Category: Operations

Many smaller companies are run from the home address of one of the business principals. Approximately six million companies in the United Kingdom are home-based. This can be a successful strategy, but other companies are more suited to having a dedicated office. Here we look at the pros and cons of running a business from home.

Reasons to run the business from home 

Time and Cost 

Perhaps the simplest idea of all. If your office is in your home, you don’t waste time getting to and from the office. Obviously if you have office premises, you will need to either buy, or more likely, rent them. The cost of commuting also seems to be increasing rapidly.

Be your own boss to a greater extent

If you rent an office, or operate from premises shared with other companies, you may need to comply with your landlord’s rules. You may have responsibilities, with your fellow tenants, for maintenance of communal areas such as kitchens and meeting rooms that eat into time which could be better spent building your business. Later we will look at how there may still be distractions when working from home, but there are certainly ways you can become sidetracked in an office. Your office might, for example, be on a business park, next to a noisy industrial site, or on a busy road. Even a noisy colleague can end up hampering productivity.

Allocate expenses to the business

Provided your home is your main place of business, you may be able to save money by allocating a portion of your council tax and utility bills as business expenses. 

Flexibility

Access to a home office at any time does have its advantages. Everything you need is accessible, whether there are some files that you urgently want to check or you want to work longer hours such as over the weekend. If your office is in your home that isn’t a problem, even if the urge hits you at 11pm.

Reasons to run the business from an office 

Professionalism

In certain business sectors, it is beneficial to ‘look’ professional. Operating from a recognised office could make this much easier to achieve and give off an impression of credibility.

Seeing clients

If you need to have regular meetings at your company premises with clients, suppliers or anyone else, it can pay to have proper office premises. Potential clients may be much more impressed if they turn up at a smart office complex rather than at your home address. Some may feel uncomfortable about coming to your home, and you may feel uncomfortable about letting them into your living space.

Availability of other facilities and services

In an office complex, a wide range of additional facilities and services may be available. For example, if you need the use of another room, or a meeting room, these are very likely to be available in your office building, and use of these may even be included in your rental payment. If you work from home and something is happening which requires use of a training room or similar, you would have to pay to hire somewhere for the day. A serviced office may also offer all manner of services, from postal and fax services to provision of lunches.

Maintenance

If something goes wrong in your home, you need to either fix it yourself or pay someone to sort it out. In an office, your landlord will probably undertake all necessary repairs as part of your contract, from technical wi-fi problems even down to fitting new lightbulbs.

Family life

It’s easy for a home office to impact on your family life; the temptation to spend a ‘quick’ five minutes checking emails can invariably lead to an hour-long session and cause upset with family members who are losing out on quality time. It’s often far more difficult to ‘switch off’.    

Employees

If you employ anyone, even if it is just one person, running the business from home becomes much more difficult. They may feel uncomfortable about working in your home and likewise, having your personal documents and living arrangements exposed could create awkwardness. For these reasons, many business owners operate from home if they are the only person involved in the company, but then move to an office when they grow sufficiently to take on their first employee.

Distractions at home

Distractions at home can be a major issue. Cold calls can be frequent, and you may feel compelled to answer all of your telephone calls just in case they turn out to be important. You may also find yourself doing household chores or watching daytime TV, almost without thinking, when you should be working. Another problem might be that friends and neighbours who know you are likely to be in all day try and use your home as a place to have their parcels delivered; not appreciating that you might actually be busy!

Other business services

Your company may well make use of other companies to provide services such as web design, printing, IT, marketing or accountancy. If you are in an office complex, you may find that there are a number of companies within the same building whose services you can use in these areas. You can thus establish genuine personal relationships with these companies more easily, and may be able to get hold of them much quicker – for example, if your computer fails, instead of ringing someone to come out and fix  it, you can perhaps just walk down the corridor to find your IT services provider.

Insurance 

Your home insurance policy may not cover business items, so check this out. If necessary you would need to buy additional insurance in order to work from home.

Mortgage restrictions

You may have been granted a mortgage on the basis that your home will only be used for residential purposes, or there may be historic covenants relating to the property prohibiting its use for commercial purposes.

New Webcomics series brought to you by #entrepreneurfail and GetEntrepreneurial.com. Enjoy!

