Home Business And Your Day Job

Home Business And Your Day Job

Just like any other business, home business too is replete with challenges and warrants your time and commitment.

Starters who are doing it part-time should continue to do it that way till they start getting back the returns. That is the safest way to start any business for that matter. Almost 80 percent of the home busisness entrepreneurs are doing business on a part-time basis.

They come back home from office, impatiently start their computers even before they take off their shoes, to check if there are any responses to their mails! Or instead of driving back home from office, they speed up to reach in time for their scheduled presentations to enthusiastic home business aspirants. In other words, they’ve got to make the best of their time after office hours till they hit the dinner table!

I am sure all that sounds very much like your own routine too!

Despite the hectic schedule that you create for yourself this way, it is much safer than quitting your job and then setting up your home business which is a daring step and prone to risks. The biggest risk is – you never know how you would feel doing home business! If you have come in with the objective of attaining time and financial freedom……..great! But if you have just jumped into it blindfolded, you have only unnecessarily made yourself gullible to troubles. With no other source of income, you would be under enormous pressure to make a living for yourself. As a result, you will get edgy and impatient and would eventually quit to go back to your “day job world” without being able to give your best shot. Now this is something that shouldn’t happen to any otherwise capable home business aspirant.

So keep your day job intact and only then explore the world of entrepreneurship without any pressures on you.

However, strike a balance between the two worlds– your day job and your home business; and avoid any overlap. That means, until you reach the stage when you feel you can make your part-time business a full-time one, maintain a good time management between the two.

Slight slackness at your workplace can jeopardize your position. That usually happens when you start reaching your office late or you start taking frequent offs in order to spend more time on your expanding business

Typically, the daily after-work routine of many entrepreneurs is somewhat like this – they reach home all fatigued, fix a drink for themselves and watch television, have dinner and then finally retire. Though every day it’s at the back of their mind to work on their home business activities, weeks and months go by doing nothing. Eventually, they lose interest in the whole thing and the desire to attain that financial freedom only becomes an unfulfilled dream.

The one very important aspect that you as an entrepreneur would have to keep in mind would be about your goals. Now you can’t achieve big milestones working just 25 hours a week! Don’t kill yourself trying to achieve unrealistic goals and be a little pragmatic while you establish them

The best way is to adopt the “inverted pyramid” strategy. Start from your 5 year or long term goal. Where do you think you would be 5 years from now? Be very clear to yourself on this. If you want to make enough money in that period, ask yourself - how much? There’s no harm in writing down the exact figure that you aim to earn annually after 5 years of hard work. This will help you back work - if your aim is to earn a million dollars per annum after 5 years, build those “work breakdown structures” to drive you towards that goal, such as the number of people you would need in your downline, the number of prospects in your database as a pipeline to build that downline, your marketing and advertising strategies to maintain such numbers, even deciding by when you should be in a secure position to quit your day job and the additional activities that you would have to do then onwards, etc.

Each structure now needs to be further fine tuned on a yearly basis. Once you do that, it would be very easy for you to disintegrate your 5 year goal into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily activities

You may realize that to reach your long term goal you would have to work for more than 5 hours everyday along with your day job! Probably you have set an unrealistic goal for yourself. Tweak with your daily activity plan once again and move up the inverted pyramid now. What you finally derive now is your revised long term goal which is more practical and doable.

As a part-timer, this will give you enough clarity about what you ought to be doing on a daily basis and how much time you should be spending on the business activities everyday. You would feel much more comfortable after you draw up your periodic goals like this. Abide by what you derive and get started!

A few things that you must keep in mind for better time management:

Time management does not mean neglecting your daily chores. Because if you do that, the cumulative effect is going to come back to you with a vengeance and you would only end up running from pillar to post to manage the chaos. Common examples of such chores that part-time entrepreneurs wrongly think they can ignore are: bill payments, car service, other household errands that need to be taken care of on a daily basis.

Keep your business operations not so spread out that you end up spending most of your time traveling.

The best business for part-timers would be one in which they don’t have to spend much time on training. Choose a home business that gives you that perk to get started right day one onwards.

It would be in your interest to sponsor people who want to be full-time in business. If they are capable, they would soon be able to compensate for your lack of time.

Develop a good pipeline of prospects, so that if there are any non performers in your downline, you might as well replace them.