Home Based Businesses - Statistics, Challenges, Solutions.

According to a recent survey conducted by First National Real Estate, about 710'000 Australians are now working from home. This growing trend is echoed around the world, with predictions that the pioneers in the field, the Americans will have more than 40% of their workforce operating from home by the year 2000.

Australians starting their own home-based business will be joined in the next decade of rapidly growing numbers of 'tele-workers'. These are employees of companies that require large parts of their staff to work from home, using modern telecommunication equipment such as the Internet.

Experience shows that there are people doing anything and everything from home: arts and crafts, service industries (such as marketing, sales and also design, publishing, trading, etc.) and professional businesses (such as accounting, law, architecture, real estate, insurance, correspondence courses, etc). It is an ideal place from which to be a consultant, trainer or trader and lends itself also to areas such as telemarketing, mail order and import/export.

The Australian Home-Based Business Association (HBBA) has some 80 different categories of occupations on record that people from all over the country are operating from their respective homes.

Challenges

The downside of home-based business is mainly the danger of 'taking it too easy' or, on the other side, to 'loose contact with the outside' while being in home work mode. It is therefore essential to try to establish a routine the respective individual is comfortable with - and then to stick to it. This does not mean that you have to fall into a slavish 9-5 routine or that you have to become a slave of your schedule. Nothing is wrong with taking advantage of nice weather and visiting friends - if you do the work later. However, if you don't, your load is bigger the next day (which happens to be your best friend's cousins' birthday which you completely forgot) and after a few weeks of 'interrupted' rout.....

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