How many times have you heard that phrase, pitch, advertisement, or
whatever? Lots, I'm sure. It is used so much because marketers know that
staying home and making money is the fondest dream of millions of people.
And why not? Did you know that the majority of fatal heart attacks happen
at 9 a.m. Monday morning? It's true. It seems a lot of people would
rather die than get back to the old grind after a weekend of freedom.
So when someone offers an opportunity or plan for you to take your job and
shove it, yet still make enough money to live and pay all your bills, it
sounds blissfully irresistible.
Of course, bliss and reality are always two different things. Is it
really possible to run a business from your own home that is more than a
hobby or source of part-time income? Can you get rich working out of your
own home? Can you really trade your cubical and necktie for blue jeans and
the comfort of your own den?
Well, for your information, home-based businesses are one of the fastest
growing kinds of enterprises in America today. As this is being written,
some 40 million Americans are doing at least some form of work out of their
homes, and the numbers are rising rapidly. According to the U.S.
Department of Labor, as many as 70 million people will be working out of
their homes by the year 2005. Government studies have indicated that as
much as 75% of all work done in this country could eventually be moved
home.
The overwhelming majority of home workers, however, are not exactly getting
rich. The average work-at-home American earns less than $15,000 per year.
That may not be bad as a supplement to a spouse's full-time income, but
let's face it, fifteen grand in and of itself is not much better than
poverty.
As master marketer and author Dr. Jeffrey Lant said: "Frankly, I never saw
any benefit to staying home and being poor."
Lant, without so much as a business card, became a work-at-home
millionaire, and is a perfect example of what truly can be achieved if you
are serious about chucking your day job, staying home, and not settling for
peanuts in exchange for your freedom. You can have it all -- you can stay
home and make as much -- and more -- money than your current job provides
you.
In this report, we are going to outline and discuss five key rules on how
to work at home and make big bucks, no matter where you live. After these
five rules, we'll talk about the most important aspect of any business,
whether it be home-based or a giant factory -- cash flow. Starting your
own business out of your home is all about attitude and inspiration, but
all the attitude in the world won't help you without money!
1. It Takes Commitment
Is it any secret in America that most people detest their jobs? Study
after study proves that most people simply dread going to work Monday
morning, and they live for the freedom of the weekend. But even that
freedom is not pure because we know that it is only temporary. It's hard
to enjoy a Sunday evening when the Monday morning alarm clock is just a few
hours away.
It makes sense that people hate their jobs. Everyday, there is a lot of
butt kissing that needs to be done. There are endless meetings which
usually accomplish nothing. There are pointless interruptions, a lot of
drifting this way and that, and lot of idiot supervisors who do nothing but
waste your time and then dog you for not accomplishing your share of work.
There are co-workers you hate, and who would stab you in the back in a
minute if it meant a raise for them instead of you.
When you work for someone else, you live a regimented life. Your body may
not want to get up at 7 a.m., but you have to be at work by 8 a.m. so you
lurch out of bed with a head full of sleep.
People who choose to work at home are doing more than just escaping the
yoke of their master; they have made a deep, firm, life-altering decision
which says that health, happiness and prosperity depend vitally on the
freedom to work for ourselves, and in doing so in the comfort of the home.
We want to really emphasize that fact that to be successful in a
work-at-home situation, you have to be nothing less than a fanatic; a
zealot, who is utterly committed to making work-at-home not only a
successful venture, but a profound commitment for life. You must be
convinced that a return to an outside office job would be the equivalent of
a spiritual death sentence.
Many people hate their office jobs, but they have made an inner compromise
with themselves. They have convinced themselves that their job is "not so
bad," pays the bills, and that they can stick out because they have to.
If you want to be truly successful at quitting your day job, there cannot
be any room for such compromises in your soul. You have to take the
attitude that to work any longer at your hateful job is akin to fouling
your inner being with a spiritual cancer the will sicken and kill you.
2. Eliminating the Home-Office Mentality
To move our work home, however, does not mean we eliminate every single
thing about the traditional American office. Rather, we should select what
is useful and what is not.
It's a mistake to quit your job and go home with a "home-office" mentality.
By this we mean thinking small, and believing that you will automatically
sacrifice a decent income in exchange for your freedom. Please! Do not
think small!
To quote Jeffrey Lant again: "Too many home-based practitioners fail to
understand the benefits that accrue because of the professional style they
have selected. They focus on the "home" part of the business rather than
the "business" portion, and as a result are doomed to small incomes."
Working at home provides many benefits. We can save a lot of time because
we don't need to commute and we have more control over our schedule. We
can save a lot of costs because we don't have the overhead requirements of
larger businesses. We can cut our stress -- and so have more energy --
because we avoid many of the characteristic problems of life in the late
20th-Century office. We must work these advantages to our profit.
3. Your International Headquarters
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that if you sit at home alone at
your empty kitchen table, eventually, the "whole world will come to you."
Well, today you don't need the great mind of a philosopher to make the
entire world come into your living room. What you need is a phone jack.
We live in a unique time in history. Satellites, fiber optics, the
integrated circuit and other communications miracles means that you can be
just about anywhere in the developed world and establish communication with
anyone.
