eMoms at Home :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

In this fast-moving world, a business name or the name of a blog can be quite good or even excellent for one phase of a business’s existence but in need of a change as circumstances change and the business owner re-calibrates her business aims and understanding of her market. The blog site formerly known as eMoms at Home is a case in point.

Those of us who have been reading Wendy Piersall’s very successful eMoms at Home blog knew that the blog, having already acquired an impressive group of bloggers with a variety of expertise, was about to have a name change. It has had that – the new name is sparkplugging – and more. The site has been re-designed and re-planted, the purpose and ambit re-phrased.

In spite of the old name’s focus on “e-mothers” working from home, I never found the site or Wendy’s posts to be focused exclusively on that group or in any way unwelcoming for others of us. It was in fact of good general interest to others, males included, and people without children at home, with probably the common thread of being interested in how to work effectively from a home base. And especially how to use the available technology, such as blogging, better.

The site is now very different from the one I discovered however long ago, with Wendy blogging away on her own. There are now Business Channels and Lifestyle Channels, with a battery of bloggers covering a range of topics, from coaching to craft businesses, from freelance writing to kids activities.

It’s still, and very much, about working from home, but more electrifyingly, so to speak, now that its new name is – sparkplugging. As the site’s About page tells it:

Why Sparkplugging? Because the people who come to this site are Spark Plugs – we are people who make things happen.

And just in case I haven’t emphasized enough the ambition of the project, note the sub-title/description of the site:

Thinking Big in the New Work-at-Home Generation.

I like it.

And the name is growing on me .

Every good wish, Wendy and colleagues, for this excellent new phase of your business and blogging!

Over at eMoms at Home, Dawud Miracle, in his post Why More People Should Be Working From Home And How You Can, celebrates the fact that for the past ten years he has not had to commute to work. He goes on to promote the concept of working from home and provides some practical suggestions for people interested in transitioning to this way of working.

There’s nothing like getting up in the morning and not having to rush into the shower, shave, get dressed, catch some grub and sit in traffic during a long commute. According to a recent Gallop Poll, the average American spends 46 minutes on their daily work commute. 46 minutes, that’s basically an hour.

I relate to that, although it’s a lot longer than ten years ago that I left behind that way of getting to and from work, in exchange for the 30 second commute, working from home. In that time I’ve worked, at different times, both in the house and in a purpose-built office but on the same site as the house. Both ways of working, in the house and separately but on site, have worked for me.

I know that some people feel that if you work from home you should have an office quite separate from the rest of the house, but the reality is that for some that is not practical, or not immediately so.

Working from home is not everyone’s ideal, but for anyone attracted to the idea and still in a regular, “commute to and from” job, Dawud’s tips on how to broach with a supervisor the possibility of testing the work from home idea are required reading.

If you want to work at home the most important thing is to show your boss and your company how it will benefit them.

One of the particular benefits of following Dawud’s suggestions is that it is an alternative to parachuting out of an existing job that may or may not be perfect but still pays the mortgage.

You can go back. The beauty of the approach Dawud suggests, i.e. getting a current employer’s support to testing the possibilities of working from home, is about a different way of doing an existing job, not an alternative to doing that job, and leaves open several possibilities. Not everyone who wants to work from home wants their own business. And not everyone is going to be happy with working from home, however much the rest of us love it.

Thanks to my colleague Bill Vick for the heads up on Dawud’s post.