Lots of people want to start home businesses. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a stay at home parent or work outside the home. A home business often sounds like the way out of your financial troubles.

Considering all the challenges, why do people put so much faith in having their own home business? Do they really understand the risks?

Other People’s Success Stories

Hearing about how other people have succeeded in home businesses is a big reason why so many people want to start their own. It sounds so good! This person started a simple business in their garage and now makes millions. How can you resist?

Freedom!

Another reason people want a home business is for the freedom they believe it gives. Run a successful home business and you can go on vacation when you want, work the hours you want, have tons of time for your family, the list goes on.

Following Your Passion

Running your own home business is a great way to do something you love. What is it that you’ve dreamed of doing to earn a living? You can quite possibly do it as a home business.

Is It All True?

Here’s the kicker. Running your own home business can bring you everything you want. Maybe. If you’re one of the lucky ones.

More likely is that you will work hard for years building your home business. Maybe you make a living, maybe you don’t. You might even *gasp* fail! As with any other kind of business, more home businesses fail than succeed.

Your typical real home business success story is not a tale of a newly made millionaire. Those home businesses that succeed don’t all make big bucks. Many make just enough for the family to get by. Others run their home business for extra money while continuing to work their day jobs.

And don’t count on extra time for the family. While you can take time off as you please, most people running home businesses find it takes a lot of time to do it right, and there’s the temptation to keep working well beyond the hours that you would have worked a regular job, even with overtime and commuting.

Should You Bother Starting a Home Business?

None of this means you shouldn’t get started if you dream of owning your own home business. You should. You won’t succeed if you don’t try.

What you should be doing is taking the chance with your eyes open. Understand what you’re risking. Understand that success most often means long, hard hours of work before you see any payoff. Understand that you are taking a financial risk.

You might succeed wildly. You might fail miserably. You might be somewhere in between. But if you don’t try you will never know.

Hard to believe the holiday season is upon us already. Whether or not you personally celebrate Christmas or any other holiday at this time of year, you probably need to get ready for those who do if you sell anything that might be given as a gift.

This time of year is great for making sales. Even when people are cutting back, there are still many chances for your business to do well.

Time to decide if you can increase your advertising to gain the attention of those who are spending money. Time to make your products stand out as great gifts. Time to be certain that you can fulfill customer needs promptly.

If you’re selling physical products, that’s a lot of work. Your workload has probably long since increased just in terms of preparation. November’s pretty late to be getting ready, after all.

It’s not too late, of course, even if life has been hectic enough for you that you aren’t as ready as you would like. Just means you have to push a little harder to get things done.

You don’t want to run out of stock. You don’t want to run behind on shipping. You don’t want to ignore customer needs even if you’re swamped with other things.

Even if you’re an affiliate you should be geared up or gearing up by now. Take advantage of the season and the extra shoppers! Be willing to answer questions that will help you to make sales.

I’ll admit I’m running behind on much of this myself this year. It has been crazy, but I know that I need to get it done.

Figure out what your business needs and do likewise. There’s no time to waste.

I’ve been reading The Power of Being Personal on Your Blog over at ProBlogger and really enjoying it. Like many people I vary how personal I get because I think about my privacy and that of my family as well.

Being personal is a big help in just about any home business. You aren’t some giant corporation. You’re you. It should show in most cases, to at least some degree. How much depends on the type of business you’re running. If you’re dealing mostly with other professionals, they may expect more of a professional attitude from you.

A Few Privacy Basics

A while back I switched the registration on this site to a private one. I really don’t like having my address and phone number out there unless I’ve given it out directly. I haven’t switched all my domains to private yet, but my big ones definitely.

Some people don’t trust private domains as much because you can’t tell who’s running them. I can understand that. But when you’re raising a family their privacy comes first.

Besides, I hope that I say enough personal things that it doesn’t matter.

That’s also why I have a P.O. Box that I now use for if I need to put my address out there. I don’t like the inconvenience, but it gives me an extra level of privacy by making my home address harder to get.

I’m not so worried about it however, that I won’t mention the city I live in from time to time or talk about things I have done. I do not mention future plans or vacations I’m going to take, or even that I’ll be out on errands. Keeping private about such things on my sites, Twitter and so forth is just good sense. You don’t know who is seeing what you publish.

Family and Privacy

Figuring out how much to share of family life is an entirely different matter. I could talk a ton more about my kids if I wanted. Some people do. It’s not my style. If I’m going to embarrass my kids in front of their friends with stories about their childhoods, I’d rather do it in person.

