What Color Is Your Parachute? (32 page)

Sure, you’ve thought about it, a million times. Hasn’t everyone? Every time you’re tied up in traffic going to or from work. You’ve toyed with the idea of not having to go to an office or other place of business, but of running your own business, maybe even out of your own home, making your own product or selling your own services, being your own boss, and keeping all the profits for yourself. It’s called
self-employment
, or being
an independent contractor
, or
freelancing,
or
contracting out your services
. Great idea!
But
, nothing’s ever come of all this daydreaming. Until now. Now, you’re out of work, and you can’t find a job anywhere, and you’re thinking to yourself:
Maybe it’s now, or never. Maybe I ought to just
do
it.

1. The first major problem of home businesses, according to experts, is that on average home-based workers (
   in the U.S. at least
   ) only earn 70 percent of what their full-time office-based equals do. So, you must think carefully whether you could make enough money to survive—never mind
   prosper.
   

2. The second major problem of home businesses is that it’s often difficult to maintain the balance between business and family time. Sometimes the
   family
   time gets shortchanged, while in other cases the demands of family (particularly with small children) may become so interruptive, that the
   business
   gets shortchanged. So, do investigate thoroughly, ahead of time,
   how
   you would go about doing this
   well
   .
   

3. Last, a home business puts you into a perpetual job-hunt.
   

Some of us when we are unemployed soon learn that we
hate
job-hunting. We are attracted to the idea of a home business because this seems like an ideal way to cut short our job-hunt. The irony is, that a home business makes you in a very real sense a
perpetual
job-hunter—because you have to be
always
seeking new clients or customers—which is to say, new
employers
. (Well, they are
employers
, because they
pay
you for the work you are doing. The only difference between this and a full-time job is that here
the contract is limited.
But if you are running your own business, you will have to
continually
beat the bushes for new clients or customers.)

Of course, the dream of most budding home business people is that you will become so well known, and so in demand, that clients or customers will be literally beating down your doors, and you will be able to stop this endless job-hunt. But that only happens to a relative minority, sorry to report.

The greater likelihood is that you will
always
have to beat the bushes for employers/clients. It may get easier as you get better at it, or it may get harder, if economic conditions continue the present severe downturn. But you must learn to make your peace with it—however grudgingly.

Otherwise, you’re probably going to find
a home business
is just a glamorous synonym for
“starving.”
I know
many
home business people to whom this has happened, and it happened precisely because they couldn’t stomach going out to beat the bushes for clients or customers. If that’s true for you, you should plan to start out by
hiring
somebody part-time, who is willing to do this for you—one who, in fact, “eats it up.”

Okay, let us say the
idea
of being self-employed intrigues the life out of you, but you can’t figure out what kind of business to start.

There are fortunately seven steps you can take to nail this down.

First, read.
There are oodles of books out there that are filled with ideas for home businesses. Browse in your local independent bookstore or Barnes & Noble.

The best books on home businesses are written by Paul Edwards and Sarah Edwards. Their most recent one (2008) is called
Middle-Class Lifeboat: Careers and Life Choices for Navigating a Changing Economy.
Earlier works include (2004)
Best Home Businesses for People 50+
and (2001)
The Best Home Businesses for the Twenty-First Century.
For other titles, browse the business shelves in your local bookstore.

Second, dream.
When looking for ideas, the thing you ought to look at are your dreams. What have you always dreamed about doing? Since childhood? Since last week? Now is the time to dust off those dreams.

You may have been dreaming of earning
more
money. But then again, you may have been dreaming of doing work that you really love, even if it means a lesser salary or income than you have been accustomed to. Don’t
judge
your dreams, and don’t let anyone else judge them either.

Third, look around your own community,
and ask yourself what services or products people seem to need the most. Or what service or product already offered in the community could stand a lot of
improving?
There may be something there that
grabs
you.

The underlying theme for 90 percent of the businesses that are
out there
these days is
things that save time or money.
It’s what the 140,000,000 who still have jobs in the U.S. most want.

Such ideas as: Daytime or evening office cleaning services and/or home cleaning services. Home repairs, especially in the evening or on weekends, of TVs, computers, smartphones, audio systems, laundries, dishwashers. Lawn care. Care for the elderly in their own homes. Childcare in their own homes. Pickup and delivery of things (even personal stuff, like cleaning) to their office. Automobile care or repair services, with pickup and delivery. Offering short-term business consultancy in various fields.

Fourth, consider mail order.
If you find no needs within your own community, you may want to broaden your search, to ask what is needed in this country—or the world. After all, with the Internet at Web 2.0, and even 3.0, businesses can be started
small
at home, and catalogs can can be displayed online, for all the world to see. There is also eBay, Etsy, and other marketplace sites, as your platform
.
If this interests you, read up on the subject. Browse the business shelves at your local bookstores.

Fifth, consider telecommuting.
Telecommuting is “working at home for others.” The people who do this are called
“telecommuters”—
a term coined by Jack Nilles in 1973. To learn more about telecommuting, a good place to start is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommuting
.

One way to go about easing yourself into telecommuting, if you already have a job, is to talk your boss into letting you do at least
some
of your work at home. You can find plans for how you “sell” your employer on the idea, at such sites as:
www.workoptions.com
.

Your boss, of course, may take the initiative here, before it has even occurred to you, and they may
ask
you to work at home, connected to the office by computer-network telephone lines.

If you are thinking about becoming a telecommuter, I advise you to investigate the idea thoroughly. You can find more telecommuting information, including a database of work-at-home jobs, at:
www.careersfromhome.com
.

Another similar site with job listings is at
www.tjobs.com
, and you can find
an association for telecommuters
, TelCoa (The Telework Coalition) with conferences and everything, at:
www.telcoa.org
.

Sixth, consider a franchise.
I’m not sure how good an idea this is, in the present brutal economy. But I list this option for the sake of completeness.

Franchises exist because some people want to have their own business, but don’t want to go through the agony of starting it up. They want to
buy in
on an already established business, and they have the money in their savings with which to do that. Fortunately for them, there are a lot of such franchises. You want to keep in mind that some
types
of franchises have a failure rate
far
greater than others. The ten
riskiest
small businesses, according to experts, are local laundries and dry cleaners, used car dealerships (not to mention new car dealerships, since both Chrysler and General Motors slimmed way down), gas stations, local trucking firms, restaurants, infant clothing stores, bakeries, machine shops, grocery or meat stores, and car washes—though I’m sure there will be some new nominees for this list, by the time you read this.
Risky
doesn’t mean you can’t make them succeed. It only means the odds for failure are greater than you will like.