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Remember when Tupperware hit the scene? What about Mary Kay? Avon? You remember these companies, don’t you? Along with overpriced products and pressure to buy those products, these companies offered women the opportunity to work for themselves. The idea of working from home, earning an income in your spare time, and getting to spend more time with their children was enticing to millions of women all over the world. Husbands gawked at boxes filled with plastic, makeup, and home decor, proclaiming this wasn’t a real job. The fact of the matter is that whether you agreed these were real jobs or not, the money these women were making – and continue to make today – is certainly real.
What’s it take to make it in the work-at-home game? It turns out that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. You can end up working incredibly long hours – way more hours than you would if you had a regular salaried job. Because you have to be the salesperson, the shipper, the marketer, the writer, the accountant, and the person who happens to have to keep their house clean, your days can quickly start running into one another.
When you work at home, you need to be organized. If you’ve ever been lost in a rabbit hole on Pinterest about creating the perfect home office, you know that none of those home offices is what it actually looks like to work-at-home. A lot of people have a desk filled with papers and orders and coffee cups that haven’t been washed in days. There are snack wrappers littering the trashcan and half eaten sandwiches. Remember how you thought you would be able to eat healthier when you worked from home because you would have so much time to prepare meals? Working from home is much harder than working outside the home.
When you work at home, you have to be willing to get outside your comfort zone. Because working from home usually means you are working on line or selling products out of your home, you actually have to get out and talk to people. Whether this is through email marketing or through picking up the phone and calling a potential customers, no one is going to make those sales for you. You don’t have to deal with the regular work-related stuff like conducting background checks or showing up on time, but it is hard work nonetheless.
Working at home can be hard on the head. If you do piece work, like freelance writing for example, it can be difficult to plan your finances because work comes and goes as clients need it. If you sell a product, like Tupperware for example, you have to always be looking for the next customer to demonstrate a product to. Certainly the efforts you put into your home-based business can be rewarded, but it takes much more effort to run a business in your home than it does outside of your home.
So why do people start home-based businesses? Because it is worth it. It is worth it to be in control of your time and how much money you can make.
