A home business presents an obvious problem: You might be too comfortable. You must stay dedicated to what you’re doing and be willing to work hard. You’ll find that organization and discipline can overcome a lot of obstacles, including the temptation to do something other than your job.
Make time for family
Believe it or not, it is possible to run a successful home business and still have time for family, fun and vacations. Work hard, but find ways to achieve balance. If you don’t, you’ll burn out and the business you worked so hard to build will fall apart.
If you go home and watch TV all night long, you’re going to be among the masses that are out there wondering what happened to your life. You have to really have the determination to do this. You have to sacrifice and give some things up; otherwise it won’t happen.
When I started out, when I took family vacations, my business closed. That is not a good plan. Now that the business has grown, I have on-call people who come in. They retrieve my phone messages every hour while I’m gone and they can run the business just as well as I do when I’m gone. But that wasn’t the case when I started.
Do you want to maintain your client base when you go away? And I would say the answer was yes, because it is much easier to keep an existing client happy than to go out and find somebody to replace those folks. So in your absence, you need to make certain that you do have somebody who can clone you. Nobody’s going to love your business and have the passion for it that you do. … But when you leave, know that it is in good hands and that it is being taken care of as well as anyone can be expected to take care of it.
Learn as you go
Remember that your customers equal more than the bottom line. Think of them as an investment, and let them know you care about them. Did you know your best source for new product ideas will be customers who have problems or special requests?
Turn weaknesses and mistakes into learning opportunities. Too many people get out of the home business arena because they’ve had a failure or two; this is a perseverance game, and without tenacity, your home business is dead in the water.