How
many times have you heard that phrase, pitch, advertisement, or
whatever? Lots, I'm sure. It is used so much because marketers know that
staying home and making money is the fondest dream of millions of
people.
And why not? Did you know that the majority of fatal heart
attacks happen at 9 a.m. Monday morning? It's true. It seems a lot of
people would rather die than get back to the old grind after a weekend
of freedom.
So when someone offers an opportunity or plans for you to
take your job and shove it, yet still make enough money to live and pay
all your bills, it sounds blissfully irresistible.
Of course, bliss
and reality are always two different things. Is it really possible to
run a business from your own home that is more than hobby or source of
part-time income? Can you get rich working out of your own home? Can you
really trade your cubical and necktie for blue jeans and the comfort of
your own den?
Well, for your information, home-based businesses are one of the fastest growing kinds of enterprises in the modern world today.
As master marketer and author Dr. Jeffrey Lant said: "Frankly, I never saw any benefit to staying home and being poor."
Lant,
without so much as a business card, became a work-at-home millionaire,
and is a perfect example of what truly can be achieved if you are
serious about chucking your day job, staying home, and not settling for
peanuts in exchange for your freedom. You can have it all -- you can
stay home and make as much -- and more -- money than your current job
provides you.
In this report, we are going to outline and discuss
five key rules on how-to work at home and make big bucks, no matter
where you live. After these five rules, we'll talk about the most
important aspect of any business, whether it be home-based or a giant
factory -- cash flow. Starting your own business out of your home is all
about attitude and inspiration, but the entire attitude in the world
won't help you without money!
1. It Takes Commitment
Is
it any secret that most people detest their jobs? Study after study
proves that most people simply dread going to work Monday morning, and
they live for the freedom of the weekend. But even that freedom is not
pure because we know that it is only temporary. It's hard to enjoy a
Sunday evening when the Monday morning alarm clock is just a few hours
away.
It makes sense that people hate their jobs. Everyday, there is a
lot of butt kissing that needs to be done. There are endless meetings
which usually accomplish nothing. There are pointless interruptions, a
lot of drifting this way and that, and lot of idiot supervisors who do
nothing but waste your time and then dog you for not accomplishing your
share of work. There are co-workers you hate, and who would stab you in
the back in a minute if it meant a raise for them instead of you.
When
you work for someone else, you live a regimented life. Your body may
not want to get up at 7 a.m., but you have to be at work by 8 a.m. so
you lurch out of bed with a head full of sleep.
People who choose to
work at home are doing more than just escaping they oke of their master;
they have made a deep, firm, life-altering decision which says that
health, happiness and prosperity depend vitally on the freedom to work
for ourselves, and in doing so in the comfort of the home.
We want to
really emphasize that fact that to be successful in a work-at-home
situation, you have to be nothing less than a fanatic; a zealot, who is
utterly, committed to making work-at-home not only a successful venture,
but a profound commitment for life. You must be convinced that a return
to an outside office job would be the equivalent of a spiritual death
sentence.
Many people hate their office jobs, but they have made an
inner compromise with themselves. They have convinced themselves that
their job is "not so bad," pays the bills, and that they can stick out
because they have to. If you want to be truly successful at quitting
your day job, there cannot be any room for such compromises in your
soul. You have to take the attitude that to work any longer at your
hateful job is akin to fouling your inner being with a spiritual cancer
the will sicken and kill you.
2. Eliminating the Home-Office Mentality
To
move our work home, however, does not mean we eliminate every single
thing about the traditional office. Rather, we should select what is
useful and what is not.
It's a mistake to quit your job and go home
with a "home-office" mentality. By this we mean thinking small, and
believing that you will automatically sacrifice a decent income in
exchange for your freedom. Please! Do not think small!
To quote
Jeffrey Lant again: "Too many home-based practitioners fail to
understand the benefits that accrue because of the professional style
they have selected. They focus on the "home" part of the business rather
than the "business" portion, and as a result are doomed to small
incomes."Working at home provides many benefits. We can save a lot of
time because we don't need to commute and we have more control over our
schedule. Wean save a lot of costs because we don't have the overhead
requirements of larger businesses. We can cut our stress -- and so have
more energy --because we avoid many of the characteristic problems of
life in the late20th-Century office. We must work these advantages to
our profit.
3. Your International Headquarters
The
German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that if you sit at home alone at
your empty kitchen table, eventually, the "whole world will come to
you."
Well, today you don't need the great mind of a philosopher to
make the entire world come into your living room. What you need is a
phone jack. We live in a unique time in history. Satellites, fiber
optics, the integrated circuit and other communications miracles mean
that you can be just about anywhere in the developed world and establish
communication with anyone.
The telephone, the fax machine, the
computer, the modem -- all of these are not only affordable by any
middle-class citizen; they are the key to eliminating your need to drive
a hectic freeway everyday to get to a place of business outside your
home.
