Home office Archives

Go It Alone!

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the streetwise secrets of self-employment

I bought this book on the strength of enthusiastic reader reviews at Amazon – and I was right to do so! It’s written as a guide and confidence-booster for those people who have decided to start their own businesses and embrace self-employment. It’s written in a lively, fast-paced style which makes for entertaining reading and what I liked was that Geoff Burch makes important distinctions between essentials. Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean making lots of money or creating a huge business empire. It might mean working for a couple of days a week, then having the rest of the time off for gardening, family, or golf – whatever takes your fancy. In other words success is not always equal to wealth. There are other ways of defining it.

And without being naively optimistic, he points out both the advantages of being self-employed and the many opportunities which exist to create your own work. Surrounded as we are by universally bad service, all the new entrepreneur has to do is offer prompt and good quality service with a smile, and he’ll put the old traders under pressure. This is something the eBay and Amazon traders are doing right now. Take the order, send a confirming email within minutes, and get the goods into the next post in a padded bag.

He also explains those small-but-important issues which most business self-help guides would not think to cover. Where do you meet clients for business meetings when your office is in your back-bedroom? What do you say when the bank tries to force you to open a business instead of a personal account? What title do you give yourself and think of yourself as, when your duties run from executive decision-making down to taking letters to the local post office?

He comes up with all sorts of practical, matter-of-fact advice for anybody planning to start up their own business – much of it common sense, but only if you have the benefit of experience. You don’t need an ‘office’; you probably don’t need lots of equipment such as printers and fax machines, and office furniture. You shouldn’t take out bank loans, and you should never mortgage your house. If you want to survive as a self-employed guerilla, the secret is “Travel light, live off the land, and strike from the shadows”

Don’t recreate your old working environment. The last thing you will need is a hat stand.
Develop the virtual office, the virtual car, and virtually anything else you need.
Don’t let your clients know that you are enjoying yourself. It might make them jealous.

This not just for those who want to set up their own businesses. It’s for people who are about to be made redundant; people who face early retirement; people who want a part-time job; and people who are already self-employed but who want to feel more confident and hold their heads up high.

I wish I had read this book ten years ago when I first set up my own company. I might not be any richer today, but I know I would have felt more confident that I was doing the right thing – and more importantly, going about it in the right way.

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Geoff Burch, Go It Alone!, London: Harper-Collins, 1997, pp.203, ISBN: 0722534604

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How to work from home

September 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

working from home – living at work

Work from home – and survive

Lots of people work from home today. If you have a mobile phone, an email address, a broadband connection, and a laptop on your coffee table, nobody knows you’re a consultant dog on the Internet. You could be:

starting up your own business
switching from employed to ‘homeworking’
creating a job for yourself
downsizing from larger commercial premises
making money from your hobby

Making a start

Working from home can have plenty of advantages – and you can use all of them to make your life easier – and bring everything under your own control..

you don’t need to rent expensive offices
you can combine work with home life
you don’t have to travel to work
you’re your own boss
it’s tax deductible

This is a morale-boosting guide for anybody who wants to start their own business, or who harbours deep desires to be their own boss. Geoff Burch takes an entirely practical approach and shows how it can be done – by cutting your costs to a minimum and steering clear of get-rich-quick schemes. It will also be useful for all those folk who are facing early retirement and wondering what to do with themselves. Do your own thing – and walk tall!

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A Room of Your Own
Some people can work with very little in the way of equipment. But for most of us, if you’re going to be business-like, you’ll need a space of your own in which to work. Even if most of your activity is outside the house (working as a hairdresser, surveyor, plasterer, gardener) you need a space in the house which is your own.

The options are usually quite obvious. It could be a spare bedroom, an attic, or even the garage or a garden shed. In smaller spaces it might be one corner of a flat. The important thing is that you establish a space in which to conduct your business.

In his best-selling book on self-employment, Go It Alone! Geoff Burch describes the ultra minimalist approach were you have no office and no equipment at all. But even he agrees that you need to establish your own space – even if this is a psychological space.

