Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Work at home – full time parent

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I’m a full-time mother at home and very much wanted to start my own business at home were I can support my daughter and still be there. 

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Starting a business while parenting a young child. One very important factor to evaluate when considering starting a business is your personal life chapter. Starting and growing a business requires a tremendous amount of passion, commitment, time and energy. It is, truly, not for the faint of heart or for those who cannot commit most of their time and energy to the endeavor in the beginning phases. Getting a business up and running can easily consume the vast majority of your waking hours for months and months, if not years and years. Balancing that reality with the time and energy demands of a young child is a formula that often adds up to doing neither thing well. It’s very easy to neglegt both the business and the child in an effort to spread yourself between each. Both a young child and a young business are needy, self-centered creatures that are essentially black holes for your personal time and energy: they will take whatever you’ve got and more. While both children and businesses can be tremendously rewarding, they both require sustained investments of high levels of focus, time and energy to be have positive outcomes.

In addition to the time and energy  demands of starting a business there is the economic reality. In 2009 the median income for a woman working full time in the U.S. was $36,278 (source: U.S. Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_wealth/cb10-144.html ). The economic reality of starting a business, especially one that you could run alone from your home while simultaneously caring for a young child, is that you would be very, very hard pressed to generate $36,278 in after-tax profit even after a year or two of operation. For the overwhelming majority of businesses it takes time to get to a point of profitability. In many cases, it can be months or years before you see your first penny of profit. Evaluate the ideas you have for a home-based business and do some basic economic calculations: Sales – cost of goods sold – cost of operations – cost of sales & maketing (advertising, etc.) – financing costs (interest on credit cards or loans) = profit. Do you have any ideas that can realistically come close to $36,278 annually? Can they come close to that while simultaneously raising a young child?

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Questions for the Next Gig

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I was asked to provide career coaching feedback on a new employment opportunity, so I worked up these questions. These questions are equally applicable to a startup or other business opportunity, with suitable modifications around manager / company / product or services .

Ask the questions before you become emotionally invested in the opportunity. Once you get past that line, your emotional investment will color or skew your perceptions to the point you will not be able to be objective about the answers.

Use as many objective, fact-based data points as possible, and keep a log or spreadsheet that rates and weights the answers.

Questions #1 – #3 are absolute show stoppers.

It can be possible to overcome #4 if you can see a clear path to obtaining the necessary skills, etc. Most entrepreneurs get to where they end up by answering “Yes, I can do that,” to every challenge and figuring it out as they go along. That approach does not disqualify you for opportunities, but you need to be honest about how that changes your risk profile.

The answers will never come back all positive, but the goal is to have the majority of the answers to questions 5-11 come back positive. Some negative responses, such as those around customers, products and services, etc., may provide leverage points for negotiations.

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4th Floor Walkup

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Yesterday, an entrepreneur told me of his father, who died at 81. The father lived in a 4th floor walkup until he was 79, when a fire in the building forced a move to a new building. The new building came with a wonderful view of the East River and an elevator. The view was nice, but the elevator eliminated those eight flights of stairs up to the 4th floor. To this day, the entrepreneur is convinced losing that daily climb up the staircase was the death knell for his father.

It’s often quoted folk-wisdom that climbing stairs adds years to your life. That’s interesting, since the goal of human civilization, once past the creation of the civilization itself and aside from war, has largely been the elimination of all possible effort associated with life.

From elevators to Google search, anything that eliminates effort is rewarded; from rotary dial phones to manual crank car windows, anything that adds effort is penalized. Day by day, year by year, more and more effort is removed from life, leaving more and more effortless life, more and more elevator rides through existence.

Is there a price to pay for that?

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