Released December 2008 (Self-Counsel Press) * 232 pages * ISBN-13: 978-1551808666
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This is the kind of book I needed but didn’t know to look for. I am in the process of starting up a freelance business, but have had no idea exactly how to go about it or what to consider. The whole process is just so big that it’s hard to know where to begin and what to avoid. Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business gives an overview of how to determine whether you are prepared to run a home-based business and what steps to take first.
The book covers businesses that sell services that are local (for example plumbers) and those that can sell globally (like things that can be shipped or transferred digitally). The book is divided into three sections: Mind, Body, and Soul. The Mind section covers how to go from initial brilliant idea to assessing the value of the idea to actually getting off your keister and starting a business (One of the chapters towards the end of this section is called “You do realize you’re the one who makes work appear, right?”). This section also talks about the boundaries that mindset imposes on us and how to overcome a limiting mindset.
The Body section focuses on the physical requirements for starting a business: money, space, software, documents, advertising, etc. The advice is straightforward and useful. I found the advertising section particularly useful as I really had no idea what to consider or rule out for a business just starting out. Now I have a number of ideas based on the reasoning and advice of this section. I also found the section on forms interesting as Furman gives an example of how changing the wording on his quote form increased his closing rate from 50% to 75%. It’s a common sense change but I rarely see it on quote forms I’ve been given by service providers (more on forms further down when I discuss the accompanying CD). Other interesting information included a compelling argument for having a separate phone line for home-based businesses as well as voice mail (something home-based business owners often think they can do without).
The Soul section covers topics like pricing, dealing with difficult customers, being a good boss to yourself, dealing with competitors, customer service and making time to work on the business itself.
A lot of what Furman says is common sense, but the thing about common sense is that you have to understand how something works in order to have common sense about it. Otherwise you’re just guessing and a lot of people guess wrong (that’s why so many people make the same beginner mistakes no matter which skill they’re learning). This book not only goes over what to do, but it also goes over why the beginner mistakes are mistakes by explaining why a particular approach doesn’t work.
This book comes with a CD of forms to get you started including forms on focusing the idea of your business, coming up with a start-up budget, a guide to writing a press release and instructions for writing a marketing proposal (there are a few other odds and ends on the CD as well). These files are actually quite useful (and I say this having taken a course on business writing and on branding small businesses), but they are not reproduced in the printed book so access to the CD is vital to benefit from these forms. This is where the publisher made a strategic blunder.
The files on the CD are in .doc (Microsoft Word) and PDF (Adobe Reader) format which is great because it makes them accessible to almost anyone–or at least it should. For reasons that escape me these files are sequestered in a proprietary program interface that must be installed on your computer (strike one) and ONLY runs on Windows (strike two). Got a Mac? No document access for you (no, you can NOT just pull them off the CD using a Mac–strike three). Now, the publisher does disclose that the CD is PC only. The issue is that there is no justification for excluding Mac users (or any other non-Windows operating system).
The proprietary interface which requires installation on my PC (which, take note, I hate because the last thing I need is another useless program installed on my PC) appears to have the sole purpose of requiring you to accept an agreement to not redistribute the files and give you a pretty browser interface to find the file you want. That’s it. That’s the sole reason–as far as I can see–to prevent Mac users from accessing otherwise platform-agnostic files. It’s not a good reason. All the program does is unpack the files so that you can copy them to your hard drive … at which point they can be read on any computer (so the proprietary program is also pointless in its purpose of keeping the files only on the original hard drive).
The good news, if you’re a Mac user, is that the unpacked files can be read on a Mac IF you can find a friend with a PC willing to install the program to unpack them on their computer. The bad news is that likely violates the agreement that publisher wants you to agree to (though technically the agreement is to only have one copy of the files so if you delete them from the PC …). Do with that information what you will.
CD issues aside, I really like Start & Run a Real Home-Based Business and found it surprisingly useful. In fact, I’ve recommended it to several of my peers who are also contemplating a home-based business.
You can buy this and other Self-Counsel Press titles from Self-Counsel Press (US and Canada) and Amazon (US
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Thank you, Anysia, for the terrific review of what we think is a great book!
At Self-Counsel Press we are not entirely happy with the CD-ROM system we are currently using. There is a little history involved: we were a fairly early adopter of CDs, initially for our business and legal forms kits, then when retail book buyers asked for them, we added them to many of our books.
Our early CDs were dual-boot (Windows and Macintosh). Three factors caused us to (unhappily) drop the Macintosh option:
1. Cost: we were being charged 2x to 3x as much for the dual-installers and that was pushing our retail/cover prices up by more than we or the retailers wanted.
2. When Apple changed its operating system, the vendors we were working with struggled with the new installation tools and began talking about even higher prices.
3. We surveyed the major retail buyers we sold to and they said the Mac option wasn’t a priority for them (at the time, Apple had a very small market share), they just wanted all versions of Windows covered.
As I said, the current system is not ideal. We are working on a plan to drop CDs from our books and make them available via a download process, so they can be OS agnostic. We started work on new websites early this year and the new Self-Counsel.com sites will launch next month (You have a news scoop! This is the first public mention).
It will likely be close to the end of the year before we have the CD problem solved. We’re a small company with limited resources to make major changes, so we can’t put some big “team” on the project because we don’t have one.
On a personal note, I’m a Linux (Ubuntu) user outside the office and would prefer the files to be in ODT format!
Sincerely,
Richard Day, Publisher
Self-Counsel Press
Hi Richard,
Thanks for clearing that up. As a consumer I don’t really see the need for installers instead of making everything HTML based (even on CD) and therefore accessible to all but I suspect there are other considerations that came into play. In any case it is good to know that this is on the radar at Self-Counsel Press and that there is a move to a web-based interface.
If you have any say in the matter, I too would prefer .odt files as I use Open Office on Mac and on PC.
Ann