Success in starting a business at home greatly depends on how good you are at budgeting your existing resources. And in a difficult global economic climate, where businesses are looking to optimize costs, the opportunity for you to start a business at home has enormously increased if you can manage your budget.
Best advice I can give you next is to involve freelancers!
I’m not suggesting that you become a freelancer yourself, though that’s one way to go into business for yourself at home. Instead, I’m proposing something else. My suggestion is that you begin to rely on freelancers to launch a business at home. Consider the following rationale as the main driving force in coming to rely on freelancers to start a business at home.
Freelancers Can Do What You Can’t and Ought Not Do Yourself
Do you know which are the most popular kinds of work that freelancers are doing today? According to an article by Mashables regarding the fastest-growing jobs online 10 years ago, freelancers had started that far back to do web search, virtual assistance, copy typing/transcription, data entry, data processing, article submission and customer support. These were the type of gigs that made the Top 10 job listings back then.
But what about today?
Today, FlexJobs.com says the most popular gigs are not even jobs themselves but entire fields.
Leading the pack is Marketing (Marketing Coordinator, Marketing Manager, Marketing Project Manager), Web Development (Junior Developer, Web Application Developer, Web Content Developer), Accounting (Accounting Clerk, Property Accountant, Bookkeeper, Accountant), Teaching & Tutoring (Subject Teacher, Instructional Designer, Education Coordinator, Consulting Teacher), Graphic Design (Digital Designer, Visual Designer, Communications Designer), not to mention Business Project Management, Writing, Social Media and even Insurance Inspection.
Do you realize this means that you can now hire temporary services from experienced experts just to work on a single project called building your business at home?
You can even hire the coordinator of that project to run administration of your initial phases, provided you know what you want accomplished!
What then is holding you back when so much freelancing resources have become available to you, even top experts from other countries who would charge you a fraction of what you may pay an equivalent expert at a local level for the same service?
Starting A Business At Home Means You Are Not The Freelancer
Temp work is now a mainstay of our global economy. Not only have we better get used to this for the long-term but learn how to exploit the hidden opportunities in this new and enduring social condition – the Gig Economy – in our globally competitive labor market. Working from home may not be simply an option that you now have available from an employer. It may be the only option you have open before you if you’ve retired or have become part of the long-term unemployed.
But remote work may well be also your best option to gain full control over your career and your future, once again, provided you know what you want to accomplish!
Let’s revisit freelancing with a pair of new eyes.
The Joy of Relying on Freelancers
Freelancers are among the most dedicated professionals who are starting a business at home. “People’s motivations for taking up freelancing are overwhelmingly positive, with over half (55%) citing desiring greater flexibility and over two fifths (44%) saying they wanted to increase their income,” according to The HR Director interview with Xenios Thrasyvoulou, founder of PeoplePerHour, who said: “Just like the Bank Crisis before it, the pandemic has proven to be a powerful catalyst for people to reassess their work lives. Whether this is through freelancing full-time or supplementing their employment with a side-hustle.”
“The rise in the number of side-hustles and other freelance work is reflected in the PeoplePerHour platform. During the pandemic, PeoplePerHour has seen its biggest rise in registrations for more than a decade. Almost a quarter of a million (227,000) people applied to use the platform in 2020, up from 136,000 in 2019. Globally, it was a similar story with a 61% jump in freelancer registrations on the platform.”
Freelancers have found value in developing a clientele that would hire their services whenever a project happens to be funded, rather than on a permanent basis as full-time employees for large corporations. Most PeoplePerHour.com clients are sole traders or limited company micro-businesses, as well as small to medium sized enterprises, although Thrasyvoulou says that many clients are larger organizations from sectors that have traditionally used freelancers.
According to PeoplePerHour.com, media businesses that, for example, use journalists and designers, visit the site to fulfill assignments and the agency has found that even bigger firms use them when they need a job done quickly and to high standards but wish for a skilled professional, like a marketing director or IT manager buying the services of a freelancer to create an animated cartoon or an expert video quickly. This is the result of freelancers providing true value, speed, and flexibility to any organization they assist. And there are many platforms to rely upon, such as Upwork, Fiverr, Guru.com, Freelancer.com and 99Designs.
Finding workers there to meet temporary service demands may cover even yours, if you can define yourself as an organization.
And an organization is a long-term project – one large project consisting of smaller ones – causing specialists to collaborate with each other to produce a final output to meet a market need.
Freelancers, therefore, are like small business service providers who deliver assistance to other small businesses on a low risk, low cost basis, unlike recruitment agencies that supply workers or contractors under a long-term commitment.
By starting a business at home you could remotely build yourself a small team and penetrate a market niche. The people are there. The expertise is there. The affordability is there. The market niches are there. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. All you need is to coordinate these workers and give them their marching orders.
So, why aren’t you doing this coordination work?
What’s Your Role As A Home Business Startup Owner Backed By Freelancers?
Are you lacking a vision? Are you lacking confidence? Do you know what to do but you’re still procrastinating?
Can it be that you’re not doing the work you alone can and ought to do because you are not yet a small business yourself, thinking and acting like one?
Consider what you could accomplish if you used some of the easiest to find freelancers right now. Let’s just use an example. If you had a little bit of money and your goal were to create an audio information guide to introduce yourself online to a specific market, what could you do?
- You could hire a freelance researcher to find specific material that you don’t wish to spend your own time looking for yourself. All you need is to know the main topic you want elaborated upon and why you need this much information. Who will it benefit from you making it available to others?
- You could then serve all this information to a data processing freelancer to analyze and report it to you in a concise, value-laden format. This summary can inform your next step, which is to plan a way to publish the most valuable content that you’ve collected so far.
- So, next you could speak into your computer’s microphone and record the information that you received from your data processing freelancer plus your own additional insight and expertise and have yet a transcription freelancer transcribe your words into a file to turn it into a script.
- You can then hire a wordsmith freelancer to prepare a final draft for a voice-talent freelancer to deliver as a final, high-quality recording.
- Pay yet another graphic design freelancer to make a cover for your audio guide.
- You can next hire a web developer freelancer to build you a one-page website where to load your branded and professionally sounding audio guide and you’re ready to publish!
- Hire one last social media freelancer to build you an audience and a campaign to promote your guide and you’re done.
Is it possible that you can’t get organized to get all this work done? Then, pay a virtual assistant freelancer to help you set up your calendar and track the progress of your project. Maybe pay another one to serve as your project management freelancer for all of the above!
In other words, start acting like a small business by starting a business at home dealing with other small businesses called freelancers. Coordinate their efforts and THEY will build the business for you!
Starting a business at home is a matter of organizing and tracking yourself as you might a budget, with the help of specialists, to harness the resources available to you to produce something that people want and would pay you for. It’s all about thinking and acting like a business.
Get a vision. Build up your confidence doing the actual work. Stop procrastinating. And you will be able to start your own business right from home with the help of freelancers.