COVID-19 has brought countless challenges for business but at the same time, helped us realize the power of remote working, freelancing, and collectively, working from home. Running a business from home has many advantages such as the ability to move your working schedule around other commitments and not having to worry about long and dreary commutes to work.
Tips to run your business from home
Whether you’re running your business from home due to the pandemic, or it’s something you’ve always been doing, here are some handy tips for you to run your business from home smoothly and scalably.
1. Pick a dedicated workspace
Working from home gives you the flexibility of picking your own work durations for the day, and even the comfort of working from your bed. However, choosing a dedicated working space is essential too. It can be difficult to differentiate working time and relaxation time, and if you work from any room at your home, this could be a problem. Choose a dedicated working space – a room where you could close the door if possible – so that you’re able to concentrate when it’s work time. Try and choose an area or a room that has little disturbances such as noise.
If you’re struggling to stay motivated, there are many ways to help resolve this problem. First and foremost, look at your workstation. Is it clear of clutter? Can you easily see your screen and other tools you need? Do you have a comfortable chair, and are you using it correctly? Is this room, are you working warm or cool enough? Does it have proper lighting? All of these factors can affect your productivity levels and resolving them can surely help with your motivational problems.
2. Get a mailing address
Every business needs an address, whether that be for mail forwarding UK (or elsewhere), or to register yourself as a business. However, listing your personal address essentially welcomes unavoidable circumstances. Luckily, there’s an easy solution for this – physical mailing addresses! These are real street addresses that will handle any incoming mail – allowing you to view it virtually, and prevent your home address from being publicly listed on the internet. You can also search for various virtual mailbox and virtual address solutions online such as physicaladdress.com.
3. Try and keep to a schedule
As briefly touched upon earlier, one of the main benefits of running your business from home is that you have the flexibility to juggle other commitments in your life, whether that be children, elderly parents, or even hobbies that you enjoy. However, this can quickly lead to problems for your business. Working around an erratic schedule may mean you miss deadlines, fall behind on sales, or miss emails that could lead to more opportunities. While it’s perfectly okay to bend the rules for your personal needs, try and keep to a schedule as much as possible. Be sure to delegate your time by planning out how long to spend on particular tasks to help you stay on top of things.
If you struggle to make and stick to a schedule, there are plenty of free online scheduling software tools that can help you fall into rhythm.
4. Outsource
Even the most skilled entrepreneurs have gaps in their knowledge that prevent them from doing absolutely everything in their business, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of that! Whether you need some help with writing content and product descriptions for your website, or you need someone to manage your social media channels, there are millions of people out there who can help! You can leverage any of the popular freelance marketplaces such as Upwork and Fiverr to outsource the work that you don’t like doing or find it difficult to manage yourself.
5. Find a trustworthy accountant
Running a business is hard enough without having to think about whether you are getting all of the financials right. While it’s perfectly okay to tackle this yourself, mistakes could mean paying higher taxes and a loss of profit. Besides this, there are various compliances or changes in government rules can lead to unavoidable problems for you and your business. In order to prevent that, you should find a local and trustworthy accountant or financial analyst to help you both in the short and long run. They will be able to take another load from you and you can rest assured all of your accounting is done correctly.
Summing up
There’s a lot to think about when moving from office work to working from home, and it’s important to keep all of these factors in mind when making the transition. Whether this is a permanent thing, or temporarily due to the Coronavirus pandemic, you’ll find working from home easier than ever.
If there are any other tips that you would like to add, please let us know in the comments below.
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