Running your own business from your own home is a great way to take control of your life and your schedule so you have more time for things like homeschooling, family fun, and self-care. Of course, it is also an excellent way to save on the costs of setting up a business too.
Of course, running a home-based business comes with its own unique challenges which mean that, if you want to give your company the best chance of succeeding, you need to cultivate a few useful skills, particularly the following:
Time- management
When your office is your home, you don’t have to get into work at 9 am and work through until 5 pm – you can have a much more flexible schedule. This is good in some ways, but it can also lead to procrastination and poor time management. Especially if you are going to be doing other things like homeschooling the kids or walking the dog during your working day.
So, it is fair to say that the most successful home business owners are the ones who know how to manage their time as efficiently as possible to fit everything in and still have some free time available.
Buy a diary and start planning out your ideal week and take it from there. It can take a bit of trial and error to get time management right, but it is possible.
Basic IT skills
If you don’t have a good knowledge of some basic IT skills like how to use spreadsheet software or how to fix problems with your mac, then you are probably going to find running a business from home frustrating at best and impossible at worst.
These days, a lot of what it takes to run the average business, from bookkeeping to keeping your website up and running required a level of IT competence that is not too difficult to achieve and there are lots of online tutorials and even books to help you get to grips with any gaps in your knowledge like how to use Microsft Access or how to reset your router when the internet is running slowly. Learn as much as you can and that side of your business will be a lot easier to manage as a result.
Focus
Focus is a skill you can learn, and you definitely should if you want to ensure that you are able to carry out your business duties as effectively as possible. When you work from home, you often have the kids coming in and out or the sog looking for attention or noise coming in from the neighbours, and if you can not work around them and focus on what you are doing you will quickly find yourself floundering
Of course, there are some things, like wearing noise-cancelling earphones and locking the office door that will remove some of your problems, but that won’t stop you from taking a million tea breaks or stopping to watch cute cats on YouTube, so you need to train yourself to focus too. Meditation is a great tool that you can use to boost your focus levels over time, and there are loads of excellent apps that will teach you the basics in as little as five minutes each day.
Delegation
You might not think that delegation is a skill, but when you’re a home-based entrepreneur, it really is. If, for example, you know when to admit that you are useless at coding, you can call in the help of a professional freelancer, save yourself loads of time and ensure your website looks good and functions right the first time, which will really help to keep customers onside.
And, it’s not just work stuff you need to learn how to delegate either, learning when to ask your husband or wife to put a load in the washer or getting the kids to help with tidying up the kitchen will mean that you are focusing completely on your work when you need to instead of all the household tasks that are piling up around you.
You can’t do it all and trying to will only make every aspect of your life much more difficult to manage effectively. Learn to delegate and you absolutely will not regret making the effort to do so.
If you work on developing all of these skills, your home business is much more likely to succeed and your time as an entrepreneur is likely to be a lot simpler and more enjoyable too!
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