Take a professional attitude and carve out a space for whatever you need. Your equipment could be no more than a few box files, a telephone, a computer, or folders full of papers. Keep this space for yourself, and don’t let it get mixed up with household matters. Don’t try to work off the edge of the kitchen table.

And Geoff Burch has another excellent piece of advice, which I firmly endorse. Don’t try to re-create a typical office environment. Why should you be surrounded by ugly metal filing cabinets and cardboard boxes full of rubbish. There are perfectly good storage solutions available at suppliers such as IKEA and Habitat which will visually enhance your environment, as well as being functional.

This is visual proof that you don’t need to be surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets. The examples in this beautifully illustrated book include quite small family homes which have been adapted to the demands of creating a working space within a domestic environment. Learn from the principles illustrated: no clutter, clean spaces, and a well organised room.

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The home office
But if it gets more serious and you want to establish a grown-up home office, you might want to create a professional work space. The basic requirements for a home office are a desk, a telephone, and storage for paperwork. Depending on the nature of your business, that’s probably the minimum. But if you want to give yourself a chance of being taken seriously, I would recommend two additions – a computer and a connection to the Internet. Since you’re reading this on the Internet, you’ve probably already got that.

The telephone
Get a dedicated line or use your mobile telephone number exclusively for your business calls. Don’t try to piggy-back off the household telephone line. Nobody will take you seriously if they ring up and are answered by a child who says “I’ll pass you to my Mum/Dad”. You might need a separate land line or a mobile number – but this is a small and worthwhile investment. Just look around you. Painters, plumbers, decorators, sales reps – everybody these days has a mobile phone.

Don’t even share a line with your spouse/partner/wife/husband (does that cover it all?) because when the phone rings, who answers it? Believe me, it’s a recipe for arguments and territorial squabbling. A separate telephone number is a minimal requirement for anybody wanting to be taken seriously in business. You’ll also benefit by having an answerphone. They’re cheap, and will cover any time you’re not in your office.

Email
The same’s true of an email address. Your customers will not be impressed if they are asked to reply to <johnandbarbara@fireside.Yahoo.co.uk>. Who is running the business – John, or Barbara? Do they both read the emails?

You should have an email address of your own – and it should have your business as a domain name. In other words <Barry@hotmail.com> could be anybody in the world. It gives you no identity, no distinction, and no business credibility. On the other hand, <info@bigservices.co.uk> looks more professional.

Fax
A fax machine used to be a badge of pride for anybody setting up their own business. But now you’ll find that it’s only the most old-fashioned concerns such as solictors who use them. Everybody else uses documents sent as attachments to email messages. So you can save on setup expense by ditching this cumbersome bit of Old Technology. All you need instead is an all-in-one printer-scanner-copier. At the time of writing these start at only thirty pounds.

Meeting clients
If you are working from home – from an office in the box room or even a corner of the spare bedroom – there comes a moment when you make contact with a potential client and need to meet up to discuss business. Ooops! It wouldn’t look good to invite Mr Big from Megabucks Ltd to your semi at 13, Oildrum Lane. You’re certainly not going to invite them back to your house to discuss business surrounded by unmade beds and children’s toys.

Don’t worry. This happens to everybody when they start up. But there are perfectly simple solutions. Either you offer to meet them on their premises (and you turn up on time, looking smart) or you invite them to meet in a public space in a location convenient to both of you. This could be a hotel lounge, a restaurant, or a bar somewhere convenient.

Working at Home shows interiors for writers, artists, musicians, and graphic designers. Most are minimalist design – plain walls and floors, no decoration, wood in teak or beech, lots of opaque tinted green glass, polished chrome fittings, simple halogen lights, chairs with tubular chrome legs, and giant settees in black leather. And the clutter which blights commercial offices has been purged – to stunning effect.

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Extra tips

Here are some tips for making your work space more professional, more visually appealing, and more productive. All the suggestions are easy to implement, and they’ll make an immediate improvement to your working life.

