There's a great posted this morning on MSNBC: Make $6 million sitting on your couch - Recessions can be a great time to start your own business. While the story of the guy who makes $6 million a year from a huge pet-sitting network makes for a great headline, most of us will never see that kind of success. However, there were some great points in the article that I found interesting.
1. One of the best things about starting a home-based business is that they tend to be cheaper to start and run. Ben and I have done this in both of our most recent companies and can say without hesitation that it's true. For the first 6 months running our web development firm, we both worked out of our homes, getting together when we needed to and collaborating over IM, email and phone. Once we got big enough to hire employees, we got office space, business liability insurance, a water service, DSL, all that stuff. But, when we switched to focusing on Bootstrap, we gave up the office and spent the next 6 months working out of our homes again. And it wasn't until recently that we got office space (and employees) again.
2. It's comforting to know you're not alone, since more than half of the 27 million small businesses in the US are home-based. One of the biggest "concerns" with being home-based has been around the perception of size and professionalism. But now that so many companies are being run from homes, and with the state of technology where it is, that stigma is starting to go away. Case in point - our first bookkeeper ran her practice from her home (and we even had meetings there;) same thing with our PR firm.
Personally, I love hearing about people running successful, even if only moderately so, businesses from their homes. In times like these, many of us will end up working for ourselves out of necessity. So it's great to hear stories from others who have figured out how to make it work. These are exactly the kinds of folks for whom we designed and built Bootstrap.
Now if only Congress will simplify the rules on home office deductions...
Outright is secure.