping for new equipment during cash flow problems.  How to resist the allure of the television and its siren song at ten a.m.  How to muster the energy to stay up a little later to get that project done tonight. 

The struggles are many.

That laundry list of challenges just scratches the surface.  There are so many challenges, and so many variations of each that it would be impossible to list them all.  Most of those challenges, however, tend to fall into one of two categories.  Let’s take a look at them.

 RISK AND INSECURITY

When you are out in the workforce punching a clock, some things are almost guaranteed.  You will have at least one co-worker who drives you crazy.  There will be a few things about the way the operation is run that will annoy you at all times.  At least one of your superiors will seem to have a personal axe to grind with your name emblazoned on the handle. 

Oh, and you will receive your paycheck in a blue envelope or via direct deposit every two weeks.

The water fountain will almost always work. Someone will pay the electric bill even after Schmidt loses the Anderson account. If you lean back too far in your swivel chair again and break it, someone from maintenance will magically make a new one appear. Your insurance card will work when you go to the doctor and, again, that paycheck will arrive like clockwork right on schedule.

Although being part of the great herd of employees has many horrifying drawbacks, it does come with consistency and some level of security. You know what to expect and what you will get in exchange for your time and effort. 

You may not get enough, but you will know what you are getting.  That kind of security does have value.

Those who work at home have to be a bit more adventurous, because they can no longer work with those creature comforts in place. If you don’t do business with your work at home operation, you don’t have money.  If you blow the Anderson deal, you suffer even worse than Schmidt would back at the office for doing the same thing. Water is your responsibility. If you break your swivel chair, you might find yourself working from a kitchen chair. And that paycheck? That’s completely in your hands. No one else will make sure it arrives. That’s up to you as well.

Those who have particularly risk-aversive personalities are usually a poor match for working at home. The risk of failure is real and so is the lack of any traditional job security. 

One may argue that today’s economy leaves everyone a bit insecure, but nothing quite compares to having your whole livelihood in your own hands. Yes, that provides opportunity, but it also creates a lot of risk.

 HARD WORK

Many people coast through their day jobs. The tasks aren’t that challenging and after awhile, they can be accomplished without a great deal of thought or real effort. The trick to being a good employee, some have joked, is showing up. The rest, one way or another, tends to take care of itself.

Admittedly, some jobs are particularly difficult. Take a look at those road crews the next time you are driving across town on a hundred degree August afternoon and you will see that. 

In many ways, however, working from home is probably more difficult than doing asphalt work while staving off a heat stroke.

Those who run their own work at home businesses have to learn so many new things. They have to learn the business itself, of course, but they also have to learn how to run a business. 

They have to learn about marketing, pricing, customer service, and a host of other things in addition to what they actually do to produce income.  It can be overwhelming for many people.

When you work without a net, the way many of those working from home do, you are often required to exert more energy and to keep longer hours than those who are just out punching clocks five days a week before hitting the bars. 

Running a work at home business requires unrivaled dedication and a serious work ethic. Anyone lacking those traits will probably find their home business flopping very quickly.

Once one has built their work at home business up and has mastered their “system,” things do tend to run more smoothly. However, every great work at home success story has its roots in a period of some very serious work.  Working at home provides many benefits, but they don’t come free.  The price is often hard work.
Next time we will ask a few serious questions that you should ask yourself before embarking on the home business band wagon.

Working from home. In this post we will examine the variety of factors that draw people to work from home.

 OPPORTUNITY

If the idea of working at home is appealing, you might just be an opportunity junkie.  Many of us crave the chance to do great things and find that our traditional nine to five work environments are very limiting. Women may have a glass ceiling with which to contend, but all of us have another even harder ceiling to break through right above that one.  It’s the inevitable ceiling of being an employee instead of an owner. 