Straighten your bookshelves
If you have books, folders, box files, or any other items stored on open bookshelves – get them straightened up. Make the items stand up straight; get them in line; and eliminate any flopping and sloping items. Leave any empty spaces free or fill them with decorative objects, such as vases or ornaments.

Clear the desk
A cluttered desk is a recipe for constant irritation. Get rid of papers, memos, post-it notes, paper-clips, coffee mugs, photographs of the family, ‘amusing’ messages, and any other detritus from your working space. Be completely ruthless, and start from a clear working space. You’ll immediately feel better.

I know that there are exceptions. The painter Francis Bacon famously worked in a state of abject squalor. But you’re not Francis Bacon – and anyway most successful business people don’t work that way.

De-clutter regularly
Every day you will receive circulars, flyers, bills, advertising, and publicity materials through the post. Take one look at each item; decide if it’s important or if you want to keep it; and if not – throw it away. Don’t have a big IN-tray – otherwise that’s extra work to be done.

Live/Work is a collection of projects where living and working environments have been merged. The results prove that you can transform a house, a flat, or even an industrial site so that it becomes a very comfortable and attractive hybrid. Examples include the homes of architects, a painter, a photographer, a fashion designer, a restaurateur, a documentary film maker, a physical trainer, even a priest marrying people out of his own home-church.

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Live/Work

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

working at home: living at work

Home office living isn’t new. It used to be called ‘living above the shop’. That was a vertical separation of living and working space. But many people are now doing the same thing horizontally, with a home office, split-use rooms, or garden shed workshops. Deborah Dietsch has assembled a collection projects where living and working environments have been merged, and the results prove that with imagination you can transform a house, a flat, or even an industrial site so that it becomes a very comfortable and attractive hybrid.

Her examples include the homes of architects, a painter, a photographer, a fashion designer, a dance tutor, a restaurateur, a documentary film maker, a physical trainer, even a priest marrying people out of his own home-church.

The examples are all very well photographed – but don’t just look at the pictures in this book. There are lots of excellent suggestions and topics of design theory in the text. For instance, she argues that you should plan with the future and multi-purpose use in mind. Your work annexe can easily double up as space for occasional guests, and if things go pear-shaped commercially, you might want to let off a room or even an entire floor to compensate for lost income.

One feature I found interesting is that in each case there’s a summary of what lessons can be learned from the project. These could be summarised as follows:

Don’t be afraid of colour
Find beauty in industrial details
Rentals pay the mortgage
Re-use space for different purposes
Maintain a professional atmosphere
Keep living and workspaces separate

This corresponds with my own personal philosophy from hours and hours of studying design magazines and architectural source materials – and it’s this. No matter how outlandish or peculiar a design scheme, no matter how unlike your own taste it might be – there’s always at least one thing you can take away as a positive or a good idea from somebody else’s work.

She even mentions two ideas in her introduction that I’ve done myself recently. You should create some sort of separate entrance so that clients or business visitors don’t have to traipse through your home living space; and it’s useful to have a separate table or conference arrangement so that you can arrange proper business meetings.

I can also confirm from personal experience that it’s a good idea to be near services – the post office, supermarket, restaurants, cafe bars – so that you don’t feel isolated if you are setting up as a sole trader.

Remember too that all these ideas are very green. If you live and work in the same space, you are not driving to work. Your carbon footprint is lower, and you can offset some of your expenditure against tax.

Of course, the success of such projects depends on where you currently live and the size of your budget for setting up a work environment. The budget could actually be zero – but this book will still give you plenty of ideas on how to arrange the space you’ve got to bring your life and work into some form of unified design.

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Deborah K. Dietsch, Live/Work – Working at Home, Living at Work, New York: Abrams, 2008, p.319, ISBN: 0810994003

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Working at Home

June 7, 2009 by Roy Johnson

combining your office with your home – elegantly

Working at Home is the second book on the interior design of home office space I have recently consulted as research for a move to new office premises. Like the first, Working Spaces, it offers a powerfully stimulating set of examples, generated by people with imagination, flair, and in some cases, courage. If the selection of examples are typical of interior design today, the cities pushing this trend are New York, London, Berlin, Barcelona, and Tokyo.

