You’ve had enough, you don’t want to be part of the rat race anymore. Perhaps circumstances mean you need to be at home (new child or a sick relative).
Do you dream of working from home but aren’t sure how to make the transition? In this guide we go through the steps of taking this from the ‘idea’ stage to reality.
A word of warning – this isn’t going to happen overnight. You’ll need to plan and you’ll need to work hard. Luckily there are a number of different routes you can take and I’ll go through them and their pitfalls in this guide.
The 7 P’s
In the British Army there is a phrase that is referred to as the 7 P’s. The 7 P’s are a mantra that apply to most things in life and mostly certainly when wanting to start something new!
The 7P’s – Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance
To make the change to working from home, you are going to have to have a plan.
The Plan
Your plan does not need to be anything elaborate but I would certainly have it written down and something you can easily refer to. Some of the information that you may need will be financial in nature so it might be worth making a spreadsheet with this financial information on it.
If you are part of a family then this transition might affect them as well, so talk your plan through with them. They may be able to offer suggestions and help you on your journey.
The beginning of this plan comes down to cold hard facts and figures. You need to be honest with yourself when working this bit out.
Key information
You need the following figures:
- Your outgoings each month – include everything rent, car, mortgage, food, clothes, essentials, how much you intent to spend on birthday presents etc.
- Your income each month – if you quit your normal job do you have any other income that you can rely on – birthday money, rent from property etc
Calculation time
Take your income total for the month and take away your outgoings. EG if I had £100 income each month and £600 of outgoings I would have an answer of £500. £500 would be the absolute minimum amount that I would need to make each month to stay afloat.
It might be worth going through and seeing which of your outgoings are essential EG – do you need that gym membership or could you do some exercise at home instead?
Also consider emergency funds – what if the car needs a new tire or needs a repair? If you want to have a holiday in the year how much will this cost?
The calculations are very important and everything must be taken into consideration.
You might also feel better if you break it down into a weekly or daily figure – so for my example above £500 works out roughly £115 per week or if there are 30 days in a month and I expect income on every day, I should be earning £16.67 a day.
How will you achieve this?
When you are confident of your calculations, you need to figure out how you are going to make this money. Unsurprisingly, “I’ll make websites for people” is a poor plan that is destined to fail regardless of if you are a great website builder because this lacks detail.
In this example you need to know who you will be building websites for, how much they are going to be paying you, how are you going to gain new customers, are you going to incur costs by doing this, when will your customer pay you, what will make people want to use you (your USP) and what will you do if you have a quiet month?
If you are offering a service like this, you need to answer these questions in detail and it may be worth you putting together a full business plan if you aim to get funding to start you off.
Your first option as detailed above is to start your own business. You do something for a customer and they pay you. Perhaps you were previously making websites for a different company or perhaps you’ve baked and decorate cakes from an early age. People will be paying you for your skills and it is definitely worth doing something you are already skilled at as opposed to trying something new.
Starting your own business is a great way to earn some cash but there are pros and cons to it which you need to be aware of and take serious consideration of.
Be an employee from home
Believe it or not there are plenty of jobs that actually rely on people working from home. These include technical writers, online personal assistants, call centre staff etc. Non of these require you to be in an office as you can do the work from home and saves the company money as they don’t have to have an office for all their staff. This can give you the best of both worlds, being actually employed by a company (and the benefits this brings) but still have the flexibility of working from home.
Some of these jobs will be more flexible than others and some may require you to ‘come into work’ on the odd days or perhaps go and visit a client. It all depends on the job so make sure you read the description clearly and ask the questions before applying.
Online worker (online odd jobber)
I’ll be honest – I didn’t know what to call this but the idea is that you take up lots of little jobs online – pretty much exactly what we have on this site! Fill in online surveys, perform tasks through MTurk etc. While this might not give you the most money out of all of these options, it does give you the ultimate freedom as you can work when you want. Want to to blast through surveys at 3am in the morning? That’s an option! Prefer to get up at 5am and work? Yup you can do that too.
You’ll need to work out which companies offer you the best pay for the tasks you want to complete (our site can help with that) and again look at how much you need to earn.
All planned? Put it into practice!
If you have your plan all worked out then it’s time to put it into practice. Remember that even with the worlds best plan and best intentions, things can happen that may make it harder than you first thought or 1 thing can make your plan impossible to carry out. Always have a backup plan in case things go wrong or you can’t get as many customers to sustain you as you would like.
You may consider a hybrid plan, for example, I’ll start up my own web development company and when it is quiet I will be an online odd jobber and answer surveys while I build my company up.
This is perfectly acceptable, and it is whatever works for you! You may even decide to get a part-time work at home job and do things on the side like start your own cake business. Again the more routes you have, the better.
Conclusion
Working from home isn’t as difficult as you might think. You just need to have a plan, you need to have grit and you need to have the determination to see it through. With hard work and a lot of research, you could make your work from home dream a reality.