Ideas & Opportunities

The key to making a home-based business work is to differentiate your work and home area. That way, there’s a line between your professional and personal life. And while a separate home-office would be ideal, many don’t have the luxury of space and money.

Working from home allows you to spend more time with family as you eliminate travel from home to office.  It also gives you greater flexibility to switch between work and play. However, the freedom you get is an excuse to become lazy, unprofessional and irresponsible with your time.  

Creating a space dedicated for your business sets the mood to get you working. A home office can also double as a place to set meetings and welcome clients. The office keeps your documents organized in one place and it is a place where family members are “off-limits” because they know once you step in your home office you enter a “do- not-disturb-mode.”

De-Clutter
Creating the physical space for your business at home means making room for new space. To create space, you need to de-clutter. Sort personal items from office supplies. Personal articles can be kept but stack them away in another room.

Discard what you don’t need or give them to people who may find them useful.  For the sentimental, this may be a lot to handle but says Chef Myke Sarthou a.k.a. Chef Tatung who manages a home-based restaurant business, “You just have to let go of some things.” He adds, “If you don’t want to let go you will not be able to create that flow to get your business going.”  

Choose in terms of function. Chef Tatung owned a lot of household appliances that he later replaced with those that could handle the requirements of his business. Household appliances “don’t function well enough anymore to handle the volume. We simply replaced them,” he says.

Convert Rooms
Convert an existing room or build a new one to accommodate your business. Depending on the type of business, you will need a room or two. Rica Dalmacion, owner of Art & Soul, a stationery and novelty craft business, uses part of the dining area to stack inventory. Other business functions such as printing are outsourced. “My workstation is basically my laptop which I can carry around the house,” she says.  

Chef Tatung converted his living room into a dining area for guests and dedicated another room for his home office. What used to be the pastry area is now his workstation, which includes a phone line, a desktop computer, a table, and shelves to keep files. He says having an office is very important because, “Sometimes you are too caught up in the operations—you miss the bigger picture for the details. Remember you also have the administrative side of the business.”

Budget
Do you want your office to look first-class, business or economy? Depending on the ambiance you want to create, prepare to spend anywhere from P20,000 to P200,000. “P200,000 is enough to cover renovation cost including installation of new cabinets and purchase of additional furniture and fixtures,” says Architect Felino Palafox Jr.    

Chef Tatung bought additional tables and chairs and carried out minor repairs, which added up to P50,000 spread over several months. “We did most of the renovations ourselves to save on cost. For example, we did the paintings of the walls,” he says.  

Get Consent
Involve all family members in discussions about setting up a home-based business. Everyone must agree to the set-up because their lives will be altered somehow by the changes. “Set the objectives and be very clear with how things would go. It will make things easier, rather than having one person wanting something that the others don’t want,” says Tatung, who shares his house with a cousin and a nephew.  

Match People with Space
Limit the number of employees to the amount of space available. As a rule of thumb, “The number of employees should not be more than the number of people living at home,” says Arch. Palafox.

• Twitter your way to marketing success
• Freelancers united
• Free entrepreneurship classes for May
• Startup event offers opportunities to Visayas-based entrepreneurs
• 7 most common challenges of Pinoy biz

• Hot home-based business ideas
• 10 Most Inspiring Entrepreneurial Stories of 2010
• Making money while staying at home
• 10 businesses you can start today
• 10 business ideas for Christmas

Name

E-Mail

URL

Comment

Email this article to a friend.

friend's email
your name
your email