Home offices have changed a lot in the last 25 years.
Coralee Kern, president and founder of Maid-to-Order Inc., has seen those changes first-hand.
“I went through some old pictures recently,” she said. “Those of the early office were fascinating. We had a calculator and an IBM electric typewriter.” Now, the office has a personal computer and a fax machine, plus there’s voice mail, which tracks peoples’ time, and an answering service.
But the biggest changes have been cultural, such as the reaction of businesspeople to the fact that Kern runs her business from her home (first in Oak Park, now in Lincoln Park).
“When we first started, we lied about where we are. We knew we’d be treated as an illegitimate child. Now we send out press releases that say we work at home, and have it on our stationery. It’s a status symbol to work at home,” she said of her cleaning service.
Today, the work-at-home market is huge, said Abhijeet Rane, a senior analyst for Link Resources Inc. in New York City. “We had about 20 percent of all U.S. households qualifying as work-at-home households in 1988. Now it’s up to 37 percent.” And approximately 44 million people in the U.S. work at home at least part time, he added.
“The trend is growing rapidly,” Rane said, predicting that the rate of growth won’t level off for several years-by that time more than half of all the homes in the U.S. will have a home worker.
This growth is partly because the trend is no longer restricted to the service industries. “Any job that involves the use of information, and doesn’t require a person to be at a particular place,” could be done at home, Rane said. “Even in a manufacturing business there are marketing and sales people who are telecommuters.”
Technology has made telecommuting a mass phenomenon, Kern and Rane agree. The typical home office has a PC with a modem, printer, fax machine, two phone lines and an answering machine.
The equipment often is acquired gradually, as the business grows, and there are differences, depending on the job and a worker’s preferences. Some replace the answering machine with voice mail or an answering service, or add a cordless or cellular phone. Some have color printers or plotters, so they can produce ads or diagrams. Others use a laptop PC or “dockable” units (a laptop that plugs into a special connector and becomes a desktop workstation) so they can bring the office with them on the road.
Barbara Talisman, a North Side-based consultant for non-profit groups, has three phone lines, a cellular phone and a fax machine in her office.
Talisman uses home-based employees and contractors to keep her costs down, as do other home-based entrepreneurs. “I have a quality service at an affordable price” that way, she said.
She added that 6-year-old Talisman Associates Inc. is doing well enough that she’s considering hiring a full-time assistant and taking some time off to start a family.
Talisman offered some tips that helped her:
– Voice mail is very helpful and she often uses three-way calling.
– Always make sure that files, books, and reference materials are within easy reach-that’s a lesson that came with growth, she noted. Her business started in 150 square feet and now has nearly three times that amount.
– If you need to move, keep in mind your office’s needs-current and the possibility of expansion-when looking at a house, condominium or apartment.
Tips like Talisman’s are collected for Svoboda’s Home & Small Business Reporter, which is published in the home office of Al Svoboda and Jill Cleary-Svoboda. He’s the publisher; she’s the editor. They publish the magazine in a sunroom at the front of their Far North Side apartment.
“The Magazine for the Independent Business Professional,” as the masthead says, circulates about 21,000 copies monthly, predominantly on the North Side and in the north suburbs. The publication, which is free, can be found in such places as office-supply stores, banks and libraries; there also are some street boxes. Each issue is tabloid-size and printed on newsprint, with about 32 pages.
The Svobodas’ home-based business started three years ago as a marketing-communications company, American Business Communications Inc. Cleary-Svoboda credits Robert Reed, editor of Crain’s Small Business, with inadvertently launching their new venture in mid-1993.
“We went to an American Marketing Association dinner meeting,” where Reed was the guest speaker, she recalled. “Someone asked what he was doing for home businesses, and he said nothing.”
That rang bells in Svoboda’s head.
Svoboda calls the Chicago area a prime location for a home-based business. “No (place) has more part-time businesspeople,” he said, citing a recent Link Resources study. “We have that kind of drive.”
The Chicago area also has great resources for home-based businesses, he added. In addition to college courses, the federal small-business development centers and small-business administration offices, there are hundreds of consultants, loan specialists and opportunities to network (such as the Evanston Chamber of Commerce’s Home Based Business Network.) Many home-based businesses advertise in the Svobodas’ magazine.
For anyone interested in starting a home-based business, the Svobodas have this advice:
– “Have your technology in place,” along with your business plan and a source of income for your startup, before opening the doors, Cleary-Svoboda urged.
The Svobodas’ office features MS-DOS-based Compaq computers, for writing and bookkeeping, and an Apple Macintosh Quadra 610 for page layout. “All the technology makes things feasible that weren’t possible even 10 years ago,” she noted.
