Recently, in my law practice, I’ve been dealing with a hell of a lot of city violation tickets and business license denials.  Sadly enough, it seems that a lot of budding entrepreneurs have evaluated the license application process, and feel they need an attorney to navigate it.  Think about that – the simple, and very beneficial for yourself and for society act of hanging your own shingle, has become so Byzantine that its beyond the reach of those without a juris doctor.

Once you do get the license, be ready to be ticketed, harassed, shut down and otherwise hazed by the City’s minions.  The goal seems to be to take as much of the business owner’s cash for the public coffers as possible.  Surprise, right?

My apologies to all if this sounds like a rant – it was prompted, as so many of my rants are, by a court case I just finished.

Chicago’s Finest wrote one of my clients a ticket for a bullshit ordinance violation.  Due to the piss-poor preparation of the officer, the city attorney was unable to prosecute – a win for me!  Next day, guess which client had his shop crawling with officers looking to write any sort of violation they could find.

And people wonder why businesses of all sizes are running headlong for the doors of Wisconsin and Indiana…

Now, it bears mentioning that, her case was up for return of service – in other words, it was her very first court date.  There was absolutely no chance that she could have been put in jail.  This is just another of the sleazy tactics being used by debt collection attorneys to scare the hell out of the debtors they are trying to rape negotiate with.

So, to set the record straight:

1. Civil debt, in and of itself, can not lead to jail time.

2. Lawyers that tell debtors that they are going to put the debtor in jail should be disbarred.

Now, there are of course situations in a civil case when a debtor could be locked up, but they center around being found guilty of contempt.  For instance, if a judgment has been rendered against the debtor and the debtor refuses to answer the questions about assets that would allow the creditor to try and collect, they could be found guilty of contempt.

In short, if you don’t have a judgment against you yet, don’t let some lowlife debt-collector threaten you.  The threats are empty, and under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, illegal.

WORK FROM HOME!  MAKE BIG MONEY!

Everyone is familiar with this come-on – more and more, it seems to be part and parcel of the American dream to be able to set up your home office, and make your fortune while commuting in your pajamas with your coffee in hand.  Unfortunately, too many of those “opportunities” have, in the past, been little more than scams.  Did you really think you could make your fortune stuffing envelopes?

Modern lifestyle gurus are promoting ideas like “digital nomadism,” location independence,” and the “four-hour-work-week.”  The problem is actually finding a legitimate way to make your filthy lucre, when your world headquarters is the computer parked on your dining room table.

One of the ways to do this is affiliate marketing.  Affiliate marketing is a way for you to earn money by mentioning or otherwise advertising merchants’ products on your own blog, website, or other web-presence.  It works like this:

Merchants who sell online contact networks (such as e-junkie, or clickbank) and set up their program.  Affiliate marketers (that’s you) sign up.  It costs nothing.  You read the rules set up by the merchant (such as how much commission they pay and when and how they pay), and then you clip a little bit of code, and place it on your website.

That little bit of code directs viewers of your website to the merchant’s sales page.  If your viewer buys, you get a commission.  Its that simple.  Of course, it helps if you can review or recommend the product, and if you have a web-presence with a decent amount of traffic.

Affiliate marketing is a true win-win.  The merchant gets greater exposure for the product, the network collects a fee from the merchant, your viewer gets access to a good product (or many of them), which drives more traffic to your website and earns you affiliate commissions.

While affiliate marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, it certainly is a good step toward the location independent lifestyle we all seem to be looking for.

Tim

(Tim’s blog, Cut of the Murphy, is located at www.timothymmurphy.com).