No matter how hard you work, no matter how smart you are, the structure of a traditional job and the limitations inherent in your role as one of the hive’s worker bees will limit you. You might become a boss some day, but you will never become The Boss. The opportunity just isn’t there. Even if there is enough opportunity to entice you to continue making the daily commute to the office for awhile, chances are those real chances for fulfillment are doled out arbitrarily and unfairly. The shots you do get to move up the ladder or closer to your goals are few, far between, and inevitably mishandled by someone who outranks you.

Operating your own business from home restores opportunity. Any limits on your success or growth are within your own control.If you want to do something, there is no head office to clear it.  You don’t have to fill out a requisition form if you want to invest in yourself.  You don’t need to smile during evaluation week so that your middle manager with the happy face obsession will give you a great performance review.
Opportunity is everywhere.  When you have your own home business, the only limits are the one’s you place upon yourself.

 MONEY

Many of those who make a break from the herd and work from home do so because of the prospect of greater earnings.  Along with the aforementioned opportunity in a general sense comes the chance to make more dough. Many work at home successes earn so much more than they ever would have if they continued on their prior path that it boggles the mind.

If you get a halfway decent job that you can stay at for decades and you are a good employee, you will probably find a way to make a decent living by popular standards.  Your income will allow you to buy a home, keep your lawnmower blades sharpened and to occasionally take a family vacation. Two vehicles and a roof over your head and food on the table is nothing to sneer at but they beat a worn pair of shoes and a “will work for food” sign be a significant margin.

In the end, though, those in the regular workplace have a cap on their earnings.  That cap may not be expressed in any contract or the result of any hard and fast law, but it is very real. The very factors that limit opportunity in general will also limit earning capacity. By stepping outside the employee circle and into the world of running your own business, you can destroy that cap.

If having a chance to make big money is important to you, running your own operation is definitely appealing.

 FLEXIBILITY

The fact that you work nine to five, Monday through Friday, might not be that distressing to you. Until your kid’s softball team makes it to the state tournament and plays their Thursday semi-final game at six in a city two hours away. The fact that you only have five vacation days per year until you have been with the firm for more than two full years may make perfect sense for a company, but that provides little comfort when you finally meet the woman of your dreams and she wants to take you on a romantic, two-week tropical cruise.  You get the idea.

Those who work from home have the ultimate in flexibility. They really can set their own hours the way very few employees can. Some work early, others work late, some work only a few hours a week, for some only a few days a week but with long hours on those days and others work as necessary. 

It depends on the home business. However, the home business is within the control of its boss, and if he wants to take mid-afternoon naps or if he wants to spend Wednesdays at the driving range, there is nobody one step higher on the corporate ladder to tell her or him “no.”

 FAMILY

Every morning someone drops off his or her child at daycare, gets back in the car and starts to do the math in his or her head. Their daycare provider has the kid from eight until five-thirty, five days a week. That’s forty seven and a half hours per week. The parent has the child from about six a.m. until eight and then again from five-thirty until that eight o’clock bedtime.  That’s twenty two and a half hours per week.  Even if one gives himself or herself full credit for two full weekend days of “awake time,” the total is still only at fifty two and a half hours per week. That’s right, the child only sees his or her parent for about five more hours per week than he does his daycare provider.For many parents, that just isn’t’t tolerable. In fact, it’s heart-wrenching and it’s one of the chief reasons why many are inspired to start their own work at home business. Yes, it may be tough to seal big deals with a two year old trying to stick a Crayola up your nose, but that challenge is far more palatable than the idea of a child growing up with only slightly more contact with his or her parents than his or her babysitter.

Even those who don’t have children may be interested in the familial advantages offered by stay at home work.  Spouses can see more of each other.  Those who are accustomed to being forced to do business on the road can finally enjoy a husband or wife again. Working at home puts one in the midst of family as powerfully as regular jobs can separate one from his or her home life.

 INTERESTS

 Many people feel trapped doing jobs they despise. You can see it in their faces.  From the angst-ridden barista at any one of ten local Starbucks who could be making shrewd stock deals all day to the slow-moving house painter who always wanted to be a chef, you encounter people who are working outside of their interests and skills just to collect a check. Some people learn to compromise. They take solace in Mr. Holland’s Opus and convince themselves that eventually all of that compromise will add up to something meaningful. They shove their interests and true desires to the back of their mind and try to retain focus on doing their job. 

