When you start running a business from home, your house changes. It’s not just a place for you and your family to live, relax and enjoy life, nope, now it’s an office. It’s a location where you could have various pieces of sensitive data related to your customer’s finances. You will also be spending most of your day there working. Don’t forget you spend about 30 percent of your life working and now that action is confined to a place where you also play with the kids, spend time with your partners and in general relax. You can probably see how this can become an issue. This and other reasons are why you have to make sure that you are making the right changes to your home and ensure that you are recognizing the new business side of it.
When You’re At Work, You’re At Work
One of the most difficult things about running a business from home is that technically, you’re there. It’s very difficult to explain to children, particularly small children, that you aren’t free just because you’re in. They could be off school on holiday, but you could still be working. They could get home long before the working day ends. However, you have to set guidelines and make sure your family and indeed your friends know that you could be very busy even if you are at home. As you will discover, this is a difficult concept for many people to grasp. You need to be very clear and stick to the time when you have finished work. If you wouldn’t be free at the office, you shouldn’t act like you’re free running a business from home.
Your Home Must Be Secure
As already mentioned, you could be keeping many things in your home that makes it more valuable and indeed more of a target. The key example would be customer personal information and financial info. This, if you are running a business will all be kept on your hard drive and computer network. Do you need to consider this when sorting out your home insurance coverage? According to a provider like Trusted Choice, it’s certainly something that you may wish to consider. In addition, you might even want to think about taking out business insurance on top of this. That will ensure that if anything valuable such as customer info is stolen from your home, then you are covered financially.
You should also make sure that you have the latest up to date tech security on your computer systems. It is important that you treat this as you would to protect an office computer, not a personal system.
Keep Meetings Away From Home
When you run a business from home, it becomes your office. Sometimes in business, you might bring clients or business partners back to your office. When you run your company from home, you shouldn’t do this. You should either use a virtual office, meet them elsewhere or communicate online. With the latest tech on the market these days, that is certainly a possibility that can and should be considered. Bringing people home can be seen as unprofessional and open up your home in a way you probably do not want.
We hope you see now why changes must be made when you run a company from home.