Will My Business Work From Home?  This is the threshold question, and one which you should give some thought to.  Do you offer a professional service, such as writing, appraisal, some types of law, consulting, and so forth?  Working from home may be a great choice.  If you purchase and re-sell heavy equipment, the home office may not serve your needs.  Does your clientele expect you to have an office?  If you’re writing resumes and cover letters for job-seekers, it’s just fine to park your laptop and cell phone on the back porch and get to work.  If you’re being paid millions of dollars to consult with federal government suppliers on aircraft contracts, you’d best get yourself a recognized address.  Do you want your customers in your home?  If you’re planning weddings, it might be a great personal touch to invite the bride into your home and start the planning.  If you’re a criminal defense attorney, you might not want the accused strong-arm robber with the mile-long rap sheet knowing where you put your head down at night.

Am I Organized?  Working for oneself, generally, requires a much higher level of organization than most people think.  When there is no management team, placing deadlines in your in-basket, or boss inspecting your work queue each day, things have a tendency to slide on by.  This problem increases geometrically as you need to work, answer the kids’ homework questions, deal with the cuts and bruises of the playground, pay attention to the needs of your spouse, lend the neighbor your lawn mower, make lunch, and so on, and so forth.  If you are the sort of person who has a place for everything and everything in its place, remembers phone numbers and appointments with near-total recall, or if you are disciplined enough to get a great calendar system and follow it religiously, you’ll do just fine.  If not, the relative quiet and solitude of an office away from home may be a better bet for you.

Can I Work Alone?  By alone, I don’t mean in the absence of other people.  That will rarely happen in your home-based business, courtesy of the spouse, kids, neighbors and occasional door-to-door salesman.  Rather, can you work and perform well without the ability to regularly turn to a co-worker to discuss the project?  Can you produce, whatever it is you produce, without a lot of feedback from people who do the same thing you do?  Can you function in sporadic professional isolation?  I do a lot of my legal work from home, and when I’m at home, the thing I miss most is the ability to walk into the adjoining office, and ask another lawyer what she thinks about a case I am handling.  To thrive at home, you must be self-sufficient.

Location, Location, Location -  While you may choose to work from home, there is a strong chance that a lot of your clients will not.  So, while you don’t need that downtown office, can you easily access the downtown offices of your customers?  In other words, home needs to be in reasonable proximity to the people you serve, or the places you need to go.  Again, my own example:  I don’t have an office right downtown by the courthouse, as a lot of Chicago lawyers do.  But I can get there in 30 minutes from my home.  If I was a hundred miles from a major city, I couldn’t practice the way I do.  It wouldn’t fit my business.  Make sure your home location is also a reasonably convenient business location, before you make the decision.

Legal – As a lawyer, I must add this.  Some jurisdictions limit, by zoning or other types of ordinances, what type of business can be run from your home.  For instance, in Illinois, you may not run a real estate brokerage from your residential address (I know, I tried…).  Save yourself a lot of problems, and be sure it is lawful to run your business from your home before you start.

Running a business from home can offer significant advantages, and add to your quality of life in ways most people can predict, and in some you may have never imagined.  But it isn’t for everybody, and it isn’t for every business.  Asking yourself some of the questions mentioned here may help give you a feel for whether you want to further explore the possibility of running your business from your home sweet home.

Housework or yard-work – There are always a million and one things that need to be done in the house or in the yard.  Go do some of them.  Many of them are things that you could do in your sleep, tasks purely physical in nature that allow your mind to work on more important problems, or better yet, just do some wandering.  Because you’re are doing something, you won’t get the urge to just pack it in for the day, and you get the added benefit of having completed some of the chores that are so, so easy to put off.

Cook – On the flip side, maybe you were busy with the busywork of your home business, pushing paper and punching in numbers, and you’ve got hours more routine maintenance to go.  Let me suggest you head to the kitchen.  We all need to eat, and instead of shoveling cold cuts down your gullet and heading back to the books, take the time to prepare a nice meal.  It doesn’t have to be complex or time consuming, but your stomach will thank you for some real homemade food, and the exercise of the creative muscles you use during cooking may just steel you for the completion of the book-keeping that lies ahead.