Yes, a few people are lucky enough to find employment that really matches their skill levels and attitudes nicely, but many more spend their time doing things in which they have only a marginal interest outside of the bib-weekly paycheck their efforts produce. Though some will swallow the disappointment and frustration, those who decide to work at home will not.  They opt to pursue their dreams and to find ways to make their skills and their “calling” into action.  It can be far more fulfilling than simply working for the sake of earning a salary.  It imbues one’s vocational life with great meaning and appeal.
In my next post we will examine the challenges of working from home.

It’s the daily grind.  It’s punching the clock.  Back to the salt mines. Another day, another dollar.  It’s a supervisor you can barely tolerate getting on your case even though you are clearly five times smarter than he’ll ever be.  It’s middle management bungles.  It’s upper management cold-heartedness. It’s a loud factory floor or a tiny slate gray cubicle.  Forty hours per week, plus overtime.

If you are a good boy or girl, that hourly wage will inch up just fast enough to almost keep up with inflation every year and some day you may even join the ranks of salaried management and longer hours dealing with even more annoying people.  It’s described as everything from a hassle to a prison.

It’s a job and you might be tempted to get rid of it. Unfortunately, along with all of the agony, the job also brings with it money.  If you’re lucky, it might bring a lot of money, health benefits and even a shot at retiring without starving to death.

Jobs mean money.  Money, whether it’s the root of all evil or not, makes the world go ‘round and ‘round.  Thus, the inmates refuse to attempt to escape.  In some workplace version of the Stockholm syndrome, the hostage employees begin to trust and rely upon their oppressive boss overlords even though they recognize that the guys upstairs don’t have their best interests in mind.

Even in this modern twenty-first century economy where people change treat jobs like disposable lighters—use it for awhile, then get rid of it—many spend their idle hours dreaming of a comfortable work prison.  Some place they can tolerate long enough to make it to age sixty-five with some benefits.  They don’t even want to grin and bear it for several decades.  They just want to bear it.  That alone would be enough. Even that can be hard.

There are some people who are willing to make a break for it.  They visualize a future that doesn’t consist of years of abuse capped off with little more than a stooped back and a gold-plated retirement watch.  When they daydream, they think about running their own show. They imagine not just making a living, but actually living. They don’t want a new office or to work for the company across town. They want to own their own future and they want to sweeten the deal by working at home.

Others are already at home and are looking for work.  Instead of trying to find a gig on the bus route, they may be ready to do their own thing. Others may just be looking for a way to add a few bucks to the family coffer every week while being able to spend quality time at home parenting.  Instead of forking over their slave wages for daycare, they decide they can be both a parent and a provider at the same time by effectively operating a work at home business.

If you have ever wanted to toss your name tag like a ninja’s shuriken right into the head or chest of a dimwitted middle manager or if you’d like to redefine casual Friday to mean actually putting on pants, this is your resource.

This has been written for anyone who may be ready to escape the daily work ritual. No more morning commutes with other wage-zombies. No more spilt gas station cappuccinos in the car. No more keeping your fingers crossed for a promotion. If that sounds good to you, keep reading.

We are going to examine the attraction and benefits of running your own home business.  We are also going to honestly approach some of the challenges of escaping the traditional work force and how you can deal with them.  We are going to cover some of the many work at home options available and discuss where to find new ones.

In this series of articles on working at home I won’t pull any punches or sell any bogus dreams. You can consider this as a letter of warning or a carefully-crafted escape plan. It may be both.

I’ll talk about avoiding the scores of work at home scams and will spend some time discussing some of the unique challenges faced by those who are working at home and dealing with kids at the same time.