It doesn’t bother me to post the occasional pic of my kids, but it’s not a regular thing. They aren’t the focus of how I run my business, even though they’re the reason I have it and they determine much of my working hours.

I post even less about my husband, especially about disagreements. We don’t have many really serious ones fortunately, but in general that’s not my kind of thing to memorialize online. Others feel differently and that’s fine.

Besides, he’s just so darn cute when he’s keeping Selene out of my hair, as he is right now.

His work I especially keep private. Not relevant to anything I do here and people have gotten in trouble in the past over work related stuff posted online. I wouldn’t do that to him, even those times that it has been tempting. I’ve said if he gets a new job or something, but not details.

Minor tales about family I do sometimes post. Hopefully through the years I’ll still feel that I chose the right ones to share.

That’s the big trick with protecting your family’s privacy while trying to be personal online. Sometimes the family stuff is highly relevant. It certainly emphasizes the small and often personal nature of a home business.

Keeping it Real

Privacy doesn’t worry so much that I use a pen name. I am who I say I am. It’s just easier for me to be me that way.

I share my personal experiences, and sometimes even talk about income.

I hope to try video one of these days. That one’s difficult with three kids in the house, especially when two aren’t in school yet.

It’s little touches like that, where you don’t worry about privacy that I think really help a home business owner really emphasize that they’re a person, not a corporation. In many markets, especially online, that helps.

The decision to work at home is one I’ve never regretted. It’s challenging, exhausting, takes up pretty much all of my spare time plus any other time I can give it, but it’s still a great experience.

I have to admit, though, the ups and downs can be pretty rough. Especially the financial ups and downs. But it’s all part of the game.

Dealing with the Financial Ups and Downs

I must say, the financial ups of working at home, and particularly of running a home business have been pretty amazing for me. I don’t just mean not paying for daycare, which would be a pretty big expense with 3 kids.

I mean the months where I get really good commission checks. Bringing in a really healthy check (by my standards) feels great.

On the other hand, those months where it seems like I can’t earn a decent check no matter what I do really suck.

That’s something you’ll face in most home businesses and many work at home jobs. It’s a reality.

Demand for your business goes up. Demand goes down. Competition comes. Competition goes.

For work at home jobs, sometimes there’s tons of work to be had. Other times things are just quiet. That was true even when I was a medical transcriptionist, and that’s a pretty high demand field.

If you aren’t ready for the financial ups and downs (especially the downs), working at home in any capacity is going to be pretty hard on you and your family.

Dealing with the ups is pretty easy. Just don’t overspend in the good times. You need money ready for those times when things aren’t so good.

Dealing with the downs is harder, especially if you haven’t prepared well for them. It’s easier if you have enough money to get by for a few months despite a low income.

But even with that, it’s going to be rough emotionally.

Dealing with the Emotional Ups and Downs

How you feel about working at home in part echoes how your income goes, but not entirely. You can get frustrated even when your income is great, and you can feel great about the work you’re doing even when it’s not yet bringing in any real money.

This is where you need family support. When things just aren’t running smoothly, you don’t want to hear “I told you so” from anyone. You want and need support.

Family’s the best place to get it, but you can also get great support from online friends. Just don’t let it lead into so much goofing off online that you don’t get any work done.

You can share your problems in your favorite forums. You can tweet about them, share with your Facebook friends, whatever and wherever you like to do to vent your frustrations.

Just don’t forget to share your triumphs too.

Enjoy the Ride

Working at home can be a roller coaster in so many ways, but you can’t let it get to you too much. Enjoy the good, deal with the bad and don’t give up. Believe in your ability to make it work, and eventually you will.

I posted last week on how many people set their sights too low when working at home. There’s a flip side to challenging yourself, of course, and that’s working too much.

This is a mistake you can make even if you haven’t set very high goals for yourself, and what defines it is quite vague. It much depends on you and the needs of your family.

Sometimes a particular schedule is just right, but then circumstances change just a little bit, and the schedule is overworking you.

This is something I’ve dealt with quite a bit lately. Having a new baby, moving, getting settled, taking my son to speech therapy, figuring out if we can manage preschool classes for him, taking my daughter to and from school… it all adds up and really makes for a more challenging schedule for me to work.

And so I work fewer hours on my business than I’d like because my family has a lot of needs right now.