With these devices at our disposal, we should allow ourselves
to "think globally." Too often, home-based businesses focus on the
narrowest market, the neighborhood, the county, the city or state. This
is fine if you are providing a local service and are content with a
certain moderate level of income. But if you want the big bucks, you
should not think small. Also, you should not believe that, just because
you are home-based, you cannot compete with the big guys.
The purpose
of any business is to seek assess and seek out every possible market
for its products and services, to ascertain whether these markets have
the ability to buy these products/services, to determine whether there
is sufficient profit in these markets to warrant approaching them, and,
once positive assessment has been made, to launch a sustained marketing
campaign that gets a significant percentage of this market to purchase
the product or service in question.
Your home telecommunications
machines will not only enable you to do this, but they can also help you
overwhelm larger, more cumbersome traditional businesses that are your
competition.
As a home-based entrepreneur, you will not have all of
the disadvantages of your more traditional competitors: no office rent,
equipment or expense; no employees to pay salaries and fringe benefits
for; no time wasted on meetings, employee problems, paid sick leave,
etc.
All the money your competitors spend on heating the office and
buying furniture could better be spent on the actual marketing itself.
As a home-based business, you will be already positioned where the
traditional business is currently struggling to move: toward the lowest
possible overhead and the greatest possible concentration of dollars on
products/service development and product/service marketing.
So, a home-based business takes full advantage of three major goals of modern business success:
(1) Vastly reduced overhead
(2) Easy access to a global market
(3) Full advantage of telecommunications.
To
not have the basic telecommunications toys -- computer, modem, fax, and
telephones is impossibly stupid. Still, even in this day and age, many
of people strongly resist the one element that is undoubtedly the heart
endbrain of any successful home business -- the computer. The computer
is so important in fact, we have made it a category all itself. And
remember, learning to use a modern computer is easier than learning to
drive a car, so you have no excuse not to plunge forward.
4. The Computer
You
should pay close attention to what computers can do for you in your
plans to escape your job and make your work-at-home dreams come true.
People
who want to run a home business usually have a very small staff --
infect, a staff of one -- yourself! The rest of your needs are handled
by independent contractors, depending on the kind of business you are in
and the services you need.
To run a serious, truly global home
business, a computer is as necessary as oxygen is to life on earth.
Those who try to fool themselves into thinking they will ever make a
serious go of their home-based business without a computer are sadly
mistaken. Computers give you two primary advantages:
(1) They enable
you to store large amounts of data and to sort by data field so that you
can easily get the information you need.
(2) They enable you to
develop a pattern document for every situation you’ll ever be in your
business. To run a home-based business successfully, you must anticipate
just what situation will emerge and prepare accordingly.
A business
is based on a characteristic series of situations and characteristic set
of things that happen -- or that do not happen. You must be prepared
with the proper document for each situation. Once you have established
all the protocols, and have experienced all the situations associated
with your kind of business, the time will come when running your
business is, in large part, a repetition of certain key tasks.
Computershare all about handling repetition swiftly and efficiently.
But
the computer is much more. Today, by connecting a computer to the phone
line with a modem, your machine becomes more than a data storage system
and repetitive task handler. It becomes a multi-task, multi-level
communications processing center that connects you to the globe.
Such
things as e-mail, on-line services, the Internet, the Web and more
can’t help but revolutionize the way business is done. If you do not
become a part of it today, you certainly are going to suffer for it
greatly in the near future.
If there is an effective way to market
products on the Internet or another on-line venue, no one has truly
discovered it yet. The only people making money on Internet marketing
are the people who are selling the concept of doing it. If you have a
product or a service and expect to reach millions of buyers through
computer screens, you are sadly mistaken.
The Internet is definitely
where a lot of innovative things are happening. It’s a great place to
exchange ideas, find out what hot, what's not, and stay on the cutting
edge whatever your particular business is.
5. Your Business Hours
If
you've been paying attention to the first four points, you're well on
your way to becoming a successful home-based business owner. Now we
don’t want you to blow it by thinking you can keep banker's hours.
The
global market is a 24-hour per day market, and a 365-day per year
market. Let the others sleep late on Saturdays and take Sundays off.
Those times could be your day to move and corner loads of customers that
the others miss.
You should get up earlier and quit work later. You
should be open for business on holidays and be available 24-hours a day
either personally or through your answering service.
"But wait a
minute!" you might be thinking at this point! "I thought that working at
home was all about freedom and an end to drudgery. This sounds like
nothing but endless work!"
Well, here's the thing. For most of you
who quit your regular jobs to go to work for yourself, you'll discover
something magical. You'll discover that when you are working for
yourself, when you are building your own business, a lot of what you do
not seem like work at all.
The great writer Jane Roberts said, "Inspiration is its own motivator."
Running
your own business is all about being inspired 24-hours-a-day. When you
stop selling your body and soul to some company or corporation and start
giving your energy to yourself, work has a way of turning into
inspiration and play.
The perfect work for you is that which you
don't think of as work, yet doing it makes money and provides you with
the bread and shelter of life. You’ll see what it's like if you make a
true commitment to being self-employed, put all your energy into it, and
stick with it for the long run.
