Er...no. Anything you do “at home” is inherently limited.
Unfortunately I believe homo-based businesses are the future.
I run my business from home, and I have NO PLANS for hiring employees.
If and when I expand, it will be through partnerships with other individuals or businesses to provide the workforce I need to continue providing services.
I have a small printing company and bulk mailing shop and do much of my work at home. I do not have drop in customers, strictly BtoB and go to my customers for their orders and of course deliveries. It works great. My wife and I have part time helpers and we give them 1099s because they work at their homes and on their time. Yes, this is a wave of the future.
I ran a home based internet type business for 5 years and did enjoy it. I quit my job on 9-10-01 to start it up. The next day was a shocker obviously and for a day or so I debated the move. The first year was actually the best year. An influx of competition and problems keeping inventory ultimately led to me shutting it down.
I had a computer business in my home for years in MD. Most places permit an office in a house because of Doctors, Insurance salesmen, and Real Estate persons. Generally, you may not store inventory. You can park a truck and keep inventory in it.
I would recommend a phone under a business name. This helps you get recognized as a legit business by other businesses. Go to the local bank and open a commercial account and get some checks printed.
I had associates not employees when I needed extra help.
Most important of all is that you are doing something which you REALLY like to do and are willing to put in a lot of hours to do it.
Happy Trails!
I can see more employees working from home to save the company money.
Besides babysitting employees, there is really little reason for offices to exist anymore.
I am the ONLY person who need to be at the office in my company. I run a warehouse that distributes print products.
Everyone else is support staff or graphic designers who really do not need to be there. E-mail and teleconferences are how most of communicate anyway.
The Unions are going crazy over the idea of people making money they can’t steal.
If I have a kid I think is a jerk, I’ll fire him/her. What’s to discuss?
I have a friend who came up with “Bumper Nuts”. You know what they are if you’ve seen them. Her biggest challenges are wasps on her front porch.
I run a business from home. I came out of a big corporate environment, so at first I was concerned that customers and suppliers would look-down on me or expect to see a nice office, etc...
I have worked all over the world, and in fact, Americans are the most accepting and practical in this regard. Many of my customers still in the corporate world envied me, and many customers found passing business to me, at home or not, saved them money on new hires, training, benefits, etc...(its also why I believe existing companies will not drive employment in this economy - but I digress)
In the end, few seem to care if I work from home. Its the strength of one’s work and character the speak loudest.
I had home-based businesses that I ran and made lots of money with. I sold and rented expensive electronic equipment. But this was in the 80’s & 90’s and they would be harder to operate now.
Generally, I would say that unless you have an outbuilding or a fairly spread-out home, you’re not going to be able to have a family-type house + inventory + employees.
You can rent a storage space, hopefully nearby, for $75-$150 a month if you need additional space. It is a time killer to go back & forth and you prolly get a little scattered with the goods over here and the paper over there and no computer anything at the storage space...but OTOH with mobile ‘net access (which did not exist back then) it can be made to work. What’s nice is that you can add and subtract more spaces as you need and “unneed” them.
Employees, which I strongly, strongly recommend against, are very tough out of a home based business. Maybe 1 employee is OK, but multiple = forget it. Actual, real, workers comp insurance will kill you. Phenomenally expensive.
You must be very careful of your state’s & Fed employment laws wrt withholding and independent contractor considerations.
All the admonitions to “wall off” your personal assets from your business assets become rather more difficult to keep walled off when the two are jumbled together. And, once that line is smudged, it ceases to have legal effect. What I am saying is, it is not that expensive to incorporate. But it can be more than trivially expensive to maintain all the proper rituals of being incorporated at the specific times they all need to be done. And should you do so, all those corporate protections go away.
It’s very likely that you’ll find yourself working 16-18 hours daily, many days, and that is OK. Your task is to reduce that, if you wish to have a life. The challenge is to get good, focused, and efficient effort going during the day that accumulates towards your bottom line. If you have kids running around, you’re going to have a problem. Not to say that you can ignore your kids.
What I’m saying is that you have to create a *feasibility*, not an impossibility.
I think rather than expecting great things from home based businesses, there is going to be a trend toward “working for cash only.” No interference with government regulations and oppressive taxation, especially if the USA becomes bankrupt.
I’ve noticed a lot of mobile businesses that might otherwise be fixed-based, like pet groomers, sales of window screens and carpeting, auto mechanics, and one guy who had a mobile gym! Oh, and a few weeks ago I saw a beauty shop in a motor home.
“Does anyone here think that running a business from home is going to be the new way that businesses are run and how do you think this will affect hiring policies?”
Both my wife and I have our own small businesses that we run out of our home. She’s a CNA who takes care of the elderly and/or infirm in their own homes.
I’m an IT consultant and specialize in PC optimization for home and business users. I work from my home as well as make house calls.
Neither of us would ever consider hiring someone else due to tremendously burdensome regulations and costs. We don’t make a huge amount of money, but we make all we need; we enjoy what we do and it’s relatively hassle-free. In effect, we rely on ourselves to take care of ourselves based on our eduction, skills, experience, and providing top notch service to our clients at reasonable prices.
Being relatively self-sufficient, we are relatively insulated from the economic destruction of the U.S. by the Obammunists and their merry band of neo-Marxists. At this stage of the game, everyone still needs a working computer and with the aging of the population, there’s more work than my wife can handle.
Since I have the AutoCAD and PLC programming software at home, I do much of my “office work” at home. The business deals with control systems projects. No inventory involved, since hardware is supplied by manufacturer reps. Any control panel/cabinet fabrication is subcontracted out to panel shops that have UL approval. Of course I get the unsolicted counsel from the local busybodies that I have been suckered into some envelope stuffing or piecework assembly deal, but this is Minnesota.
If I have a design idea at some odd hour, I could at least tinker with it instead of forgetting it later. I also get the service call at Oh-Dark-Thirty, where I have to link into the control system remotely via internet and work with the technician on site before I have to travel there.
It’s a specialized business to business operation (refineries, pipelines, chem plants), so not much of the generic home based business advice applies, outside of legal incorporation, separate business accounts, etc. Much of the project administration practices are similar to the major engineering companies (Fluor, Jacobs, Kellogg Brown and Root, etc), except streamlined due to the low overhead. I’m part of a consortium that pools some resources, which even has a full safety manual much like the refineries - full OSHA compliance. Many of our project bids tend to be quite competitive, with well defined deliverables.
I seem to recall that Mao attempted to increase steel production by means of iron smelters in back yards. Didn’t work...
No, however with federal labor laws, tax laws, etc.. the “independent contractor” may be the future, especially in the workplace.
J.S.
I don’t know if it will be the future, but I have been working out of my home for eight years now and can confidently state the I am more productive in three hours at home than I would be in a workplace during eight hours.
With technology some situations will definitely allow home based businesses to thrive (talk about low overhead). The company I work for has its customers concentrated in Maryland and Virginia, but also in other areas of the country, and no state has more than one employee from our company, the CEO residing in Maine.
It’s been a blast (and my fuzzy office mates, Cadillac Jack and Capella appreciate it too).