Amir Hassan's Key Ideas from Starting a Business From Home
by Colin Barrow

There are lots of things that money can buy but time isn't one of them. However close your business premises are, you could spend at least four hours a day travelling to and from them. I'm sure if your shop, restaurant or office is only a couple of miles away you won't believe that proposition. How on earth could it be possible to take an hour to travel just one mile? There is an immutable law that says the closer your home is to your business premises the more often you travel between the two. Whatever the distance, the average weekly travel time is about the same.

Working from home also helps with all the other factors that use up your time. If a family member is ill and needs your attention you can work and look after the ill person too - no need to run back and forth or get into work late, as you are on the spot anyway. The same applies to having to put in extra hours to meet a work deadline. You can take an hour out to have dinner with your family and then get back to work afterwards.

Commuting to work on a daily basis is stressful. Few of us are fortunate enough to live in a car-free area or where parking is never a problem. Even if you could find such a paradise the chances are it would be useless as a business proposition. Depopulated areas are equally devoid of customers, suppliers and people to employ. Even if you are the boss you have to get into your premises before anyone else and leave after them to lock up. Often this is a bonus, as with a bit of careful planning you can miss the worst of the traffic. But whatever the benefits this can make for a very long day.

Juggling the factors that make for a satisfactory home-work balance is another source of stress that homeworkers are less prone to suffer. After all, you have everything in one place and can deal with problems as they occur. The opportunity to shift between business-related tasks and working on housework provides exactly the sort of variety that minimises the chances of getting bored. Also you can work at what you feel best able to do when the conditions are right. Gardening will be more fun on a sunny morning than at dusk in the rain after a fraught drive home

Less Stress + More Time = Improved Productivity

This is an equation that works for any business, but works best for a home-based one. If follows that if you can find a couple of extra hours a day and spend them working at something you really feel good about doing you will get more done each day. The more valuable work you do the more productive you are and hence the more income you can generate.

If you can make £20 an hour in your business the every extra hour you work is to your advantage. Spend the four hours you might have spent travelling at productive work and you have an extra £80 a day. Do that five days a week for 48 weeks and you have an extra £19,200 of productive output. That makes a home-based business around a fifth more productive than the average business is in its early years.

Many small businesses see their primary initial competitive advantage as being able to sell at a lower price than bigger established competitors. In fact, as most owner-managers have little or no idea what their true costs will be or how much they will sell, that proposition is almost always fallacious. They sell cheap and lose money more often than not. Then they struggle hard to get their prices up, losing dozens of expensively won customers on the way.

Most home-based businesses have a winning formula:

Improved Productivity + Lower Costs = Potential to Sell Cheap & Make Money

This argument is a powerful one and it goes like this. The home-based business hasn't had to spend large sums of money on premises and rent at the outset, so those costs don't have to be recovered from every sale. Also, being more productive the home-based business gets more done and so has more to sell. Therefore with more output to sell and less costs to recover, anyone running a business from home can undercut any premises-based business and still make more profit.