Is your filing cabinet under your bed?

In New York City or any large metropolis worldwide, you’ll find entrepreneurs who have made a home office a reality. The city provides an alluring location, but the dollar per square foot is obscene. This is why many budding entrepreneurs choose to start in a home office. And in working from home, the magical line between the bed and the desk soon disappears – an #entrepreneurfail.

Some of the challenges we have faced working in a home office include:

1. Lack of camaraderie and employee banter
2. Difficult to be presentable for last minute meetings
3. No space to have office meetings
4. Cabin fever strikes all the time 

You can use your flexibility to your advantage if you don’t have a traditional office, though. Just remember, cubicle-dwellers across the world would gladly trade their cage to have your 15-second commute. It is just unfortunate that productivity can wane when your workspace is lonely and cluttered, which is a definite #entrepreneurfail.  To escape the monotony of your home office, you can go to coworking spaces and coffee shops. Here is a list of places with free wifi that may help you in your quest. Alternatively, you can be your own wifi provider, and carry a hotspot. We’ve also used libraries, parks, hotel lobbies and other public spaces to set up shop for the day.

Good luck finding a cordoned-off spot to optimize your output. And now, back to work!

Tell us about your quest to find the perfect spot to work. Let us know in the comments below. 

Fails are nothing but a laugh on the road to success. Find more entrepreneurship comics here.  This post is originally from #entrepreneurfail: Startup Success by Kriti Vichare.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get about marketing revolves around price. Setting prices for products and services takes a combination of science, psychology and intuition. Let’s walk through some of the most effective ways to determine price and create a checklist of what to test to find the best one.

Your Cost Plus Profit

Of course, business 101 tells us to cover our costs and earn a profit (or go out of business fast!). But once the basics have been covered, where do you go from there?

Check the Competition

Are there other products or services like yours? There almost certainly are. Search online and find 10-20 others and jot down their price points. Watch them over the course of 30 days to see if they offer discounts and, if so, how much.

Do you want to position your product/service alongside competitors? If so, matching their prices could be a good strategy. If you want to be seen as the least-expensive option, you’ll try and beat the others’ prices. And, conversely, if you want to position yourself as a luxury/premium option to the rest, you’ll start with a price point higher than the average product/service.

Useless Prices

If you have levels of products/services, there are several interesting pricing tactics you can test. The first is from “Predictably Irrational” author Daniel Ariel. (Awesome book, by the way!) Watch this short video.

Did you understand what he was saying? The “useless” price of $125 for only the print subscription was not really useless. While it was there, people jumped to the higher price point because they clearly saw the value of getting TWO subscriptions (print and web) for the same price as web-only.

Contextual Prices

Ariel offers some other strategies in his book as well.

Let’s say you have three sizes of popcorn at your movie theater (or three subscription models or three sizes of drink at a gas station). You can influence sales to purchase at the middle price point or the higher price point.

If the medium-sized popcorn bucket is the one you want people to choose, space the prices out equally among the three choices. By nature, most customers will select the middle option.

However, if you want people to buy the highest-priced subscription, leave a large gap between the lowest-cost option and the middle-priced option. Then price the other two very close together.

For instance, a small popcorn would be $3.50. A medium-sized bucket of popcorn would be $7.50 and a large would cost $8.00. The mindset here is that “for only 50 cents more” you can get a much larger portion of popcorn. The same is true for fountain drinks at gas stations. Small = $.99. Medium = $1.49. Large = $1.59. Which sells more? Almost always the large for “just 10 cents more.”

The Power of 9

You might be tempted to think that lower numbers would lead to even greater sales, but that’s not true.

Price Anchoring

Want to sell a $1,000 home entertainment center? Show it to customers AFTER you’ve introduced them to a $5,000 home entertainment center. Anchoring works because most of us have a tendency to compare everything else to the first prices we encounter.

The high $5,000 system makes everything else look like a real bargain. The point here is not to sell the $5,000 system, but to use it as an anchor that allows you to move more $1,000 systems.

Like most other marketing elements, choosing the right price point takes testing. Make some notes about how you could possibly use these strategies with your products/services. Then work your way through the options to see which brings the best results.