I’m much prone to overworking, and I know it. I’ll stay up late even when I know the baby hasn’t been sleeping well and I’ll just be dragging the next day. It’s not the best of habits, really.

It doesn’t feel like overwork; I enjoy what I’m doing. But when I’m that tired later on, I know.

So how do you balance your ambitions with working an appropriate amount?

It’s not always easy. You need to pay attention to your own needs as well as the needs of your family. You don’t ever want to forget why you’re a work at home parent.

Make sure you take some time every day with your family. Eat meals together whenever possible. Play as a family before putting the kids to bed. Take a break with your spouse.

Sometimes, yes, you’ll overwork yourself by working more after doing all the fun stuff. That’s how it goes at times. Just don’t let overwork be your entire way of life.

I think I’m like a lot of work at home moms in that my original reason for working at home was to add to our family finances without needing daycare. Not all that much was needed, as by the time you take out the costs of daycare, transportation, wardrobe, eating out more and so forth, any job I was likely to get at the time wouldn’t be bringing in that much.

Either that or I’d be bringing in enough that we’d complain that my husband’s income was getting entirely eaten up by that stuff. But since I was the one having the baby and having left my job for other reasons at the time, as well as taking training in medical transcription, it just made sense for me to be the one at home.

And sure enough, those first few years I didn’t earn that much. I just worked part time hours on my transcription and dabbled in a couple websites. Nothing serious.

Until the first month that I had a website outearn my husband’s income.

That was quite a flash of insight. Suddenly I realized that there was much more potential in what I had been working on.

These days my sights are higher. I don’t always outearn my husband; matter of fact some months flat out suck. But knowing that I can do that has made me set my sights even higher.

I want to let him work at home.

That’s a tough one, I’ll admit. That means a sufficiently stable income to take that gamble. It means being able to pay for health insurance for a family of five. It means money to invest in whatever it is he wants to do and keep it up while he gets things moving.

After that, the goals get higher yet.

What Do You Expect of Your Home Business?

When you set a goal of just a couple hundred a month, you probably aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. It may be all you need, but is it really enough to motivate you to work as hard as it takes to get things going?

Admittedly the benefit of being there for your family is pretty motivating too. But it’s motivating in a different way than earning money.

Here’s the thing. If you can earn a couple hundred a month, there’s a pretty good chance that you can expand on those same concepts and earn more the same way. It won’t always work; some things just don’t grow that way, but often enough one thing leads to another.

I like having tiers of earning goals. There’s my basic goal of a regular $5000 a month which I’ve hit a couple times, but have yet to reach regularly. And since my lows can be really, really low yet I know I have a good bit of work to do.

But that goal is just the first, and it’s not enough to get my husband working at home. Not in southern California anyhow, and we have no plans at this time to leave the state. Both of our extended families are primarily here.

Set your goals high enough to be challenging but low enough that you know you’ll reach them eventually. You won’t know how long it will take, but make it reasonable and it will happen.

Plan rewards for yourself for each goal. I have rewards planned both for occasional high earnings and for when things start looking regular.

How Do You Get There?

There are a few key factors to reaching your business goals. One quite simple to say – hard work.

Hard work won’t guarantee success, but you’re not likely to get anywhere without it.

But there’s generally more to it. You need to invest time and money into training yourself. How you balance this depends on what you can afford to spend versus how long you’re willing to take to find the right information.

If you’re in network marketing, for example, downloading The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing and buying The Renegade Network Marketer can be a great place to start. You need to know how to build your business, and trial and error or working your family and friends isn’t always all that effective. It’s better to learn from someone who knows what works.

The resources you pick depend on just what it is you want to do. If you really aren’t into network marketing, those resources aren’t going to do a thing for you. They’d be a waste of time and money.

Pick just one business skill you want to improve. It should be something that helps you to make money, whatever it is. You might want to do more on AdWords and want the latest version of Perry Marshall’s AdWords guide. You might want to learn more about article marketing, blogging, forum marketing… any one of many more skills that you can use to grow your business.

Yes, you’ll probably have to spend money. Buying ebooks or training from reliable sources is very much so worth the expense. You might find the same information for free elsewhere, but you’ll have to dig through a lot of garbage and inaccurate information first. The time saved is worth it most of the time.

Don’t try to improve all your skills at once. You’ll probably just make it harder to improve any of them. Pick one. Get comfortable with it and see how it works for you. Focus on it.