The telephone, the fax machine, the computer, the modem -- all of these are
not only affordable by any middle-class citizen; they are the key to
eliminating your need to drive a hectic freeway everyday to get to a place
of business outside your home.
With these devices at our disposal, we should allow ourselves to "think
globally." Too often, home-based businesses focus on the narrowest market,
the neighborhood, the county, the city or state. This is fine if you are
providing a local service and are content with a certain moderate level of
income. But if you want the big bucks, you should not think small. Also,
you should not believe that, just because you are home-based, you cannot
compete with the big guys.
The purpose of any business is to seek assess and seek out every possible
market for its products and services, to ascertain whether these markets
have the ability to buy these products/services, to determine whether there
is sufficient profit in these markets to warrant approaching them, and,
once positive assessment has been made, to launch a sustained marketing
campaign that gets a significant percentage of this market to purchase the
product or service in question.
Your home telecommunications machines will not only enable you to do this,
but they can also help you overwhelm larger, more cumbersome traditional
businesses that are your competition.
As a home-based entrepreneur, you will not have all of the disadvantages of
your more traditional competitors: no office rent, equipment or expense;
no employees to pay salaries and fringe benefits for; no time wasted on
meetings, employee problems, paid sick leave, etc.
All the money your competitors spend on heating the office and buying
furniture could better be spent on the actual marketing itself.
As a home-based business, you will be already positioned where the
traditional business is currently struggling to move: toward the lowest
possible overhead and the greatest possible concentration of dollars on
products/service development and product/service marketing.
So, a home-based business takes full advantage of three major goals of
modern business success:
(1) Vastly reduced overhead
(2) Easy access to a global market
(3) Full advantage of telecommunications.
To not have the basic telecommunications toys -- computer, modem, fax, and
telephones is impossibly stupid. Still, even in this day and age, many of
people strongly resist the one element that is undoubtedly the heart and
brain of any successful home business -- the computer. The computer is so
important in fact, we have made it a category all itself.
And remember, learning to use a modern computer is easier than learning to
drive a car, so you have no excuse not to plunge forward.
4. The Computer
You should pay close attention to what computers can do for you in your
plans to escape your job and make your work-at-home dreams come true.
People who want to run a home business usually have a very small staff -- in
fact, a staff of one -- yourself! The rest of your needs are handled by
independent contractors, depending on the kind of business you are in and
the services you need.
To run a serious, truly global home business, a computer is as necessary as
oxygen is to life on earth. Those who try to fool themselves into thinking
they will ever make a serious go of their home-based business without a
computer are sadly mistaken.
Computers give you two primary advantages:
(1) They enable you to store large amounts of data and to sort by data
field so that you can easily get the information you need.
(2) They enable you to develop a pattern document for every situation
you'll ever be in in your business. To run a home-based business
successfully, you must anticipate just what situation will emerge and
prepare accordingly.
A business is based on a characteristic series of situations and a
characteristic set of things that happen -- or that do not happen. You
must be prepared with the proper document for each situation. Once you
have established all the protocols, and have experienced all the situations
associated with your kind of business, the time will come when running your
business is, in large part, a repetition of certain key tasks. Computers
are all about handling repetition swiftly and efficiently.
But the computer is much more. Today, by connecting a computer to the
phone line with a modem, your machine becomes more than a data storage
system and repetitive task handler. It becomes a multi-task, multi-level
communications processing center that connects you to the globe.
Such things as e-mail, on-line services, the Internet, the Web and more
can't help but revolutionize the way business is done. If you do not
become a part of it today, you certainly are going to suffer for it greatly
in the near future.
If there is an effective way to market products on the Internet or any
other on-line venue, no one has truly discovered it yet. The only people
making money on Internet marketing are the people who are selling the
concept of doing it. If you have a product or a service and expect to
reach millions of buyers through computer screens, you are sadly mistaken.
The Internet is definitely where a lot of innovative things are happening.
It's a great place to exchange ideas, find out what hot, what's not, and
stay on the cutting edge whatever your particular business is.
5. Your Business Hours
If you've been paying attention to the first four points, you're well on
your way to becoming a successful home-based business owner. Now we don't
want you to blow it by thinking you can keep banker's hours.
The global market is a 24-hour per day market, and a 365-day per year
market. Let the others sleep late on Saturdays and take Sundays off.
Those times could be your day to move and corner loads of customers that
the others miss.
You should get up earlier and quit work later. You should be open for
business on holidays and be available 24-hours a day either personally or
through your answering service.
"But wait a minute!" you might be thinking at this point! "I thought that
working at home was all about freedom and an end to drudgery. This sounds
like nothing but endless work!"
Well, here's the thing. For most of you who quit your regular jobs to go
to work for yourself, you'll discover something magical. You'll discover
that when you are working for yourself, when you are building your own
business, a lot of what you does not seem like work at all.
The great writer Jane Roberts said, "Inspiration is its own motivator."
Running your own business is all about being inspired 24-hours-a-day. When
you stop selling your body and soul to some company or corporation and
start giving your energy to yourself, work has a way of turning into
inspiration and play.
The perfect work for you is that which you don't think of as work, yet
doing it makes money and provides you with the bread and shelter of life.
You'll see what it's like if you make a true commitment to being self
employed, put all your energy into it, and stick with it for the long run.