And the fashion is for old industrial spaces preserved for their high ceilings, big room spaces, and vast windows. In each case they have been transformed by adding luxury furnishings, yet the original features have been preserved – so that there at first appears to be a tension between domestic and commercial purposes. The examples show interior design solutions for writers, artists, musicians, architects, graphic designers, a printers, business people, and a textile designer. And in most cases the usual clutter which blights commercial offices has been purged – to good effect.

It has to be said that most of the samples illustrated are examples of minimalist design – plain walls and floors, no decoration, wood in teak or beech, lots of opaque tinted green glass, polished chrome fittings, simple halogen downlighters, chairs with tubular chrome legs, and giant settees in black leather.

There are architectural plans reproduced in each case which illustrate how the overall space has been used and how the parts relate to the whole.

One of the recurring features I spotted here was floors covered in epoxy resin – which results in a hard, shiny surface which is practical and easily cleaned. Not everybody would wish to settle down for a cozy evening in such surroundings – but the results look great.

What conclusions can be drawn from the examples on display? In almost all cases there are few decorations in the rooms: no pictures or shelves or decorative brackets. The rooms, with their pale walls and clutter-free surfaces are left to speak for themselves.

You might imagine that people working in the creative industries would want to decorate every inch of their surroundings with objects which expressed their tastes and cultural values. But the opposite appears to be the case. And these might indeed be shining examples illustrating Mies van der Rohe’s mantra – Less is More.

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Aurora Cuito, Working at Home, New York: Loftpublications, 2000, pp.175, ISBN 0823058700

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Working Spaces

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

interior design glamour for the home office

Lots of people work from home today. In the world of an email address, a broadband connection, and a laptop on your coffee table, nobody knows you’re a consultant dog on the Internet. But if it gets more serious and you want to establish a grown-up home office, you might want to create a professional workspace. Many people start from a small study or working in a corner of the spare room, but if your business grows, I guarantee you’ll feel more professional with a proper office. Working Spaces is packed with examples of how it can be done.

This book is visual proof that you don’t need to be surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets. The examples illustrated include quite small family homes which have been adapted to the demands of creating a working space within a domestic environment. They also recognise that people working from confined spaces may need to put a single area to different uses at different times. A workaday meeting room might become a weekend lounge; or an office might need to be converted to accommodate guests from time to time.

What I admire about these Taschen publications is that although they have the outer glamour of coffee table luxury, they do in fact deal with real-life examples. There are plenty of cases here of one and two-roomed apartments which have been adapted to maximise space and preserve elegance, whilst at the same time functioning as proper offices with computers, storage for box files, and desks with telephones and wastebaskets.

The photography is superb throughout; the text is in English, French, and German; and every example is accompanied by architectural plans showing the floor layout. It’s also bursting with good space-saving ideas – foldaway beds; hinged partition screens; and lots of tables, chairs and bookshelves with wheels. Another common design feature if you’ve got the courage to try it is white floors. White everything in fact.

How can you make your own working space more pleasant, more aesthetically soothing? Well, ask yourself these questions. Do you really need ugly filing cabinets immediately to hand? Why not conceal them or put the contents somewhere else? Why not have bold decorative features in your workspace, to make it more individualised and humane? Large pictures and big pots of flowers will do the trick.

Most of the owners seem to be graphic and interior designers, and architects – which might be cheating somewhat. I know a number of professional writers who operate from spaces far less elegant (and that’s putting it mildly) . But this gives an idea of what is possible, and moreover attainable without a great deal of expense.

In fact I’ll summarise it all in one tip which is guaranteed to make your own working space more stylish and effective in one quick step: Get rid of all the clutter- now!

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Simone Schleifer, Working Spaces, London: Taschen, 2005, pp.384, ISBN: 3822841862

More on architecture
More on technology
More on design

the streetwise secrets of self-employment

working from home – living at work

Work from home – and survive

Extra tips

working at home: living at work

combining your office with your home – elegantly

interior design glamour for the home office

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