Andrea Richardson sounds like the ideal career woman. She is married, has an engineering degree from Harvard, and at one time worked for one of the largest engineering firms in the city. She now stays home with her two small children, and she hasn’t worked outside the home since her second child was born. And that suits her just fine: Ever since her daughters were born "work just doesn't have the same importance to me."
Andrea is now working as a consultant from her home. Even though her business is booming, and she needs more working space than her home office provides, she prefers to remain home. Why move? Andrea can prepare lunch for her kids and be back at the office in 40 seconds.
Andrea is one of more than 12 million Americans who run a full-time business from their home. Many are choosing to keep their business based at home so they can spend more time with their family. Instead of dragging in the door every evening from a distant job filled with stress and fatigue, home-based entrepreneurs can greet their children as they step off the school bus. They can take as many breaks as necessary during the day, not to mention take a short nap if necessary in order to re-energize! When is the last time your boss agreed to give you an hour to go home and take a nap? Even if he did, by the time you fought the traffic returning to work, you’d need another nap!
Working at home can be good for your finances, too. People who work from home save money on wear and tear on their vehicles. They save gas, and they save on groceries because you no longer have to spend the extra money to buy lunchmeat, bread and other necessities to make your lunch. Not to mention the money you save by not attending all those lunch meetings or get-togethers with your co-workers. That takes a big bite out of your weekly check! Instead you can nibble only when you’re hungry, and you have better control over what you’re eating, an added bonus that your waist will appreciate.
Although it may take a few weeks or months for your earnings to increase, many entrepreneurs earn good incomes. According to a recent study by professor David Buchen of the University of Wisconsin, nearly 3 million home-based entrepreneurs earned more than $100,000 last year, and the number of high-earning home enterprises is expected to continue to grow.
There are more Americans working at least part of the time from home than most people realize. The National Association of the Self-Employed states that as many as 40 million Americans conduct some work from home. These are a mixed bunch, which include telecommuters, part-time business owners, and independent contractors. The number of home workers is rising at such a tremendous speed, that only two years after the non-profit Home Business Institute was formed, it already had over 50,000 members.
Other organizations like Small Office Home Office and the American Association of Home-based Businesses are also helping make it more acceptable to run a business from home. It wasn’t that long ago that working from home was not as accepted as it is today. If you remember, people used to buy those novelty tapes that have office noises so that your clients wouldn't catch on that you were working from home. Thankfully, working from home today is not only considered acceptable, it is considered to be hip, and you are probably the envy of many of your friends, family and ex-colleagues.
Many famous entrepreneurial ventures were started in kitchens and garages. Consider the following:
- Apple Computer was born in Steven Wozniak's garage.
- Lillian Vernon cooked up her famous catalogue company on the kitchen table of her New York apartment.
- Mo Siegel started tea-maker Celestial Seasonings in his rented home outside of Boulder, Colorado, using a screen door to dry herbs!
Perhaps the biggest difference between Steven Wozniak, Lillian Vernon and Mo Seigel is that today’s entrepreneurs don't intend -- ever -- to leave home, and the desire to spend more time with their family is the number-one reason for this.
Below are some of the factors experts cite as the reason for the recent explosion of home-based businesses:
- Family Life. Many college-educated women start home-businesses when they become mothers. They want to be full-time moms and full-time business owners.
- New Technology. You no longer need a receptionist, an accountant or a mailroom to run your business. With today’s computer technology and software, entrepreneurs can a smooth operating business. There’s little need for a mailroom, your email automatically arrives in the right place. Word processing and voice recognition software make secretaries obsolete. Computers can send and receive faxes, and even answer the phone. Calculating payroll, processing invoices, updating ledgers, paying taxes, and cutting checks can now be done with the click of a mouse, and with affordable software such as Quicken, MS Excel.
- Financing. As competition from non-bank lenders increases, traditional banks are working harder to find new business customers. As a result they are starting to take home-based companies seriously. Many local governments now realize that small businesses create large numbers of jobs. They are beginning to loosen zoning and other restrictions that once barred entrepreneurs from running a home business.
- Downsizing. Large corporations have trimmed their payrolls by more than 4 million since 1985. That released an army of well-trained business managers to their homes, and many decided to stay there, creating their own firms and bringing a new level of expertise to home-based business.
Our leaders in Washington are finally beginning to realize the importance of running a home business, which allows a parent to spend more time with his children, and thus improving the lives of children and families. I believe that within the next five or ten years we can expect to see more parents running a home business and home schooling their children.