Ask Your Spouse – This may be the most productive of all possible breaks, and it is so simple.  Ask your husband, wife, partner, significant other how you can help with his or her day.  As we run our own businesses, we sometimes forget that the person who shares our live has an agenda, responsibilities, a schedule and goals all her own.  Say that you’ve got some time, and want to lend a hand.  Help with that errand, read over that report, go pick up his mom from the airport.  Whatever it is, help.  You’ll not only get a bit of diversion from your work, but you’ll score big points with the one you love for your thoughtfulness and consideration.

Little People – Certainly the best break of all.  I have five small people that make up my contribution to the genetic future, and I’ll gladly take a break from work to help with homework, look at the new pair of shoes, throw the ball around, play GI Joes, or just sit and be Dad for a little while.  It recharges your batteries like nothing else, and as I’ve mentioned in other articles, we can always use a little reminder about exactly who and what we are working so hard for.

Even working from home can be a grind.  Follow these tips for break-taking, and you’ll be that much closer to the work-life integration that should be the ultimate goal of working from home.

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.

is according to my friends at the hotel a posh little area. It also had a lot of activity on the street, and was extremely convenient to “the Tube,” which is where I was headed.
Getting off the train at the Embankment, I walked over a bridge, and found a pier, at which were sitting boats for the Circular Cruise of London. This service provides a, surprise surprise, circular tour on the Thames. Great thing is, though, the ticket is cheap, and you can get off and back on again at any stop, as you please. I rode about half of the tour, as far as St. Katharine’s Pier. During the ride I passed by, and heard interesting stories from the (Irish!) guide, regarding Blackfriar’s Bridge, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Southwark Cathedral, London Bridge, the H.M.S. Belfast and the Tower Bridge.
From there, I got off the boat, and had a wander around the Tower of London, beautiful from any angle, and had a look at the famous, or infamous, Traitor’s Gate.

I kept walking then, and came across Trinity Square. At a pub called the Liberty Bounds, I had the pleasure of a ploughman’s and a pint (really, several) of cider, as well as some conversation with some very friendly, and two very drunken, Londoners.

I came upon All Hallows Church, by the Tower – perhaps the oldest church in London, built atop Roman ruins, and with a small museum in the crypt.

A lot more walking followed, but it was fine, as the weather was beautiful, and there were plenty of places to stop for another cider, or later, a Pimm’s and lemonade at the Devonshire Arms in Dentham Street. Along the way were the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, Pall Mall, Picadilly, the Supreme Court, Westminster Abbey – all during a comfortable walk.

The train ride back to Earl’s Court provided first rate people watching, as well as time to think about all I had seen. I found a hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant, and had a lovely dinner. From there, I just strolled – stopping everywhere, and even looking at ads for flats, contemplating what it would be like to live in this little slice of London. I took those thoughts to sleep with me for some rest and some sweet dreams.

The point of all this is not to tell you a lot about London – if you’re reading this you probably have been there, and you may know a great deal more about the place than I do. The point is this: There is always time. No matter how busy your work schedule, no matter how little time for sightseeing, you can still get a feel for…wherever you are. Get a train ticket, get your feet moving, get into the thick of things, and see what you can see.
It worked for me in London…it works for me everywhere!

Enjoy!

Good-bye, My Sweet Little Green Bird (originally posted 6/8/2009)

As those of you who know me know, I’m usually a bit of a bastard. I make no apologies for this – it enables me to get through all of the shit that life put’s in a man’s way, without the need to tear out my hair, rend my clothes, or just give up. So, suffice it to say that I am not particularly emotional or sentimental. However, there are a few things I am impossibly soft-hearted about.
Cookie was the name of my little black-capped conure, a small species of parrot. She was a beautiful, small bird, and her chirping woke me up each morning. She was intensely curious about everything, friendly, cuddly, funny, and an all around great pet and companion. She died last night, June 7, 2009, and my heart is broken.
I know some of you fellow bastards may say, “So what, Murphy, it was just a bird.” You’d be wrong. She was a sweet green bird who brought joy into my daily life. Now she’s gone, and I miss her. In other words, she mattered. People should try so hard.