Of course, the whole issue of working from home is incredibly expansive and I don’t profess to cover every single nook and cranny of the matter within these articles. I do, however, think this is a valuable resource that will help you decide whether or not working from home will work for you and, if so, can help you in deciding how to stop being a clock-puncher and to become your own boss.

A Guide To Getting Started

Starting an internet home business isn’t as challenging as it sounds. Thousands of single moms, teenagers, and elderly folk are successfully doing it. With a well thought-out plan of action and a proven system to take you to success, your internet home business can soon be a reality.

Getting starting with an internet home business can be tricky. In the beginning, it’s a good idea not to assume you’ll be making tons of money quickly. In other words, until you’re making a steady income through your internet home business, don’t quit your day job.

If you have several months of living expenses saved up and you’re determined to leave your day job for good, plan to have at least 3 months of living expenses, plus several hundred dollars for miscellaneous marketing-related expenses. (Domain names, hosting, marketing, etc.)

Before you get started, you should familiarize yourself with the various available methods of making money online. Should you sell items on eBay? Should you create your own product and market it online? Or would you prefer to write articles and drive traffic to other people’s websites? Find an approach that works best for you, learn everything you can about it, create a plan, and stick to that plan.

Once you’ve picked an approach, educated yourself, and created a plan, the next step is to start setting achievable, quantifiable goals. Recent studies show that only about 2% of the popular sets goals, yet those 2% are making more money than the other 98% combined.

Set goals that stretch your abilities just a little, set a specific time and a gauge to know whether you achieved your goals or not. Once you have your long-term goal, break it down into smaller and smaller sized goals until you have a “today” or “current task” goal.

James Brown is a home based internet entrepreneur living in beautiful Japan. He travels frequently throughout Asia with his wife sharing the benefits of running your own home internet business. You can read more about him at his blog http://www.jamesbrown.name

Extra income working from home

Every entrepreneur, to achieve any amount of success should be motivated. Motivation comes from passion. Every book published or e-book that deals in money making and motivation screams passion – the most important ingredient in any successful entrepreneur.

Similarly, when you think about going after that extra income, you have to create a burning passion to do so. It will keep your fire glowing for a long time, at least till the first results become apparent. After that passion at a particular level keeps in rotation, after all money is the biggest motivator.

An entrepreneur embarking upon the route of home office and extra income should strongly believe in himself and his capabilities. He/ She should be thick skinned not to be perturbed or affected in any way by others comments and opinions. People are just plain jealous. Clear conscience and belief in oneself does not seek external approval. Evidence enough that, once you are successful and start earning extra income, the negative opinions and nasty comments turn into praise. One should have the ability and courage to make independent decisions and abide by them. This would be your most valuable asset yet.

Online businesses are basically scams – popular opinion of people around you in any part of the world. Your online business needs your approval heart and soul; otherwise success will keep eluding you and so will the extra income you planned from it. If Edison did not believe, that electricity can be harnessed to light up human life; we would still be living in the dark ages, wouldn’t we?

Being flexible with working hours, being energetic, planning wisely, focusing on short-term objectives and stress control are hallmarks of a successful home business owner. If you think you lack in any of them, practice till you make these attributes a part of your involuntary senses.

Discipline to start is very important but to know where to stop is more important. Do not overwork or stress up yourself to the point of not stopping. It will only burn out your imagination and render you useless for some time to come. Making short time extra income, you will lose out on the next few dollars (ex: Burning out today may earn you $1000 today, but by not working for the next 3 days you will lose $500X3 =  $1500). Work the number of hours as per the plan you carefully laid out.

Building your business is more important than earning money out of it. As your business sustains and grows, the money you earn from it automatically grows. Treat the home business as your hobby and keep abreast of it through updated information. Knowledge earned does not cost a cent here but will help in decision making in all spheres of independent life.

Last but not the least, fear of failure and not failure itself leads to most failures. Keep trying, look at failure as a part of learning and appreciate your benefit of knowledge from it. Learn from your mistakes, a lesson we have learnt in primary school.

All the best for your online success!