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

Pondering what to write today and thinking maybe I could write something useful for people starting out in home based business – or maybe wanting to re-boot an existing home based business – I gave myself an exercise.

And the exercise I gave myself was this: “If someone was just setting up a home based business, what – based on my own more than 20 years of being a home based business owner – would be five tips I would give them?”

The idea was not to come up with the “top 5”; more like “5 off the top of my head”.

All my own thoughts

25 June:Working at home by Sladey via Flickr I chose not to consult my library, where I have some really useful books on the topic, or other blogs, some of which I know are full of wisdom and practical advice, or to point to some of the excellent, free guides on government-sponsored web sites in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and no doubt other countries.

And I certainly chose not to suggest focusing on what I focused on when I set up my own home based business all those years ago, like

spending hours working out what configuration of computer, printer, fax machine I should get
spending an inordinate amount of time working on stationery design, especially what my business card should look like
wondering about office furniture

Those concerns have their place but there are more fundamental things I would love to have had someone point out – forcefully – to me. Mainly about the realities of business, as distinct from the tools and trappings.

So for this exercise I would draw on just my thoughts, here and now February 2011, based on my experience, and not aiming to win a competition for the “best” or “wisest” or “potentially most profitable” tips.

Here’s what I wrote down (the pic of the handwritten version shows why I did not win prizes at school for handwriting!).

5 Tips for Someone Starting a Home Based Business

Know your market worth
Build an order book
Develop new networks
Ask for help
Love the business you are in

Briefly about each:

1. Know your market worth

As background, statement of the bleeding obvious: everyone comes from somewhere.

Explanation. It’s probably a reasonable statement that for most of us setting up a professional services business from home, we come from having a role, a status, probably even a title, in our previous place of business or work. They helped identify our worth to our employer or other prospective employers. Now we need to work out a fresh valuation of our worth in the market. Which in turn or as a pre-requisite requires us to work out who our market is.

2. Build an order book

I learned this from a wise, very experienced business leader, who would say – and told me that as a CEO he would say it to his team – “don’t tell me about the business we have now. Tell me what’s in your order book for six months from now.”

This one needs strategy, planning, discipline. And it requires us to be thinking ahead and “marketing ahead”. But it’s how we can build a sustainable business.

3. Develop new networks

As my handwritten scrawl shows, the first version of this was “Build your networks”. The trouble is, while the networks we have now might sustain us for a while, our new business focus may demand, not that we trash our existing networks, but that we complement it with new networks relevant to our marketing strategy.

If you are starting your business now or giving it a re-boot, social media offers you literally unprecedented opportunities to build amazing new, and amazingly profitable, networks.

4. Ask for help

Assuming you are good at what you do (or just good at what you are good at), you should assume that your friends and former work colleagues will want to help you get business. They may not have contracts for you themselves (don’t crowd them or embarrass them by begging or cajoling) but if you can make it very clear to them what you are focused on and the sort of people you want to connect with, they will surely want to give you introductions and recommendations. Ask them! The worst they can do is say no.

5. Love the business you are in

You might, channeling Tina Turner, ask ‘What’s love got to do with it?”. My answer: A Lot! You might have started your business because you got retrenched or just couldn’t stand where you were working. But now you’ve started it, you’d better make sure you love it, or learn to love it. Or start a different business. Or look for a job again.

Believe me, if you don’t love it, if it doesn’t get you out of bed in the morning eager to get into it, being thrilled to help your clients, you will stand a fair chance of getting bored, disillusioned and cranky enough that it will show and people will not want to do business with you. You wouldn’t want that, would you?

But wait, there’s more!

It has been a challenge, with these five tips, to restrict myself to making a brief observation on/explanation of each.

With each of them there is more that I want to share and each of them leads into other, related topics. So I’m thinking of doing a separate post on each of the five tips.

I’m also interested to know what others might offer as their 5 Tips.

So.

What are 5 tips you would give to someone starting or re-booting a home based business?

Image credit:: “25 June: Working at home” by Sladey, via Flickr (CC BY -ND 2.0)

The series: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 1: Know Your Market Worth : Starting a Home Based Business Series

Tip 2: Build an Order Book: Starting a Home Based Business Series

Tip 3: Build New Networks: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 4: Ask for Help: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

Tip 5: Love the Business You Are In: 5 Tips for Starting a Home Based Business

This post on Secret Weapons for the Serious Business Builder is the last in the Working From Home and Loving It series.

I’ve identified five “secret weapons” for people building a business from home.They are not “secret” in the sense that nobody knows about them. They are however secret in the sense that many people I meet who are in business, from home or elsewhere, seem oblivious to the fact that these resources are available to help them.