Once you’ve really mastered it or decided that it really isn’t for you, then you can go on to the next thing. Don’t drop anything that works well for you, of course.

Your focus should always be on meeting your goals. While you can have very simple goals, the simple truth is that having higher aspirations can be more motivating than merely wanting enough to get by. Don’t settle for good enough. That can be your first goal, but why let it be your final one?

How would you spend it?

I don’t care if you already have a home business and call it an added $1000 that you could spend on your business however you like or you haven’t decided what to do and need the money to get started.

How would you spend it?

I’ve been thinking about this post for a few days. I’m terrible at spending money, which is good most of the time, but bad when I should be investing more money into my business. This is a pretty tough question for me to answer.

If only I could say “buy more time” and be done with it! But it’s really not that simple.

I’d probably put the bulk of it to marketing. A part of it to this site because I love this site, but also for some of my other sites that have had less of my attention but have good chances to make money.

One of the strategies I’ve considered is putting up flyers at local colleges. The ability to work at home is great for college students, and I wouldn’t mind getting a little more attention from that area.

Another possibility would be to use it to get a great prize for a giveaway, such as an iPod or similar item. Something that might generate attention on its own as people tell their friends about it.

I’d probably also hire someone for some blog topic research. Probably not writing the posts, just getting some of the research out of the way. I like writing my own stuff and I think I’d be too prone to rewriting the whole thing if I hired a ghostwriter for my posts.

All that could easily use up $1000. How much to each part would depend on what seemed to be working. I wouldn’t suggest throwing money at something that hasn’t been tested on a smaller budget first for the marketing stuff, and hiring help always includes a search for just the right person, and that can cost money too in paying those who just don’t quite work out.

Your turn.

Finding the right home business is wonderful, but it’s not an easy process. You may have to try a few business models to find the one that works right for you.

Trouble is, trying out home businesses can be downright addicting.

Becoming addicted to starting new home businesses is a great way to fail. You overload yourself and never really find what you excel at… or if you do, you don’t have the time to really do it right.

There’s a thrill to starting a new business. New products, a new topic to talk about, a different way to market. It’s fun, and I won’t deny that.

But having at least one business that you are succeeding at matters far more than the thrill of chasing after dozens of ideas. Without success, what’s the point of being in business?

Home business addiction can take a few forms. It might mean you jump from one opportunity to another in network marketing. It might mean you halfway launch a dozen websites, but never really promote any of them well enough to get anywhere (owning a dozen or more sites and running them well is another matter). It might mean buying into every grandiose product launch you read about in your email, spending thousands before you really understand what you need to learn.

Sometimes it pays to just stop. Take a look at where you’re going. Pick something to focus on. Quit trying new things and try to master one thing you know kind of well.

It may take time, and it may be hard to tell early on what business you are most likely to succeed in. You’ll learn more, however, by giving your favorite a solid try with as few distractions as you can manage.

In a lot of ways, I’m still in shock about how last week went. I’ve rarely been so crazed in my life, in large part because I was so limited in what I could do to take control of the matter.

The server problems were out of my hands once I made the decision to go with a dedicated server. All I could do was wait for the IP and DNS to propagate once I did my part of the work. I wanted to take so much more action, but there was literally nothing I could do to speed things along.

Plus the phone kept ringing and ringing with people wanting to get information from me one way or the other. With the site down, what choice did they have?

Never mind that I never, ever get calls normally. It completely threw me off that I was getting them at first, but on a guess I had about a dozen on Thursday. Wasn’t exactly keeping count or anything, but for a time the phone was ringing quite regularly.

Add in the care that I have absolutely no interest in avoiding of my family. For me, running a home business does mean I sometimes allow my family to take most of my time, other times the business takes over. But no matter what there are some things I will always do for my kids, and it’s more than simply being there.

When things get crazily busy, all you can do is decide what to drop. In my case this time around, it was the third item that has been making my life hectic of late – unpacking from the move.

Yep, we’re still living in part from boxes, which is no fun at all. But I was certainly willing to deal with that a little extra to cope with a business crisis.

Things are finally easing up a little. I’ve answered tons of emailed questions (~300 on a guess). A few addresses bounced back to me, which is a pity for those whose questions therefore didn’t get answered, but that’s how it goes.

All in all, it’s been an interesting lesson in just how much I can deal with. Pretty amazing, really.

How do you cope when your life goes from busy, to really, really busy?

Working at home can be chaotic. Working at home while trying to move, even more so.