I’d love to hear what pricing tactics you use and the results you get.

Part of running an efficient and organized business is making full use of the technology and resources available to you. It’s great to set up systems and processes and have them work for you, but in order to fully automate your business you also need to know which technologies are going to work best to support you in that.

Over the years I have worked with many different automation tools (either in my own business or for my clients) that have helped to support an online solo business owner, and today I’d like to share my top five favorite ones with you. All of these tools I use in my own business today – and they’re a huge timesaver as well as creating a more streamlined and automated business for me.

1. 1ShoppingCart – this is my shopping cart, autoresponder, broadcast, and database management systems all rolled into ONE system. I especially like this service because everything is done in one place which really does make for a more streamlined business. It is possible to use one service for your shopping cart activities (i.e. product sales) and another service for your autoresponder/broadcast (i.e. sending out your newsletter) but the danger with this is that you are running two different databases and at some point it will become cumbersome and may even start to become unmanageable. An example I see a lot is using Aweber for list management, and then using Paypal to accept payments.

2. TimeTrade – this is probably my favorite find and is such a huge timesaver for me; I’m so grateful to one of my clients for putting me onto this service. It’s a system whereby you can get your clients to self-schedule their appointments with you, avoiding the back and forth of emails that happens when you’re trying to arrangement appointments and, of course, the time spent doing this.  You simply give your clients/colleagues the special link that’s generated by TimeTrade and they are able to see your availability (which you have pre-determined) and therefore schedule accordingly with you. It works with both Outlook and Google calendars.

3. BYOAudio – as well as using this service to record and host all my teleclass audios, I make full use of their Podcast feature. You can record your podcast episode directly into your podcast, and they will share and syndicate it with the top podcast directories – even iTunes – immediately it’s published! Those directories, in turn, come and get your podcast, index it, and make it available to their visitors. All this takes is about 10/15 minutes of my time to record my podcast episode and publish it to my podcast. Another great strategy for building my list that really takes no time at all to implement!

4. “Sharing” WordPress Posts – if you have a WordPress blog and post regularly, there is an option called “Sharing”. If you add your social medial profiles to this, any time you post a new blog post, it will automatically be posted to your social networks.

5. Instant Teleseminar – I love this service for running all of my workshops (both free & paid). Not only is it a teleconference line, but I am also able to show slides and create an interactive experience. The automation piece comes because, as soon as your training is over, your replay page is produced automatically!

The twenty-first century has seen the nature of taxi businesses change massively, with their purposes changing and evolving. Whereas taxis mainly used to be associated with picking old ladies up from the shops during the day, taxis are now used throughout the day and night, picking people up from the airport and helping drunk teenagers get home from nightclubs. The diversity of the market and the options available means that opening a taxi company is now a valid business opportunity. However, for it to truly succeed, you need to celebrate diversity. Here are some areas to consider:

The Nature of Your Drivers

Most customers say that if they feel uncomfortable in a taxi during a journey, they will never use the company again. By entering a taxi with a stranger, a customer is putting themselves in a potentially vulnerable situation. For this reason, you should be absolutely certain that your taxi drivers are aware of appropriate etiquette and political correctness before you employ them. As part of this, it is well worth drawing up a code of conduct and getting each driver to sign it before they start. This way, you should be able to guarantee a pleasant experience for your passengers.

The Safety of Your Taxis

Getting people from A to B as quickly as possible is an important part of the job and, the quicker the service, the more people you’ll be able to carry in the day. However, safety is your most important priority for the day as a safe experience for your passengers will result in a professional image that encourages repeat custom. If a passenger feels unsafe, it is unlikely that they’ll return.

Accessibility of Your Taxis

Finally, you’ll need to consider the accessibility of your taxis. Small city cars are great for fuel economy, but they are unable to carry a large number of people. Likewise, large vehicles are great for if you’re bringing a group of people home from a night out, but aren’t very practical during the day. Due to this, it is wise for you to have a mix of vehicles that cater for all times and situations. As a part of this, you have to consider other factors such as disabled access. Proper disabled taxis are a rather niche corner of the market, but it is a sector of the market that is well worth investing in. Purchasing one from somewhere like Allied Mobility once more shows your professionalism and allows you to cater for every possible need.