Home Based Craft Business
Tips to Work at Home Effectively

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Building a home based craft business may seem ideal and idyllic to many creative people. It's true that an art or craft based business can be a fantastic way to feed your creative energies, and earning a living and making money with art can be a compelling goal for so many creative people.

If you are eventually able to build your home based craft business to a point where you are able to quit your day job, then working from home can be an amazing way to achieve the work life balance that is elusive to so many people. It allows you to free yourself from nine to five schedules and gives you more flexibility for family time or personal time.

I love my own home based craft business, and I don't regret for a second leaving my previous field of work. My jewelry business has let me do the hands on, creative work I love, as opposed to the paper pushing corporate work that I had been promoted into. It has also given me enormous freedom and flexibility to be at home with my son.

However, working effectively from home is not without its challenges; it's not as easy and dreamy as it may seem. You may have visions of bringing your laptop out to your sunny backyard, having a cool drink beside you, and lounging on your deck chair as you write up your marketing plans. That sounds pretty great, it's a little fantasy of mine, but it has not been my experience.

Having a home based craft business can be more a matter of sitting in your spare-bedroom-turned-home-office in the twenty spare minutes you have between disciplining your kid and doing the dishes and letting your tea get cold as you work out the math to figure out how you spent so much money on supplies that month and try to resist the urge to shove all of your receipts in a shoe box that tell you yourself you will most definitely organize later.
For me, building a home based craft business has had far more benefits and opportunities than challenges. But, if you're thinking about starting a home based craft business, there are specific issues that arise for most people who work at home that you might want to consider. Taking the time to plan for and deal with these challenges can help smooth the transition period when you begin to work at home.

Here are some of the challenges that have arisen since I started to work at home, and links to some strategies I use (or ideas I know I should use) to manage them.

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Tips for working from home:


Working Without Administrative and Technical Support
Working from home typically means working without administrative and technical support. It's amazing how much you can rely support staff in a traditional office environment, and how much you miss those people when they're not there.

Telephone Tips for Artists and Professional Crafters who Work at Home
Home office telephone issues usually fall into two main categories: making sure business calls are always handled in a professional manner, and not allowing business phone calls to creep into personal time. This article will help you develop telephone strategies to keep your home craft business professional and (somewhat) separate from your personal life.

Home Office Space
If you’re going to work at home efficiently, there's no getting around it, you'll need some type of designated office and studio space. This article outlines how a designated home office and studio space can benefit your home craft business.

Time Management - Getting to Work
Time management and getting down to work can be difficult when you have a home based craft business. If you learn a few simple strategies to minimize distractions and schedule your time, you'll find that getting to work when you're working from home is much easier.

Organization
It's important to give yourself the tools and equipment that you need to work efficiently. If you have a lot of paperwork, you'll need a filing cabinet. If storing your craft materials in clear containers will help inspire your work, then investing in those containers can be a good idea. You don't have to spend a lot of money outfitting your office and studio space. It's amazing what you can find for reasonable prices at dollar stores, on eBay or through other sources if you take the time to look.

Getting Away from Work
When you work from home, you never leave work, so it's easy to let your work creep into every aspect of your day. To avoid burnout, most people need to set boundaries around when they will and will not work on their business. Having one specific room for business related activities can help you to separate work and personal time when you work from home. If you do use your home computer for business and personal reasons, having separate user accounts and email addresses, one for personal use and one for business use can help you to separate the two. That way, when you're in your business user account, you're working on business, and when you're in your personal user account, you're doing personal things.

Getting Respect
Sometimes, when you have a home based craft business, it can be difficult to get friends and family members to respect the fact that you are working and running a business. If you don't have a regular 'day job', they'll see that you are not off at an office, don’t have a boss enforcing deadlines and have a certain amount of flexibility in your day to day schedule. As a result, you become the one who is called on for favors in the middle of the work day.

Many people choose to work from home in order to have flexibility and to be more available for others during the day. However, it will become important to find ways to strike a balance and set boundaries to ensure you have the time you need to make your business successful.

Meeting Deadlines and Achieving Goals
When starting a home based craft business, the idea that there is no boss who is placing demands on you can be very appealing to many people. However, you will still have deadlines, goals and responsibilities and many bosses in the form of your customers. It will be important to develop long term goals, ideally in the form of a business plan, as well as short term goals.

As a small business owner, you will be the only person who is responsible for keeping an eye on the day to day deadlines, like meeting with a customer and the longer term deadlines, like getting your product, displays, photographs and paperwork ready in time to meet the deadline for your first application to a juried art and craft show. Writing down short and long term goals will help keep you on track, meet deadlines and achieve goals.

Building my home based craft business, and working from home has been a great career decision for me. It has given me freedom and flexibility for family time that I would never have had in a more traditional job. It is a great outlet for all of my creative energies, and after years of buying into the "starving artist" cliché, I love the fact that I am making money with art.

Starting a home based craft business, or a home based business of any kind is not for everyone. It's important to carefully weigh a lot of factors before jumping in and committing to a business. If you take time to research and read as much as you can about the realities of working from home, and building a home based craft business, you will be well prepared to make well informed business and career decisions for yourself.

 
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