Home Working Business Tips
For Appearing Professional
For work from home business owners, one of the main problems they face is
appearing professional in the eyes of customers and suppliers. While work from
home business ventures are no less merit-worthy than those based out of offices,
there is a certain stigma attached that work from home business owners must
shake if they are to run a serious and profitable enterprise, and this can often
be easier said than done, particularly if you are doing business in a market
that’s full of larger, more ‘professional’ rivals. However, by embracing your
work from home status and understanding how you can avoid appearing
unprofessional to others, you should be able to grow your work from home
business to a comfortable level.
The first problem encountered by most work from home business ventures if
overcoming a residential address. Some mailing addresses are obviously
residential, no matter how you try to cloak them, which obviously appears
unprofessional to large clients and certainly has an impact on the way you can
do business. Of course, you may be lucky and live on a notable commercial street
or within a business district of your local town which might allow your address
to come across as more business-like. If this isn’t the case, a good, low cost
way around this is to opt for a mailbox service. These are usually provided by
special mail handling companies that have prime locations to collect mail for
this specific purpose. The mailboxes usually cost around £30 per month for prime
addresses, and you can also usually have mail forwarded directly to your home
address. This is also beneficial in giving your business the appearance of being
national, by having addresses in major cities which all forward to your home
address.
Another obvious potential problem is your phone number. While it’s perfectly OK
to have a local landline number, you don’t want your family answering the phone
to business customers, and you certainly don’t want to advertise a mobile number
as the means of contact for professionalism reasons. A good way around this is
to install a second phone line and to purchase an additional phone located
within your work from home office, that is set up only to handle business calls.
So long as this phone line and phone number is reserved for your business
customers, there can never be any confusion as to who is phoning and for what
purpose, allowing you to appear more professional overall.
Work from home business ventures are commonplace, and when most individuals give
up employment to go it alone they tend to start out using their own home as a
base. This reduces operating costs and hassles, and allows for the most
flexibility possible in starting up the business. By working around the obvious
problems associated with your mailing address, and taking the time to install
separate phone lines and work around any of the more apparent problems your work
from home business might encounter, there’s no reason whatsoever that you can’t
make a successful business from your back bedroom, without having to waste money
on expensive office space.
Syeda Mahwish Fatima Naqvi