The month of August is Small Business Month here in Victoria, and I wanted to share my top “practical” tips on running a home based business.
These tips are not linked to the tax impact of running your business from home (you should contact me if you want to know more about this), but rather the important things I have learned and implemented over the past few years of working from home.
Here is a list of 5 top tips for home based businesses:
- Secure your space – make sure you have a separate room to act as your office, keep it for business as much as is practical and ensure there is the ability to close the door so you can walk away from your business and back to your home at the end of the day
- Be online – these days every business needs an online presence but with the lack of a bricks and mortar shopfront, this is particularly important for home based businesses. More important is to be active online, it’s all about getting engagement
- Surround yourself with like minded people – when you work from home it is easy to become isolated, there’s no “tea room chatter” or people passing your desk all the time. Join a networking group or a discussion group and make sure there is someone in your network you can call on if you need to debrief (confidentially of course)
- Learn and improve – maintain a good appetite for learning and improving, maintaining your skills and keeping up to date with changes in your industry
- Take time away – when you work and live in the same building, it can be easy to always be on call, make an effort to close the door of your office (see point 1 above) and switch off for the day or night or weekend – your business will benefit from it and so will you
Do you have any other tips you’d like to share? Please do…
Regards