– Your commitment is just as important as your technology, Svoboda said.
“Everyone loves a new baby, but you have to go through toddlerhood and adolescence, too,” he said. “Think to yourself, `Suppose this doesn’t make it? Would I get into another business?’ If the answer is `yes’-go. If the answer is `no’-maybe spend your money in different ways.”
Nationally, the home-office market is big enough to have trade shows, like PC Expo Home in New York City; glossy magazines, like Scholastic Inc.’s Home Office Computing; and many trade groups, like the Home Office Association of America in New York City and the National Home Office Association in Washington.
Like many home-based businesses, the trade associations compete fiercely. The Home Office Association of America offers discounts on phone service and insurance, chairman Richard Ekstract said. The National Home Office Association promises to represent the industry in Washington, according to president Brian Cassedy.
Michael McAuliffe, publisher of the SoHo Journal in New York City, which follows the home-based business market, has been working at home for 15 years. He believes it is discipline, not technology, that makes the big difference between success and failure.
“You can absolutely waste tons of time on personal phone calls during business hours, because people figure you’re at home and they can chat. You have to enforce phone discipline,” he said.
“It’s also important to make your office room separate,” not just for tax purposes but for discipline, he added.
And keep a tight rein on the budget-it’s very easy to overspend on things like cellular phones and on-line services.
Reaching this home-based business market has become a top priority of many businesses, Rane of Link Resources noted. “In terms of distributing products, the best way to reach them is through a mass-market retail channel-Sears Brand Central, CompUSA, Office Max.”
But the rise in home-based technology buying power has led many companies to try new means of distribution.
International Business Machines Corp., for example, is selling CD-ROMs with software that can be tested free, then loaded after purchase.
It’s called the Right At Home series, said Mike Kayosaki, director of worldwide marketing for IBM software manufacturing solutions in Somers, N.Y. The narrow focus of the program-all the software is geared to home offices-should make it a winner, Kayosaki said.
“More and more people are working at home,” and those with their own businesses don’t have to buy the standard tools telecommuters get from their employers. “This is one of the focus markets we’re going after.”
To reach the home-based worker, IBM also is planning to sell software on the Internet and through kiosks, Kayosaki said, and is also testing delivery of software with DirecTv, a direct-broadcast satellite.
Still, communicating with the home-based market is difficult, Rane noted. “When we ask these people how they get their information, it’s primarily word of mouth. That means the vendor must build a good brand image, so it can be translated into a sale.”
As a result, on-line services are also popular paths to reaching the market, Rane said.
On CompuServe, the nation’s largest consumer on-line service, one of the most popular hangouts is the Work At Home Forum, reached by typing “go work” at any prompt.
The forum managers are Paul and Sarah Edwards, who have worked together-at-home-in Santa Monica, Calif., since 1974.
The Edwards are considered the nation’s best-known work-at-home experts, mainly because they saw that expertise as a niche and established themselves as authorities long before working at home was cool.
Paul Edwards said Talisman, with her use of home-based employees and contractors, is on the front-end of a major new trend-the virtual company, which consists of multiple home offices linked together informally.
“The `virtual corporation’ is the most active section on our forum-600-800 messages a week,” from about 50,000 active forum members, he said.
While the couple still gets computer questions about working from home-“things about faxes and modems and copiers and printers”-the psychological questions intrigue him the most.
“Most people who are successfully self-employed had parents who were self-employed,” he said. “Today’s Baby Boomers had parents who worked for companies. With that comes a different psychological makeup, different from what the self-employed have.”
While many of the Edwards’ current books on how to work at home and succeed (such as “Working from Home,” which deals with the issues of running a home office; “Best Home Businesses for the ’90s;” and “Making Money With Your Computer at Home”) remain in print, Edwards noted that “the first problem remains, `What do I do?’ “
To answer that, the Edwardses are writing what he calls a “self-employed version of `What Color is Your Parachute,’ ” the perennial best-seller by Richard N. Bolles on finding a new job.
The book will be “for people who are lost with the possibilities, people who don’t have the self-esteem, people who get caught in analysis paralysis,” he said.
The work-at-home movement is here to stay, Edwards said.
“Whether it’s public officials looking at limited government resources” for roads and sewers, “or commuters fighting the traffic, or employers saying you get two choices, overtime or part-time-you (often) can’t get a full-time job anymore,” he noted. “It’s a fact of life.”
The best choice then, he said, is to build a life.
Starting from home.
If you’re lucky, Edwards added, it might be a life like Coralee Kern’s with Maid-to-Order.
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Dana Blankenhorn is on-line editor for Interactive Age. Use 76200,3025 to reach him at CompuServe.
