Working from home advice from real entrepreneurs
When you work from home, it’s incredibly important to keep your work and your home separate as much as possible. You don’t want your business life to damage your family life, but at the same time you don’t want your family life to interfere with your business’ success.
We asked some entrepreneurs just like you for their best work-from-home tips. Here’s what they had to say:
- Check with local requirements and zoning regulations to make sure that your business can be run from your home.
- Install a separate phone line in your office to truly keep your business separate from your home life (and to make sure your kids don’t inadvertently make a sale on your behalf!). You should also have a professional voicemail system, separate from your family or personal voicemail.
- Set specific start and end times for your work day. Decide on your work hours and stick to them.
- Try to stay committed to a set schedule as much as possible to avoid any chance of not spending enough time on the job, or not spending enough time with your family.
- Try to make your work area as professional and motivating as possible. Keep the office work-related, and try to avoid having any kids in your home treat it like their own play room. Consider having something inspiring or motivating in your work area in order to remind yourself why you’re working so hard — whether it’s a favourite quote, a photo of a dream vacation spot on your desktop background, a major financial goal written in big flashy letters, or a dream board filled with pictures of things you’d love to have.
- If you have to do any renovating for this home office of yours, make sure you keep records of everything. Keep track of your utility bills and mortgage payments so that you can deduct these expenses when it comes to tax season.
- Consider using a virtual office service. This will allow you to rent a mailbox at a downtown location so that clients will see a more sophisticated address when sending packages. These companies also usually rent out boardrooms for meetings at a downtown location. If necessary, you may also be able to hire a virtual assistant who will answer your phone calls in a professional manner before connecting the call to you at your home office.
- Make sure that your office has a door and can be a quiet environment when you need to get down to business. Avoid distractions as much as possible.
For more tips on working from home, check out these past blog posts:
Tip of the Month: Working from Home
Ulistic started off working from our home. We have recently moved into a shared office space at Regus in Burlington and Buffalo, NY. It was great working from home but as our business grew, it was time to find a physical office.
We used Easy Office Phone (http://www.easyofficephone.com) for our phone system. They were awesome and gave us that professional phone system for pretty cheap and without the hassle of installing another phone line. Just worked over our Cogeco cable. I highly recommend them and they were instrumental in our early success.
I mentioned Regus. They are awesome and once again a valuable service.
I also recommend a professional email system. Microsoft Office 365 will allow you to have a professional email and document sharing service for pennies a day.
These were just some early tips to how Ulistic got started as a professional MSP Marketing consulting firm.
Stuart Crawford
Great tips, Stuart – thanks for sharing!
This is great. I love this advice. I will follow them all.