Entrepreneurs often go into business to avoid the doldrums of Cubicle Land.

But then they find themselves skipping showers, piling papers on their dining room tables and feeling isolated. They miss the office — and the copiers and water coolers and secretaries that come standard.

Entrepreneur Josh Bereano, 38, said he rolls out of bed each morning in his Hawthorne Hills neighborhood to check his e-mail. He feels cut off from the work force sometimes.

“People don’t look down at home offices anymore, it’s natural,” said Bereano, who owns the video Internet marketing company Direct Marketing Inc. But still, it’s good to “just get out of the house and spice up the workday.”

My Day Office, a new Belltown business, hopes to cater to folks like Bereano — mobile workers who don’t need, or can’t yet afford, a long office lease. It will offer a la carte office space and services.

Full Article

…Blasingame, a small business expert, answers so many business-related questions that he recently launched a new Web site, askjim.biz, which functions as a search engine for people looking for business advice.

CNN: What were the circumstances that led you to work from home?

Blasingame: I’ve been home-based a couple of times, but I’m not now. The main reason people work from home is it allows them to start a business without having to pay the expenses of an office somewhere else. A lot of people start a home-based business part time. They do their job, they come home and they set up a little shop in the den or the attic or the basement … and it allows them to literally grow a business one teeny tiny step at a time without making a huge infrastructure decision. The last time I was home-based was in ‘89, and I started a consulting company.

CNN: What are the qualities of a successful home-based business?

Blasingame: Discipline. First is discipline. You’ve got to be able to separate your work from your personal life. You’ve got to be able to set working hours so that when you work, you work, and when you’re not working you have quality personal time. You’ve got to make the decision to turn the computer off and not take e-mail. You’ve got to be able to say, “This is a job, it’s just a coincidence that it’s in my home, and so I’m going to work 8 to 5.”

But also you can time shift. You can say, “I’m an early morning person who has to pick my kids up at 3 o’clock from school.” So you can work 5 till 7, get up and take the kids to school, come back and work till 3 and go get your kids and come back. You don’t have to work a full shift like a regular 8 to 5 kind of thing.

But whatever you’re doing, you have to have regular hours, and you have to have the discipline to stick to those hours, otherwise you wind up not really getting a lot accomplished.

CNN: How does telecommuting fit in with being home-based?

Read More…

Irritated by the highest gas prices in U.S. history, John Thorner has a message for his 70 employees: Stay home.

Rising gas prices have topped the $4 per gallon mark in some U.S. cities.

Thorner is requiring all staff at the National Recreation and Park Association to avoid commuting at least one day a week — either by working four long days and taking the fifth one off, or by working from home on the fifth day.

“The 70 people in our office drive an average of 30 miles a day. We did the math and figured that by having the employees not commute one day a week, we would be saving 100 gallons a week,” says Thorner, executive director of the nonprofit, which is based in the suburbs of Washington.

“This is not a huge amount of gasoline, but it could serve as a model for other operations.”

When the average price of gasoline in the United States hit $3.18 in May, it was the highest price ever recorded, even when adjusted for inflation, according to the Lundberg Survey of thousands of service stations across the nation…..Full Article

Are you a stay at home mom or a work at home mom (WAHM) who wants to earn a living from home by making money online and who wants to work according to your own schedule? Are you already a work at home mom who is looking for a unique home business idea for starting an Internet home based business opportunity or an mlm business for a low start up cost under $100? Building an internet home based business online takes time, but with a solid business plan, hard work & perseverance, you can achieve success from home …all for under $100.

Many new moms, work at home moms (WAHM) and dads explore starting their own mlm home business or online business opportunity after having children so they can spend more time with their kids. Finding the right work at home idea so you can become work at home and stay at home parents also makes sense from a business standpoint.

Many stay at home moms or a work at home moms get frustrated by the fact that they aren’t bringing money into their home as they stay home to raise their children. This is very understandable. After all, it can even get boring to do nothing more than clean and cook all day long with no money as an incentive.

Full Article

Many of us who start a home business do so while we are still working in another job. Our jobs provide us with a risk-free income, covering living expenses and, if we’re lucky, for funding at least a portion of our business start-up costs. Most people in this position hope to eventually leave their jobs to work from home full-time. But when’s the “right” time to quit? While there’s no black and white answer to this question, here are a few things to consider:

Are you confident in your ability to earn an income?
Some ‘experts’ recommend that you stick with your home business for at least a year before you consider quitting your job. This will give you the opportunity to ‘feel out’ any possible trends that may occur during the year. For example, you may find that sales are slow during the summer, and that your strongest months are from January to April.

If your business has been profitable for at least a year, you’ll probably feel reasonably secure that you can continue to turn a profit even after you leave your job.
Full Article

The job search process has changed dramatically over the past twenty years. The hiring process has experienced just as much change over the same period of time. What happened? As you may have guessed, the Internet has changed the way workers look for jobs and the way employers look for workers. This evolution has proved to be exciting for people on both sides.
The Internet has also created an entire business built around job postings. Newspapers and trade magazines used to have this business cornered. If a company needed to get the word out about an open position, the recruiters would post advertisements in local and national newspapers. Some companies would place ads in trade publications and others would use headhunters and search firms.

New Problems for Job Seekers
Finding a job isn’t as difficult as it used to be especially if you have Internet access. The problem job seekers have today is a problem of abundance–an abundance of online job listings. There are literally hundreds of career sites on the Internet that list open jobs all over the country and in many cases all over the world. Employers pay a fee to these online job listing sites so they can post open jobs.

Full Article: Online Job Listings

For whatever reason, it seems that most people who want to start a work at home business somehow think they don’t really have to work at all. Instead, they believe the ads that led them to assume that everything will just run on autopilot and they will soon start collecting huge sums of money. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t happen that way. Here are a few things you need to know when considering a work at home business.

1. You will not get rich overnight, or even in a few months. But if you work you can make very good money that will even get better as you learn more about your business. You will only get out out what you put into your business. Don’t fall for the empty promises of instant money.
2. Consistently devote time each working day to your business. Depending on the business, it may not be necessary to work several hours a day, but it is necessary to work some every day.
3. Learn to be organized. Organization in fact is one of the most important ingrediants to success in a work at home business. If you are organized you will look and feel more better, and you will be working with a purpose and therefore you will have a much better chance for success.
4. Don’t become a hermit. When working from home is can be easy to cut ourselves off from the world. But lack of human contact is not good because soon you will become hardened and unable to interact well with those you are doing business with. It is important to have some human contact on a regular basis for our emotional health and well-being.
5. Learn as much as you can about marketing. If you are going to be successful as a work at home business entrepreneur, you will spend most of your time marketing your business. You don’t like marketing? Then don’t get involved in a work at home business because with marketing you won’t have one very long anyway.
6. Grow your mind. Read good books and listen to motivational tapes when you can. This will not only keep your mind sharp, it will also stimulate you and keep you motivated.

So when you work at home you do work. And the sooner you understand this the better you will be positioned to make the money you were looking for when you decided on a work at home business.