That’s what I’ve been working on lately. There’s absolutely no doubt that it has cut massively into my “working on my home business” schedule. Drives me nuts.

It’s not just the time loss. It’s being extra tired. Trying to figure out some way to have fun with the kids, who are of course concerned about the move and really want more time.

We’re moving because my husband got a job in San Bernardino. We’re quite delighted about that, even though we had really hoped for the San Diego office so we could stay where we are. It’s not easy to leave a house you’ve lived in for 4 years, raising your children and having another baby.

Much of the move has fallen on my shoulders. My husband has to be at work all week, so he can’t handle a lot of the stuff that needs doing during the week. He’s simply not available. Thank goodness for willing grandparents and a very helpful older sister who lives closer than we do to my husband’s new job. She and her husband have been so patient with having my husband there every weeknight, plus my kids playing with her daughter when I need to do stuff up that way.

I’m lucky that way.

Like everything else in home business and much of life, it comes down to planning.

1. Figure out the times that you’ll be working versus house/apartment hunting, packing, etc.

The balance here depends on how fast the move needs to go. We decided to be optimists about finding a place to rent, and gave notice to our current landlord pretty quickly. We even made it work. We’ll be out in plenty of time.

The faster you want to move, the more you need to tilt the balance toward finding a place to live and packing to get there.

Expect to lose some working days entirely. There have been plenty of days where I just have not had the energy to deal with anything beyond what it took to find a new place to live.

If you have clients, make sure they know you’re moving, and work with their needs as much as possible, even hiring someone else if need be to do the work you can’t get done due to your move. A virtual assistant for yourself may be a good idea too.

2. Pay attention to what you can live without for a while, versus what should be packed last.

You don’t want to pack away anything to do with your home business until you’re ready to have no access to it. For me, that means my computer stays out as long as possible.

Pack as neatly as possible, with all boxes labeled so that you can get organized again as soon as possible in your new home. If you aren’t in a big rush, this can also be a great time to declutter and get rid of all those papers that build up over time.

Now is a very good time to back up your computer. You hope nothing will happen to it on the move, but stuff happens. Better to be prepared.

I do this regularly anyhow. I have an external hard drive that backs up my files at night. Big, big help. They’re really quite affordable these days, especially when you consider the cost of losing all your files.

3. Check the rules for home business at your new home.

Don’t commit to anything until you’re sure that your home business won’t be a problem. If you’re entirely online, it really shouldn’t be a problem. However, if you ever have clients come to your home, there may be issues. You need to be sure that you can still run your business wherever you go.

Sometimes you’ll need a business license, sometimes a home occupation permit, sometimes a Fictitious Business Name or a DBA. Requirements vary quite a bit. Know what you need so you can keep your business legit.

4. Get your utilities and internet service hooked up in plenty of time at the new place.

How much in advance you need to take care of this depends on where you’re moving to and what kind of internet service you need. When my sister moved she got FIOS, which had a two week lead time on it. Other services can be turned on more or less same day.

5. Plan the layout of your new home.

This isn’t just for your home business. It’s for entire family. With luck, you’ll be able to dedicate a room as a home office. Maybe it will even have a door!

My home office at our new home will be pretty much like what I have now, that is to say a room that is still a part of the main body of the house, no door. We’re planning on having it be my office as well as the play area for the baby (she still needs to be near me, after all), plus have my husband’s computer in it and a homework place for my daughter. It’s a bigger room than we have for all of that right now, though, which will be nice.

Planning things a little in advance of the actual move helps when you’re moving. It’s nice to be able to put the boxes in the room they belong in, rather than in a big stack as you debate when you get there.

6. Keep planning your unpacking around your home business.

The move doesn’t stop when all the boxes and furniture are in your new home. It doesn’t even stop when you have the everyday basics set up.

Unpacking can be quite the process, and it too will interfere with your home business. You don’t want to be living out of boxes forever. At the same time, you may be quite eager to get your business running again. When you love what you do, it’s hard to ignore it once you’re sufficiently comfortable in your new situation.

But you do need to get the unpacking done too. It can be quite frustrating dealing with the little issues caused by having this and that packed away.

Work on the unpacking at a rate you and your family can tolerate. How fast that needs to be is a pretty personal decision. But I don’t recommend taking months and months to get the job done.

The idea, after all, is to get settled so that the move is no longer interfering with your ability to work your home business and enjoy your family. Once it’s all out of the way you’ll be glad it’s done.