Been There, Done That: Confessions of a Home Business Junky
by Michelle McGarry

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My obsession with home business probably began when I was old enough to babysit. The entrepreneurial spirit took hold of me very young, and I began my first business at the age of 11, charging $2.00 an hour to babysit the children of neighbors.

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I kept careful records of the hours I worked and the fees I collected in a special notebook, and I even made notes of when I spent any of my earnings and on what. Aside from the obligatory lemonade stand I had when I was even younger, this was my first real homeworking experience.

The lures of working from home are many: be your own boss, set your own fees, be closer to your family, control your own destiny. Who could argue with those benefits? A lot of people are making money selling the idea of home business, but how many people are really succeeding at it? The challenges, though not as highly publicized, for beginning a home business or finding a homeworking opportunity are just as many. The first challenge, and sometimes the most insurmountable, is finding the right work-at-home situation for you. The research alone can cost you a lot of time and a lot of money. Over the past six years, I have tried many different ways of working from home. Here are some of my experiences:

Full-time Telecommuting: My Dream Job?

My first experience was amazingly, a full-time telecommuting job as an editor for a national trade magazine. It seemed like a dream job. I was hired just a week after I found out I was pregnant with my first child. But I thought, "This is the perfect job to have as an at-home mother."

Finding a full-time telecommuting job (with benefits!) that is actually in your field is hard enough. How could it not work out? The problem is that every telecommuting situation is different. Of course, being an at-home mother is a full-time job in itself. I knew this, but I figured I could be flexible with my hours and still complete my tasks on deadline.

I realized in less than a year in the job that I was not going to be able to work full time with an infant in the house, even if it was in my home office. My boss required me to keep strict office hours (M-F, 8-5) and the job was simply too demanding to do it all. Even the other editors who had children at home told me—they still had to have childcare Monday through Friday. Ultimately, my salary was not enough to justify paying for childcare. It was surreal to have to quit that job, but I had confidence that I would be able to do something else at home part-time.

Word Processing and Freelancing:
Tedium and Deadlines

Next, I found a work-at-home, work-when-you-want word processing job for a human resources company. They processed resumes for companies all over the world and they hired homeworkers to clean up and sometimes retype the scanned resumes. You could start and stop whenever you needed to, so this schedule sounded great.

The problem? It was piece-work, and you got paid by the page. Plus, the work was so tedious that you really needed to work fast within a chunk of time in order to get anything done. You needed to build up a rhythm and go through pages quickly to make your time worth it. In the end, it was just not enough money for such a tedious task, for which I did not have solid chunks of time to devote to. End job number two.

My third opportunity was a regular freelancing job for a book production company. They needed 20 hours a week from me. My daughter was now 18 months old and my husband had some time to help out with her, so I accepted the freelance job. I knew I had 20 hours to spare. Unfortunately, they needed 20 hours in a row to meet their deadlines. I worked on two books for them, and both needed two 12-hour days to complete on deadline. I had planned to work 20 hours over the course of a week in order to accommodate the rest of my life. But listening to my daughter cry for me through the door of my home office over those four days was unbearable. This time the money was pretty good, but ultimately my daughter came first.

Home Business Books:
Lots of Creative Ideas, Not a Lot of Detail

During the course of all these attempts to find the right work-at-home situation, I developed an addiction to home business books. It seemed like the only way to control my own schedule was to create my own income source. In those efforts, I have read practically everything on the market relating to home business. I particularly like the books that feature real people who are working from home in a field that they love. Books like "Finding Your Perfect Work" by Paul and Sarah Edwards, "The Stay-At-Home Mom's Guide to Making Money from Home," by Liz Folger, and "The Women's Home-based Business Book of Answers," by Maria T. Bailey provide nicely written, inspirational, and informative profiles of successful home biz entrepreneurs.

The books that are both helpful and not helpful at the same time are the ones that have a lot of ideas, but not a lot of guidance for each idea. Start an online newsletter? Sounds great, but how? Begin a desktop publishing service? Okay, where do I learn the software? These were the questions that vexed me while I read. There are a lot of interesting ways to earn money from a home business, and I became motivated to find out the details of each one.

Learn from My Lessons
Now, this isn’t to say that telecommuting, freelancing, piecework, or other homeworking opportunities aren’t for you. Many people succeed in these situations. The major obstacle to overcome is discovering that right opportunity. If you’re bouncing from idea to idea, you’re not alone! Many of us have done the same.

So, what have I learned? Go with your first passion if you can. Mine is writing and publishing. Second, do the one thing you can't live without. Think of the thing(s) you enjoy doing every day anyway, and discover a way to make money at it. Third, make your priorities clear to yourself. Write down all the things you are willing to sacrifice (and not) and what you really want to accomplish. If your first priority is being an at-home parent, then what else are you willing to sacrifice to make money? Sleep? Personal time? A clean house? Or maybe the money isn't worth any of it and you need to re-evaluate your budget. Either way, it’s now my priority to help those still searching to discover the breadth of home careers out there.

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Michelle McGarry is author of "Train at Home to Work at Home: How to Get
Certified, Earn a Degree, or Take a Class from Home to Begin a Work-at-Home
Career" ($12.95), which details more than 200 distance learning programs from which
you can learn 27 popular and profitable work-at-home careers. For more
information, visit www.michellemedia.com.
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