Working
At Home: The First Year Revisited
by: Kirk Bannerman
For reasons that escape me
now, I kept sort of a diary during my first full year of working at
a home based business. It was nothing close to being a complete daily
diary, but was more of a collection of scribbles about things that
I felt were worthy of note at the time. Since quite a bit of time
has passed since then, I decided to revisit these notes.
In no particular order, here
are some of the things that I had made note of.
Choosing the path...in the
beginning, my enthusiasm was very high (perhaps too high?) and I was
chasing off on several different home-based business opportunities
at the same time (exhibiting the "dog in a meat market" syndrome,
I suppose) and not focusing my efforts enough to be successful at
any single one of them. I finally reigned myself in and focused on
a single work at home business opportunity.
In other notes I find reference
to emotional and/or psychological issues that I experienced and are
probably typical for most people when starting a home based business.
When working at home a person can, at times, experience a feeling
of isolation which is probably brought on by the lack of interaction
of a work force environment.
There were also periods of
doubt in the early going...did I pick a viable business opportunity?...am
I doing the right things to develop my business?...when will I start
making a profit?, and so on.
Many of the entries in my so-called
diary had to do with the proverbial "two steps forward and one step
backward" thing and the ever-looming temptation to become discouraged.
Although I didn't appreciate it at the time, it is now obvious that
as long as you have more steps forward than backward you will eventually
get ahead! Isn't hindsight wonderful?
Other entries reflect the fact
that relatively minor events can seem huge in the early stages of
developing a work at home business and can really contribute to an
emotional roller coaster ride. For example, if you are just starting
out and you have two customers/clients and you lose one...that's a
50% drop! However, if you fast-forward in time to the point where
you have hundreds of customers/clients and you lose one...that's just
a mere fraction of 1%! Same event, just at a different point in time.
Looking back on it now, some
of the stuff I recorded now seems humorous, but I'm pretty sure that
was not the case at the time I made the notations.