Balancing your home business

Nation's Business, April, 1997 by Susan Biddle Jaffe

Getting away from the traditional office brings on new challenges involving family, household distractions, and professionalism.

Beth Makens Long runs a $17 million-a-year sales business from the basement of her suburban Chicago home. She puts in 50-hour weeks, and she travels a lot. She could work even longer hours--and earn more--but she has chosen to put her family first. That means turning down business.

Recently, Long told her customers she had decided to drop several of the product lines that her company, Connemara Ltd., represented. As a self-employed manufacturers' representative selling equipment with price tags of $500,000 or more to the utilities industry, she lost at least $100,000 a year in commissions because of the change.

By cutting back on the amount of work she takes on, Long opted for more time with her children, 4-year-old Conor and 3-year-old Meaghan; her husband, John; and her stepdaughter, 19-year-old Kristin.

Long is among the many home-based business people who face hard choices in finding the right balance between work and family

According to Robert Strauss, a small-business and home-marketplace analyst for IDC/LINK, a New York City research firm, there are 30 million U.S. households in which someone works at home. They are divided into four categories: the full-time self-employed, such as Long; part-timers who work exclusively from home; the "corporate after-hours" set, who work from home in addition to holding an outside job; and telecommuters, whose employers let them do some or all of their work from home.

Reality Sets In

Working from home might appear to be an idyllic alternative to office work, but the reality can be quite different. The clashes between work and family become more immediate, and there are everyday challenges in trying to maintain a polished and professional work environment when the kids are screaming, the dog is barking, and the neighbor's lawn mower is roaring.

Home-based entrepreneurs and authorities on home-based businesses say that the ingredients of success for someone working from home are no different from those for a person who works outside the home. The same levels of dedication and effort are required. But the distractions are different.

"The hardest thing" that home-based workers must do "is to give themselves permission to set boundaries, to say `I am at work"' says Joanne H. Pratt. She started working from home in 1959 as an oil-industry consultant and now runs a home-based research firm in Houston that has studied the emergence of entrepreneurs who work from home. "If you don't set boundaries, you're always feeling the pull, always feeling guilty."

Paul Edwards, an author and expert on home-based business who works with his wife, Sarah, from their home in Santa Monica, Calif., says, "You have to define things for yourself as well as other people. When you're employed, the company defines what you have to do. When you're on your own, you have to define the structure yourself."

Once you define that structure, you must be careful to prevent it from turning away clients or potential clients, says Edwards. For example, he tells of a woman who works only in the mornings, while her children are at school. When asked by clients about her availability during the afternoon, she simply says she has "another commitment."

Most business people understand and respect this, says Edwards, and the woman can maintain the legitimacy of her business while meeting her family's needs. Equal in importance to setting a structure, says Lisa Roberts, mother of four and author of How to Raise a Family and a Career Under One Roof (Bookhaven, $15.95), is the delegation of personal and professional tasks.

"You need to think like a manager," says Roberts, who owns A Creative Type, a home-based communications consulting company in Fairfield, Conn. "Managers delegate, schedule, and monitor, and those are three things you need to do as a business owner at home. Delegate domestic as well as business skills that you can't do, like child care, or that you're not good at, like marketing or accounting."

A Separate Space

Maintaining professionalism when you're working at home is critical. You don't want the kids answering your business calls, for example. Likewise, a telecommuter should make sure the boss has no reason to believe that productivity is suffering from the arrangement.

Dedicate an office space, add a phone line for the exclusive use of your business, and have the technical capabilities--notably a fax and electronic mail--that are necessary to conduct business professionally. A separate entrance to the office area of your home may be called for if you have clients or employees who come to your office frequently.

"Bite the bullet and get some good equipment," advises Barry Stauffer, whose Alexandria, Va., home-based business provides security services for computer information systems. Stauffer installed a separate phone line and a fax line for his home office.

Even with such technological improvements, people with home-based businesses often need creative approaches to problems such as where to have meetings and what to do if children can be heard during a call.