Is Your Home Ready for Home Business?

Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

Right now, there is a gold rush going on in a suburb near you. It is the people who are freshly out of work and looking to start their own business from home. You might even find yourself joining the stampede. Don’t knock it. Starting a home business is a pretty good idea right now. Here’s why:

There’s no guarantee your old job will be waiting for you after the pandemic.
If you do it just right, you can make a lot more money working for yourself.
With the right work/life balance, it is easier to spend time with your family and still pay the bills.

Then again, if it were that easy, why didn’t everybody do it before there was a worldwide crisis? Obviously, it is not that easy. As with a lot of things, there are more ways to get it wrong than there are to get it right. There are some dire consequences to getting it wrong. If you already have a clientele, you could easily lose them. You can appear unprofessional. You could unduly inconvenience your family, and so much more. The problem may not be you. It could be your home. Here’s how to make sure your home is ready for work:

Commercially Clean

You know what you never see in an accountant’s office? Bugs, that’s what. No accountant has to ever say to a client, “Sorry about the roaches.” If they did, they wouldn’t have any clients. Unfortunately, even the best kept homes have bugs.

Before you open your home for business, you need to go to the nearest search engine and type, “exterminator near me.” It is unfair that the quality of your business might be judged because your kids left a half-eaten back of chips behind the client chair and attracted an army of ants. That’s unfortunate. But that’s also life.

You are hoping to extract a lot of money from clients who aren’t doing any better than you are. They will make unconscious decisions based on appearances. And if insects start making appearances, your home business is done.

Make Room to Work

So, you want to open a successful home business? One of the most basic things you need to do is make room for your business. That doesn’t mean just pushing the breakfast plates to the side while you try to get things done at the kitchen table. You have to do a little better than that.

You need a dedicated space for your business. Even if you don’t have clients coming into the home, you still need to have space for your computer, your paper files, and a clean workspace on the desk for writing things down or doing something unplanned.

You also need that space to be used only for work. That reduces the chances of important papers getting misplaced. It is hard to misplace things when there is only one place for them. You also don’t want to take any chances with your clients' sensitive data. That can’t be left on the table where you might forget it and where others might see it. Before deciding to work from home, make sure your home has a place for work.

Get the Best Possible Connection

You can’t expect to do an internet-based business from home on a shaky dial-up, metered connection. If you are not searching at this very moment for the best routers of 2020, you are setting yourself up for failure. The last thing you need is to spend a half a day on the phone with your cut-rate internet service provider as they try to walk you through a lot of technical problems with very little support.

When it comes to your home business, every mission is critical. You cannot afford to cut corners anywhere. You are already saving a lot of money by not renting a proper office space. But don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. Don’t settle for less than commercial-grade extermination and cleaning. Make the space you need to do the job. And get the best wireless router you can. Dead spots in your home mean dead spots in your business.

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