As part of a bootstrapping exercise or a business start-up phase, working from home is a great way to work, so I thought of some points to consider when setting up your office, small business or personal business, like contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants at home:

1. Cost - you will save a lot of money and be very eco-friendly when you decide not to rent an office, this saving can be used in other areas of your business, like marketing, better web-site or better IT.
2. Family - I suspect that many of you work from home because of your family, it allows you to be around when your kids come home from school or look after relatives, while still earning a living.
3. Commuting - again a very eco-friendly approach and saves money and time. This time can be spend on real business activities. It certainly will enhance your work/life balance and make your small business or start-up more cost efficient form day one.
4. Freedom - this may especially appeal to you if you like to work at odd hours, it will suit your lifestyle. Dress as you like it, so you will be more comfortable.
5. Healthy - if you work in an office and one of you gets ill, soon all the others are down too - not if you work from home.
6. Teamwork - chances are you need to work with other people, use online technology to collaborate with your colleagues and other team workers - they too may work from home.
7. Domestic Life - you’ll be around when the plumber finally turns up or other trades people. You can enjoy your local life more - by having a social network in your village rather than at work - this could be the return of the local community.
8. Small Business Infrastructure - use online technology to keep your data and work safe at all times without that you have to do anything, build your own virtual Small Business Team to timeshare professionals like yourself. Outsource to make your business more professional and scalable.
9. Meetings - even bigger businesses use coffee shops to meet - they often have WiFi - so can you. Make sure you plan them well, so you can be efficient with your time.
10. Eco-Friendly - you will only heat your home, no other workplace needs to be heated or air-conditioned, your energy efficiency goes up, no travel to work - so you reduce your carbon footprint enormously just by working from home.

You will need some pretty good reasons to go to an office and work. Especially for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal business, you need to ask yourself if you can afford to miss out on all the above opportunities for your work and for your life?

I work from home over 90% of the time and only go to the office for meetings and I love every minute of this. I use social network communities like linkedIn to build my professional network, utilizing our online office, skype and other tools to communicate and work worldwide.

More and more of my friends work from home so we have nice “pub-lunches” locally, no traveling, less stress and a much better work/life balance - how is your work/life balance?

For more of my checklists see the Small Business Checklists category and as always please add to my list with your comments, tell us what works for you.

An enormous amount of personal and business information is available on the internet and in the hands of unscrupulous people it could do a lot of damage. Taking the seriousness of this matter into consideration the House of Lordsí science and technology committee published a proposal to protect people against cyber crime and hold start-up-, personal- and small business, and IT security vendors responsible.

The proposal focuses on protecting customers data and personal information. The Lords called for the setting up of an online e-crime reporting system that would include the creation of security breach notification laws and how they will be enforced.

McAfee and Datamonitor, the analyst firm, conducted a survey that included over 1400 businesses. 30% of the respondents said that a major security breach could be fatal for the business.

“We feel many of the organizations profiting from internet services now need to take their share of the responsibility. That includes the IT industry and the software vendors, the banks and internet traders, and the internet service providers,” said Lord Broers, chairman of the committee.

Small businesses, internet services, banks, software vendors and the IT industry need to start taking responsibility for e-crime and protect themselves and their customers against them. Small businesses need to consider outsourcing processes such as accounting that they aren’t comfortable handling. An online shop must take all the necessary precautions to protect its customers.

A On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure can dal with a lot of the security concern small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Personal businesses must have.

Whatever you are planning a personal business or a small business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer businesses, the time has never been better for starting a business. Many politicians will have you believe that the current up-rise in personal and small business activity is due to their policies, that is b*** s****, it is due to the greatest platform for entrepreneurial activity to date - the internet and related technologies.

Anyone between the ages of 13 (apparently) and 81 (?) can be a first time entrepreneur, and best of all - thanks to the technology available - it:

1. Does not need a lot of capital: bootstrapping and outsourcing techniques allow you to start your business on the side at less than what you spend on a meal out.
2. Only need very little business experience: we live in a time when business processes are rewritten, and much happens online, information, advice and tools are available for free, communities help you to build online networks and make starting easy.

So if you ever had a dream or goal in business, now is the time to start, some people make their hobby into a business, others their DIY skills and some even start social businesses for giving someone else a helping hand - the reasons and opportunities are truly limitless.

What business would you like to start today?

While most of us want to achieve professional success a majority of working people are now unwilling to do so at the cost of their family and health. Employees are preferring to turn to businesses that offer them flexible working conditions that allow them an opportunity to find a balance between work and home.

This is a strong equalizer when it comes to compete for the employees with big business. An interesting research study by Mitel indicates that small businesses are more open to adopting flexible working conditions not only for the employees but also for the business owners. Small businesses are willing to utilize the internet and IP telephony to allow remote working.

” ….. 72% of small businesses were willing to allow their workers to work from home as compared to the 44% of bigger businesses and corporations. …”

Small businesses are making use of online business infrastructure and using it effectively to focus only on core activities. Having an online office is an excellent way for employees and employers to keep in touch with the office and also with clients and customers. Since the internet can be accessed at any time it really doesnít matter where one is and can log on and make crucial business decisions.

Working styles are changing globally and on-demand small business infrastructure is paving the way, not to forget it is more eco-friendly too.

A Virtual Assistant can provide valuable assistance anywhere@anytime, in certain areas of your business activities where you can’t devote your time and energy.

There are numerous problems faced by small business in expanding their products or services, the hiring, cost and training of extra staff is one of them.

Having the presence of a Virtual Assistant is of advantage to your business as you get support and other services online. The major benefit of being associated with a Virtual Assistant is that you get professional and quality jobs, without having to employ a full time professional. To you it means savings on your HR expenditure, this helps to keep overheads low.

A Virtual Assistant can assist you in the area of his/her specialization, such as market research, credit control, public relations, marketing, payment follow-ups, designing, secretarial services, telephone answering and more.

This all comes back to my belief that small business does need a services infrastructure delivered over the internet, so that they can concentrate on developing the business, and do not have all their time taken up by admin tasks.

Update (04/06): Kathie Thomas introduces Virtual Assistants.

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