18 months ago (has it really been that long?) I started a boutique consulting company providing technical, operational and management advice to Cable, Satellite and Telephone companies and vendors in the commercial video space. Part of the plan was to operate the business out of my house to keep expenses as low as possible. The business started slowly as I learned what it takes to run my own business.
The business has grown to the point that I recently decided to rent some managed office space in a nearby building. It's quite a commitment for a bootstrapped startup but I think the results are worth it.
Here's why: It was certainly cool to work from home. I've done all the fun things, conference calls from bed, the backyard and the garage and at first is seemed like heaven to never "go to work". But, therein lies the challenge;
if you never go to work, how do you know when you leave work? At first al all blurred together, hours and days didn't matter, just the number of billable hours I worked each week. That was fine for a few months, but after a while some problems started to emerge.
First of all, I live in a pretty small house, so the option of where to work are limited. I tried the home "office" which was too buried with personal junk. I tried a couple of other places and ended up simply working from the couch in the living room. In hindsight, this was the first mistake. You need separation between work and home.
Second was the intrusion of work on "personal" time, it starts slowly with a couple of early calls from the east coast, then came even earlier calls from Europe. I was OK with them because I was "at home". They quickly become a regular occurrence and pretty soon I started to resent the constant disruption. Letting this schedule go unchecked was the second mistake.
For me, a more pressing problem became when and how to end the day. After a few months I realized that I was spending 12-14 hours a day on "work" because I was continually multitasking between work and personal stuff and felt that I was never done with work. I tried to formalize the arrangement by closing all the work apps on my laptop at 5pm to have a clear separation of work and play. That was a step in the right direction but I still felt that I was always at work.
Then Kathy lost her job and started to spend much more time at home. I love her to death, but humans are simply not meant to spend 24hrs a day together. All of a sudden I felt the need to keep the volume low in morning conference calls or skipped optional calls all together to avoid disturbing her. After a few months of this the reduction in productivity and the marital friction became apparent. SOmething had to change.
I shopped around and found a small full managed office with Regus near the house. For just a few hundred dollars a month I now have a fully furnished office in a beautiful building. I'm only a few days into the new space but I've already noticed I'm closing To-Dos faster and making more "networking" calls then ever before. I'm obviously still in the honeymoon period here, let's see how long the glow lasts.
