Finding the right space for office supplies in a home office can often be a challenge. Using space wisely by being organized will allow you to get more work done on time. Unfortunately,  the reality of a home based office is that there seems to never be enough space. A recent article from Entrepreneur.com, written by Jonathan Blum, offers tips on how to organize and best utilize home office space.

1. The challenge: No dedicated office
Some work-from-home businesses (especially the sales-centric ones) require more time out of the office than in it. So they can often get by without a dedicated office. But it’s easy enough to transform an existing room into one.

“I find that dining rooms are often underutilized,” says Jennifer Coleman, principal at JKC Designs, a Rye, N.Y.-based design firm, with a practice in urban home office design.

Simple solution: Choose pieces that can do double duty.
Install an articulating keyboard under your dining table. A pedestal table is best, so the legs won’t be in your way.

Stash the laptop, files and supplies in a buffet or sideboard that closes up after hours.

Perfect solution: The custom-made “rolling office.”
Turn a rolling kitchen cart into a portable desk. A quality choice is the maple-topped “Cuce” Cucina Elegante from John Boos (johnboos.com), which has locking casters and is available with drop leaves.

2. The challenge: Gadgets galore
Technical professionals, such as those in IT or telecom, amass rooms full of computers, printers, external hard drives and cords–often to growing familial horror.

“These clients need a highly customized solution that optimizes all the space they have,” says Claire Tamburro, principal at Tamburro Interiors, an interior design firm in Arlington, Va. “That will most likely involve casework built specifically for the job.”

Simple solution: Reach hig

If you have floor and wall space, install simple floor-to-ceiling cabinets.

If wall space is at a premium, install cabinets horizontally along the ceiling.

Mount power strips inside desks or storage units to power and charge gadgets. Doug Mockett & Co. is the place for state-of-the-art desk organizing tools.

Read More:

Starting a home based business for many people seems to be ideal. You are in charge of how your day will go, the meetings you attend and what calls you will make on a daily basis. However, running a home based business is not an easy task. Below are some tips from Entrepreneur.com on how to keep your home based business running smoothly

• Structure your day. The problem a lot of homebased business owners have is that they no longer have a boss standing over them making sure they get their work done, or a tangible start and end of each workday. It’s easy to let time slip by as you head to the refrigerator, catch a few minutes of TV, or dive into a project first thing in the morning, neglecting the other tasks you need to perform to keep your business running smoothly.

• Stay connected. Carry an organizer wherever you go. If you’re still using a day planner or similar dinosaur, consider upgrading to a Blackberry or other high-tech gadget. You don’t need to go crazy and spend a lot of money, but invest wisely in something that will hold everything you need and allow you to instantly access it on the go. Another good idea is to not keep all of your information in one location, such as the hard drive of your home computer. Keep your data hosted on a virtual exchange server so you can access it anywhere that has an Internet connection. A big misconception about homebased business owners is that they stay at home all day, everyday. And as you know, that’s just not always true.

• Organize your family time. Once your professional life is organized, you may need to consider organizing your personal life. Maybe you noticed right away, or maybe it’s just becoming apparent, that you tend to work around the schedule of your family members. This is especially true if you have children. A lot of people, especially young moms, decide that they’re going to quit their jobs in corporate America and work from home in order to care for their children and save on daycare expenses. But in reality, if you’re serious about running a homebased business and earning a decent income, you’re going to have to make arrangements for childcare in or outside the home. Otherwise it becomes too distracting. Consider hiring a babysitter so you’re guaranteed five to six solid hours to get your work done.

• Motivate yourself. Sit down and set some goals for yourself. You no longer have quarterly reviews or progress reports, so it’s important to keep track of whether or not you’re making progress in your business. It’s one thing to set small goals like completing your to-do-list–you also have to set goals to motivate yourself to succeed. Hopefully by now you’re making as much, if not more, money at your homebased business than you were at your former job. If you aren’t, begin by setting a goal to bring in the same amount of income you were, and slowly raise the bar to increase your income by a couple of thousand a month. Once you’ve met a goal, make time to reward yourself by doing something fun, which brings us to the next tip.

• Take time out for good behavior. It’s not uncommon to find yourself working 60- to 70-hour weeks. But the good thing is, if you want to sneak out and see a movie at two in the afternoon, nobody’s going to tell you not to do it. You have that freedom and flexibility as a home business owner. It can be tempting to work all the time when you start seeing how successful your business has become, but know when to relax. You’ve already established a smooth-running business. Take a break every now and then so you don’t get burned out.

Read More:

In order to be a successful entrepreneur it takes a lot of hard work and dedication.  Successful entrepreneurs do not evolve overnight, and believe it or not, entrepreneurs have multiple characteristics that drive their commitment, honor and goals, which drives their achievement.

Below is an article from Entrepreneur.com regarding the 25 most common characteristics of successful entrepreneurs.

1. Do what you enjoy.
What you get out of your business in the form of personal satisfaction, financial gain, stability and enjoyment will be the sum of what you put into your business. So if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, in all likelihood it’s safe to assume that will be reflected in the success of your business–or subsequent lack of success. In fact, if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, chances are you won’t succeed.

