Cut of the Murphy

So you’ve paid close attention to your business, or the business you want to go into. You’ve determined that it is suitable to be operated from your home, that your home is a suitable place from which to run that business, and that you have the discipline and organizational skills to successfully operate from home. Why did you want to do this? That’s right, the benefits. There are benefits to turning that spare bedroom into Jane Q. Public, Inc. World Headquarters. The benefits are many, but some of the most important ones follow:

Low Start-up Costs and Overhead – Starting a new business can be devilishly expensive, what with office leases, equipment, licenses and permits, office supplies, utilities, security deposits, and insurance, not to mention to opportunity costs of foregoing that regular paycheck forever. Running your small business from home cuts down on a lot of this. You don’t need to pony up $10,000 per month for that prime location. There aren’t a lot of additional phone and data lines to be run. You don’t have an additional set of utility and usage fees. In fact, depending on your business, there may be little or no overhead. I run a law practice and three other professional services businesses largely from my home. My outlay to equip this model of sometimes efficiency was limited to the cost of a computer, cell phone with good headset, one of those multi-function fax/printer/copier/scanner things, and a couple of filing cabinets. Cheap and easy, both virtues when you’re beginning a new small business project.

Low Commuting Time – I get out of the shower in the morning, and migrate the approximately 20 feet from my toothbrush to my office. Years ago I had a one hour train ride, and before that, I think my mind has blocked out my memory of driving into downtown Chicago each morning during rush hour. There are some things every business owner must do. For those of us who work from home, at least, road rage isn’t one of them.

No Office Politics – Perhaps the most stressful things about my previous life as a person with an office in the city, after the commute, was the games people play in the office. The business world can be cutthroat, and if you think that’s only for high level executives, Gordon Gekko-style “greed is good” buccaneers and people who work on Capitol Hill, you’re wrong. If you’ve ever observed the double dealing, backstabbing and jockeying for positions that go along with, say, getting a prime parking space, you know the score. It’s the reason most of us wanted to get away from the office in the first place, and if you work at home, you avoid it altogether.

Greater Availability to Family and Friends – One of the struggles we all face is dividing time fairly between the pleasures of family and the demands of work. When you’re at the office all day, it seems difficult to find the time to talk about what’s for dinner that night, or to drive all the way back home to get your child with a cold home from school. These things are much less troublesome when you work from home. I can be working on a legal document, and take a moment to help my kids with their homework, and prepare a grocery list, or sometimes even dinner. For me, the demands of work become the pleasures of work because I love the people that surround me all day, and when my little ones jump up on my lap while I’m writing, that just reminds me, in a very poignant way, what exactly I’m working so hard for.

This is but a small sample of the benefits that you can reap when you decide to work at home. It was once said of a painter, I believe Monet, who worked from his home, that he never really seemed to work. One moment he was playing with his children, the next he was playing with his wife, the next he was playing with his paintings. Working surrounded by the people and things he loved allowed him to integrate his work and his life so fully, that he could hardly be said to be working at all. We should all wish to have the same thing said about us.