Working At Home: The First Year Revisited

by Kirk Bannerman

More Home Business Articles

Published on this site: January 2004 - See more articles from this month

For reasons that escape me now, I kept sort of a diary during my first full year of working at a home based business. It was nothing close to being a complete daily diary, but was more of a collection of scribbles about things that I felt were worthy of note at the time. Since quite a bit of time has passed since then, I decided to revisit these notes.

In no particular order, here are some of the things that I had made note of.

Choosing the path...in the beginning, my enthusiasm was very high (perhaps too high?) and I was chasing off on several different home-based business opportunities at the same time (exhibiting the "dog in a meat market" syndrome, I suppose) and not focusing my efforts enough to be successful at any single one of them. I finally reigned myself in and focused on a single work at home business opportunity.

In other notes I find reference to emotional and/or psychological issues that I experienced and are probably typical for most people when starting a home based business. When working at home a person can, at times, experience a feeling of isolation which is probably brought on by the lack of interaction of a work force environment.

There were also periods of doubt in the early going...did I pick a viable business opportunity?...am I doing the right things to develop my business?...when will I start making a profit?, and so on.

Many of the entries in my so-called diary had to do with the proverbial "two steps forward and one step backward" thing and the ever-looming temptation to become discouraged. Although I didn't appreciate it at the time, it is now obvious that as long as you have more steps forward than backward you will eventually get ahead! Isn't hindsight wonderful?

Other entries reflect the fact that relatively minor events can seem huge in the early stages of developing a work at home business and can really contribute to an emotional roller coaster ride. For example, if you are just starting out and you have two customers/clients and you lose one...that's a 50% drop! However, if you fast-forward in time to the point where you have hundreds of customers/clients and you lose one...that's just a mere fraction of 1%! Same event, just at a different point in time.

Looking back on it now, some of the stuff I recorded now seems humorous, but I'm pretty sure that was not the case at the time I made the notations.

Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and resides in California. For more details, visit his website at
http://business-at-home.us