Important Considerations for Your Home Office

There are several important aspects to consider about your home office:

1) The main elements
2) The layout
3) Your Equipment

The main elements:

Each home based business has different needs, but every home office requires several basic functional elements:

A relatively private place for you to run your business free from noise and distractions – the level of privacy will depend upon you and how much you need to function productively. You may know what level this is now or you may have to make adjustments as you go along to figure out what is ideal for you.

If you’re a service provider (versus a manufacturer or wholesaler) you do not need a home office large enough to store inventory or component parts.

If you have clients, you will probably travel to their offices for meetings, so you do not need a conference room.

Office furniture: A well-lit place to sit down and work. You’ll need a desk, chair, and a lamp.

An efficient and atheistically pleasing layout of the furniture, equipment, and décor.

Adequate storage, such as a closet and filing cabinet, so that you eliminate clutter.

Equipment: a computer, phone, fax machine, printer, Internet connection, database, and back-up system.

Let’s first look at the layout of your home office.

Your Office Layout

Make your home office a place in which you like being. Consider:

The quality, size, and type of desk that you want. Also consider where you’re going to place your desk in your home office. The best place for a desk is in the far corner, on a diagonal across the room from the door.

Your color choices, placement of plants and water, as well as the shape of the room. A square or rectangular room is best.

Placing artwork in your home office. Artwork contributes to harmony and productivity in your home office.

Entranceways are important even if you do not have the general public coming to your home office. Entranceways are the symbolic representation of how opportunities come to your business. Does the pathway into your office flow smoothly? Or is it an utter challenge to get into your office? Make it easy and enjoyable to enter your office.

For example, excellent choices in an entry are: a beautiful piece of art work, lush plants, an aquarium, or a water fountain.

If you want to give more consideration to the layout of your home office before you make any definite decisions, consider learning more about feng shui (pronounced "Fung-Schway").

Equipment

Most home business owners need at least the following equipment:

A computer or laptop, along with internet access, electronic mail, and software applications to assist you with your business (such as word processing, spreadsheet, and database software to store information about your customers).

A phone and phone service. It’s a good idea to keep your business line separate from your personal line. Also consider getting a cordless phone and a head set so that you can talk on the phone hands free.

A fax machine – if you anticipate that you will be getting a lot of faxes, you may want to get a separate phone line for your fax machine. Otherwise you can hook your fax machine up to your business line and set it up to automatically handle receiving faxes.

An adequate back-up system. I know of several home business owners who did not back-up their computers regularly and lost everything when their system malfunctioned.

How much is all of this going to cost?

The prices for computers, laptops, fax machines and other office equipment has come down dramatically over the past several years.

In addition, the prices for phone and internet access services have come down. Check to see if you can get all-inclusive package from your local phone or cable provider. Most important - do your research before buying anything.

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