Idea Whose Time Has Come: Home, Suite Home : Lifestyle: Work-from-home gurus lead a groundswell of 30 million who commute from bedroom to office.
Twenty years ago, Sarah Edwards saw her future.
The relatively satisfied holder of a government job, Edwards had a meeting with a consultant who did something unusual. He worked out of his house. Edwards, the mother of a young son, loved the idea. “I could make my life work this way,” she thought.
Today Edwards and her husband Paul, 53, are known as the gurus of the home office. Working out of their Santa Monica townhouse, the couple have written five books on the subject, including the bible of home-based business, “Working From Home.” More than 35,000 subscribers participate in their 10-year-old Working from Home Forum on CompuServe information network. And on the radio and in a popular column for the magazine Home Office Computing, they offer tips on how to succeed in business without taking off your fuzzy slippers.
In 1993, working at home is an idea whose time has come. More than 30 million Americans do it. But as the couple recall, it was relatively uncharted territory in 1974 when they quit their office jobs to try to make it on their own, Sarah as a home-based psychotherapist and Paul as a political consultant.
“Our sensors told us this was something more and more people were going to be doing,” Paul said. But the public was unconvinced. “The neighbors thought Paul was unemployed,” Sarah said, laughing. There were few places to turn for advice when they became home business pioneers. Indeed, by quitting their day jobs before getting their home businesses established, they broke what has become one of their cardinal rules. But, for the most part, they say, their two decades of working where they live have been a pleasure, although there were years, Sarah said, when they spent more money than they earned.
There are three main reasons home businesses have taken off, according to Sarah. First, the high-powered, affordable home computer, the fax and other new technology, she says, “make it possible to have a first-rate office in your home.” Second, a changing economy is fueling the trend. Large companies shed 4 million employees during the 1980s, and layoffs continue despite an upturn in the economy as a whole. This year, Sarah said, there were one-third more corporate layoffs than in 1992. Finally, she believes, working from home (the term they prefer to “working at home”) has taken off because Americans don’t like working for other people. “Deep in their hearts,” she said, “7 out of 10 Americans say they want to be their own boss.”
If any single development underpins the homework phenomenon, it’s the computer, they say. Sarah recalled that they wrote the first draft of “Working From Home” on an IBM Selectric. The final draft was done on their first computer.
Today publishers routinely accept manuscripts on computer disc, but in that electronic Dark Age--only a decade ago--the publisher wanted only hard copy, and not copy produced on a dot-matrix printer, thank you. Sarah recalled that they had to fight to get a chapter on computers included in the book.
Today, 60% of all home businesses are computerized, Paul said. Able to interact with larger businesses as equals, these computerized small businesses are an increasingly vital segment of the economy. “Every minute a new home business is born,” said Paul, who cites Apple and Day Runner as examples of innovative home-based businesses that made it big.
Anticipating a boom in home-based businesses, the Edwardses published “Working From Home” in 1985. They have been in the business of advising home businesses and telecommuters full time ever since. Their books, filled with flow charts and checklists, deal with everything from determining whether you have the temperament to work at home (they strongly advise against working in bed) to the nuts and bolts of setting up a billing system.
As befits an enterprise based in Southern California, there is a New Age aura to some of their advice. In a list of instant energizers for the home-based worker who is beginning to wilt, they suggest giving yourself a 60-second round of applause (don’t forget to stand up and take a bow). But the pointers can be utterly pragmatic as well. What to do about clients who never pay on time? The couple suggest giving them a discount if they pay within 30 days. If all else fails, the gurus advise charging the chronically tardy more than other clients because you are giving them financing.
The Edwardses promise to tell you “Everything You Need to Know About Living and Working Under the Same Roof” (the subtitle of their first book). This includes home office hygiene. Among the tips you least expect to find in a business book: using dark grout in tiled areas of your home office. This, they assure, “saves hours of bleaching and scrubbing.”
On the more global question of whether you should let clients know that you work at home, they advise: not necessarily. They quote a home-based consultant who does not reveal that home is where her office is. “I work with Fortune 500 companies,” she said. “They’re used to working with consultants who have Madison Avenue addresses. I don’t actually know what they would think if they knew I was talking with them in my bathrobe, but I’d just as soon not find out.”
The couple predict that by 2000 1 in 3 Americans will work at home at least part time. Young people who can’t find conventional jobs and older workers who are losing theirs will make up a major part of this home-based work force. The couple note that the people who are most successful working from home are those who want to be there.
Ever the psychotherapist, Sarah urges anyone who finds himself or herself working at home because they have no choice, to shift their energy from the negative to the positive.
Take all that anger, frustration and disillusionment, she advises, “and channel it into creating the things that are in your heart.”
