Five Ideas for Working at Home

Here is a list of five ideas for working from home, together with some sub-lists in some cases of things that you could consider or need to think about.

Five ideas

• 1. Run your business from home
• 2. Run a bed-and-breakfast
• 3. Let your land or rent a room
• 4. Mind the child; mind the dog
• 5. Look after someone else’s things

We’ll look at each of these in a bit more detail.

1. Run your Business from Home

There are many businesses that you can run from home. Here are a few examples:

• Accountant
• Bed-and-breakfast
• Electrician
• Financial advisor
• Leaflet distributor
• Plumber
• Web designer
• Writer

The point is really this, consider very hard before you decide to take on any premises for your business.

Reasons to take on premises:

• Not enough room at home
• Taking on extra staff
• Need to be able to welcome clients to more professional premises
• Need a workshop

Reasons not to take on premises:

• Keep costs down
• No travel to get to work
• Flexibility in working arrangements
• Life–work balance

Home is a great place from which to run your business. It can reduce stress and increase your useful working time.

2. Run a Bed and Breakfast

Running a bed and breakfast seems to appeal to quite a number of people in Britain, but it is harder work than many people imagine. It involves having strangers in your house, and you can almost become a servant in your own home. You will need to make your property available at holiday periods, and this could impact on your own holidays. Your property will need to be in a fairly popular area to attract enough business to give you a decent income – unless this is only one of your enterprises. However, for the hard working homemaker running a bed and breakfast can be very appealing, and it is something - by its very nature – that you have to do from your own home.

3. Let your Land or Rent a Room

If you are lucky enough to have enough to be able to let some out land (and we are talking a substantial amount of room for the activities below), then here are a few ways of renting it out:

• Caravan site
• Car parking
• Children’s sports
• Flower shows
• Forestry
• Garden fetes
• Horse shows
• Marriages
• TV or film location
• Wind farming

If these activities are too big, then you might have enough room to rent out as storage: say, an outbuilding, or a garage you don’t use.

If you have a spare room, then you could rent it out to a student at the local university, or to a foreign worker finding his/her feet in your town.

4. Mind the Child; Mind the Dog

Child-minding can come with qualifications and checks, but it can be done from home, provided you are happy to have under-fives in your house – with all the care that necessitates!

An easier alternative might be to run a pet-minding service. In this way you visit the homes of people who are away, or out for the day, and need their pet feeding or their dog taken out for a walk. It’s a fine way to get some exercise too.

5. Looking after Someone Else’s Things

In a similar way to pet-minding, this could be house-sitting or tending to someone’s garden while they are away. Not everyone has a relative or a neighbour they can use or trust, so would be happy to use such a service. You might also be able to look after someone’s business while they are away by, for example, providing a telephone answering service or tending to their mail while they are away.

These ideas may take your fancy. Some may not, and some may be impossible for you to do. However, let these few simple ideas fire your mind? What sort of business could you run from home?