How To Build A Successful Business From Home

Home businesses have been an extremely popular topic since 2009-2010. Everyone wants to have the luxury of staying at home, spending more time with their families and making money without ever leaving their house.

While this is a dream for most, it’s something that can become a reality with a bit of effort. When I started my first official business, I was 17 years old and still a senior in high school.

Most of my friends never knew anything about this business and I ran it solely from the comfort of my home. After 2 years of running the business, I had grown the company at its peak to a little over 15 employees and our biggest client was a Fortune 500 company.

I was able to do all this without ever leaving my house at the age of 17. If you’re wondering where/how I had employees, I had an office (that I had never visited) in another country that I set up as my back-office to deliver my services.

In this blog article, I’m going to share my tips and tricks on how to build a successful business from home:

Think Technology

While it’s not impossible to create a non-technology driven business from home, it’s extremely difficult. The beauty of technology and the internet is that you can operate your business with people from all around the world sitting anywhere.

If you want to create a business that you can operate from your house, find ways to leverage technology to do so. For my first business, I had virtual assistants and a system that allowed me to get clients who needed websites all through the internet.

I spent the first year of my business completely at home closing customers/deals through Skype and the telephone. I had a great way of generating leads (all online based) and my production was done through outsourcing which allowed me to literally use technology for every step of the way.

Regardless of what your business is, there’s always a way to leverage technology to assist you with streamlining it into a home business. The internet is a great resource and you should use it to your advantage.

Dedicate Space

When I ran my business from home, my bedroom was really my universe. I literally spent about 12-15 hours a day there. I only came out for food and sunlight, nothing else.

If you want to be successful in creating your home business, you need to create boundaries. Work and play cannot overlap for you to be successful. Find a space or bedroom in your house that you can dedicate to your office space. Treat it like you would an office.

The great part about your home-office is that you’re just a few steps away from your kitchen or family. While that’s a great luxury to have, you don’t want to abuse it by mixing your home-life with your work-life.

Look Like You Don’t Work From Home

If my clients had known that my whole operation was from my bedroom, I probably would have never closed any customers. Thankfully, I did a great job of covering it up because I made sure that my business looked professional.

Here are a list of things you want to do professionally so that people won’t know where you’re working from:

– Do NOT use your home address for work. With Google Maps, you can find out what your office looks like in seconds. Buy a P.O. box or ask a friend if you can use their office address on your website/business cards.

– Get a professional website and domain name. If you’re running a business from home, you need to use some form of technology. You need to make the most out of your online presence by doing everything with high quality.

– There is nothing worst than your kids answering the office line. Separate your home and office lines. You can use tools like Google Voice or add a cellphone to your monthly contract for about $50/month.

– Use more than one email address for correspondence. I made my business look bigger than it was by creating fake aliases (email addresses with different names) that I used for client correspondence. I had one email address for handling billing, one for support, one for project management, and one for sales. Even though one person handled everything, it looked like there were 5-6 different people in the company.

These simple tricks above will help your home business look like a legitimate operation. You want to make sure that you working from home doesn’t change the professionalism of your business in any way.

Start Small, Scale Slowly

It would be amazing to work from home every single day of the year, but it’s very hard to make that actually happen. I was lucky enough to be able to achieve that since I planned my business around starting from home.

However, if you have an actual business that you’re trying to transform into a home-business, it may take some time to do so. Instead of trying to work every single day from home, try to create a schedule that gradually leads to that.

I would suggest working 2 days of the week from home for a few months and slowly working more from home as you maintain control and stability of the business.

Automate

In order to really successfully run a home business, you need to find ways to automate everything. Virtual assistants and other resources online can help you achieve automation for your business. You may also consider technology for automaton for all aspects of your business, this may include a software like Workday payroll solutions and other HR solutions.

Running a home business is tough and that’s why you should focus on the most important tasks surrounding your business. Things like data entry, customer support and other lower-level business activities can be automated.

Whether you use technology to automate it or you decide to get virtual help, it’s a great idea to focus your time on the things that will bring you the biggest ROI.

Conclusion

Creating a home business is not easy, otherwise everyone would be doing it. It takes a lot of intelligence, effort and dedication if you wish to successfully build your business from home. In this article, I shared my tips on how to build a successful business from home.

photo credit: mccun934 via photopin cc