My list is, in no particular order of priority:

Organic search
Social networking
Skype
Blogging
Syndication

In selecting my favorite “secret weapons” I have used as one criterion the consideration that many or most people with businesses from home do not have large marketing budgets and are always interested in what can be done effectively on a limited or zero budget.

Organic search

Whether we want to sell our goods or services locally or globally – or both – gaining a basic understanding about search is both imperative and potentially very rewarding. Deciding not to know about search is not a good business decision.

My focus here is on organic search, because I believe the power of organic search is relatively secret. I find that people seem to feel they understand paid search: maybe they see that as a kind of new, web version of paying for a box in the printed yellow pages. People sometimes tell me what good results they are having from Google ads or other paid research. Sometimes they tell me what bad results they’ve had.

I find it a challenge to get either group interested in a conversation about organic search.

I don’t have any problem with people using paid search, as long as they know what they are doing and know how to manage the process, or have it managed, within a specified budget.

But if the home based business owner’s first real introduction to online search resources is from an individual or company offering to sell search or search engine optimization (seo) services or products, it’s really important to be able to establish from the outset how much of the service is about using paid search and how much about organic search.

And for a cash-strapped home business owner, there is a lot you can do with just organic search, without having to pay. Of course, if you do have a budget for the purpose, there are search engine optimization expert companies and individuals who can help you with organic as well as paid search: with the right expertise you can surely move faster and better than doing it the self-help way.

And whether you are hiring external expertise or going the diy route, it will be relevant for businesses wanting at least some business from a local market to build some understanding of the new realities and opportunities with local search. There is an excellent interview on local search by Michael Gray with my friend, top search wiz, Lee Odden.

In that interview, Lee provides some great advice, including how to interact with local media.

One tool in this area of search and media, global as well as local, and which in my not totally unbiased opinion is ideal for the home business owner, is Pitch Engine. There is a free level and then other levels still within the budget frame of most home based businesses. I posted here recently about Pitch Engine and small business (and declared there my interest as Australian manager).

Social Networking

In an earlier post in this series I wrote about what I called the myth of isolation for people in home based business. No prize for guessing that how I named the post showed that I am not on the side of those who think that working from home means you will necessarily feel isolated.

But here I am going to go a step further and say that working from home may well give you access to many more people, more communities, in more diverse parts of the world and walks of life, than your friends and colleagues in more traditional, “working for the Man” places of work, may have.

And with time zones being what they are, those of us who work from home have access to such communities around the clock, if we wish.

With resources such as the various groups we can join on Google Groups, Yahoo! Groups, or Ning and access to other social networking platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, most with no financial outlay involved, we have access 24/7 to a potentially amazing array of resources for collegial support, research, checking and feedback.

Not to mention that a number of these can and do also serve as virtual water coolers.

Skype

The free or low-cost VoIP or Internet phone service Skype has to be one of the best of all the secret weapons for the home based business owner.

Secret? With millions of people using Skype at any one time, you may well ask. And yet I continually find people with businesses from home who do not use Skype, although many indicate that they have “heard of it”. Skype enables me to have conference calls around the world, to coach clients in far-flung localities and all at no cost other than what I am already paying for Internet access, plus, with a very modest, one-off outlay for a third party application, Pamela, having the option to record any of those calls in a downloadable file, .

“”Skype: don’t work from home without it.”

Blogging

Don’t believe the pundits who say blogging is dead. What they really mean is they are bored with it. A recent survey indicated that blogging in the business context has a bright future.

Blogging is potentially a very powerful weapon for the home based business owner. When I think that, ten years or so years ago, to even begin to have the kind of communication capability provided by a free or low cost blog, together with RSS/syndication (see next point) cost me and others thousands of dollars, I find it impossible to be blasé about blogging.

This is probably a good point at which to mention that my book for small business 7 Step Business Blog, is not only in its 2nd edition but is now available for downloading free of charge (see form, top of right sidebar).

Syndication

Having sung the praises of Skype, I actually believe that, for the home based business owner, syndication, or RSS, is a bigger gift than Skype.

To use what is probably the more common term, RSS provides me as a home based business owner with a two way benefit:

I can get up to date news and other information from selected sources delivered automatically to me on a continuous basis
I can make information available to others who might not come on a regular basis to visit my blog but are happy to receive regular updates in their RSS reader

What’s not to love?

Are there other secret weapons for the home based business owner? Please share.

Picture “Working from Home” – by carlfish via Flickr, Creative Commons