Cut of the Murphy

If you’re like most worker bees in this modern-day hive, whether you work for someone else or you’re self-employed, you’ve probably asked yourself that question.  Sitting on that train, or shaking your fist in traffic, you’ve thought “Wouldn’t it be great if my commute was from the shower to the sun room?”  Take it from me, it can be.  As many of you know, besides being a partner in a small law firm, I run a few other businesses, and although those businesses do have offices, 90% of my work is done from home.  My wife is a stay-at-home mom, managing five kids, and my house is Grand Central.  So if I can do it, you certainly can do it, too.  But you need to ask yourself a few questions first.

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.

Even when you work in the wonderful environment of your own home, surrounded by the people and things you love, you’re still working.  Because you’re working, at some point, your head will be full (or empty, as the case may be) and you’ll need to take a break.  As you will have guessed by now, there are right ways and wrong ways to do this.  A good break will give you a chance to get away from the work a little bit, but won’t disconnect you completely from what you were doing.  This is a particularly difficult balance to strike for the person who works from home.  When that bedroom with the California king and the surround-sound-home-theater- Jacuzzi-wet-bar is only steps away from the computer, break time can easily signal the effective end of your work day.  That would be bad.  Working from home is great, and if you’d like to continue to be able to do so, skip the nap and take one of these tried (by me) and true methods for taking five.

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.

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.