2. Take what you do seriously.
You cannot expect to be effective and successful in business unless you truly believe in your business and in the goods and services that you sell. Far too many home business owners fail to take their own businesses seriously enough, getting easily sidetracked and not staying motivated and keeping their noses to the grindstone. They also fall prey to naysayers who don’t take them seriously because they don’t work from an office building, office park, storefront, or factory. Little do these skeptics, who rain on the home business owner’s parade, know is that the number of people working from home, and making very good annual incomes, has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.

3. Plan everything.
Planning every aspect of your home business is not only a must, but also builds habits that every home business owner should develop, implement, and maintain. The act of business planning is so important because it requires you to analyze each business situation, research and compile data, and make conclusions based mainly on the facts as revealed through the research. Business planning also serves a second function, which is having your goals and how you will achieve them, on paper. You can use the plan that you create both as map to take you from point A to Z and as a yardstick to measure the success of each individual plan or segment within the plan.

4. Manage money wisely.
The lifeblood of any business enterprise is cash flow. You need it to buy inventory, pay for services, promote and market your business, repair and replace tools and equipment, and pay yourself so that you can continue to work. Therefore, all home business owners must become wise money managers to ensure that the cash keeps flowing and the bills get paid. There are two aspects to wise money management.

1. The money you receive from clients in exchange for your goods and services you provide (income)
2. The money you spend on inventory, supplies, wages and other items required to keep your business operating. (expenses)

5. Ask for the sale.
A home business entrepreneur must always remember that marketing, advertising, or promotional activities are completely worthless, regardless of how clever, expensive, or perfectly targeted they are, unless one simple thing is accomplished–ask for the sale. This is not to say that being a great salesperson, advertising copywriting whiz or a public relations specialist isn’t a tremendous asset to your business. However, all of these skills will be for naught if you do not actively ask people to buy what you are selling.

Read More:

Determining your own salary as a business owner can be a difficult choice. Many business owners face the age old question: how much should I pay myself? Here are a few tips written by Entrepreneur.com for new business owners who want to understand what they should make.  This might vary industry to industry, but this is a great way to evaluate compensation.

1. Pay yourself enough to get by.
At least during startup until you are operating in the black. The argument here is to minimize your overhead in order to decrease the amount of capital required to make your business a success. Also, by reducing your overhead, your net loss will decrease or your net profit will increase, providing the business with lean operating requirements until it is well established.

2. Pay yourself what you are worth.
Build that into your business plan so you have an accurate portrayal of how much capital you will need in order to finance your business. By paying yourself what you are worth, you aren’t painting an artificial portrait of the business that will change once you reach the black–operating costs will remain the same.

Once you have established the startup money for your business, the next step is making your salary work and protecting it as well. Here is information on how to do just that.

Projecting Your Salary
As we mentioned, there are two methods you can use to determine your pay during startup. The first is paying yourself enough to meet basic living requirements. Depending on your situation, that means enough income to cover your bills, food and other miscellaneous living expenses. Strike all other discretionary items from your life for a while and get used to just the bare necessities. If you are used to dining at fine restaurants seven days a week, get used to going down to the local McDonald’s maybe once or twice a week.

To begin planning your pay, you need to put together your own personalfinancial statement that lists all your living expenses and any credit cards with outstanding balances as well as short-term and long-term loans. This may be one of the most difficult things you’ve ever had to do because you don’t want to leave anything out. You want to make sure that your income from the business will be enough to cover your expenses.

Read More:

Everyone enjoys getting something for free, especially today due to the economy.  PCworld.com posted a great article about five awesome free tools for small businesses.

1. Google Apps For Business

If your organization has under 50 employees, then Google Apps for Business (formerly called Google Apps for Domains) is for you. It offers free e-mail under the umbrella of your own organization’s domain name (You can pay Google $10 to reserve a domain name, if you don’t already have one). You can also have your own private Google Docs system along with your own Google Calendar system.

2. Dropbox

Dropbox is a sync and backup tool that makes use of the cloud to remotely store files. Once the Dropbox software is installed, you’ll find a new Dropbox folder on your hard disk. Anything stored in this folder is instantly transferred to Dropbox’s cloud storage system. This is done invisibly, and using the Dropbox folder is just like using any other folder on your hard disk.

3. Microsoft Security Essentials

License fees for antivirus software are taxing for those who use Windows. We’d rather not pay, but there’s no way of getting around it. Most free antivirus products, such as AVG, are free only for home users.

4. Linux

Don’t worry. I’m not going to advise you switch to Linux on your desktop computers. From a purely financial standpoint this has rarely made much sense for smaller businesses, considering they usually pay for Windows licenses without any choice when they buy a new PC.

Instead, I’m going to recommend Linux for your file servers. This avoids the need to pay for expensive Windows Server licenses. If you go with something like Ubuntu, the most popular form of Linux, you’ll pay nothing at all for an installation serving an unlimited number of client computers.

5. Go-OO office suite

Unless u’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you probably already know about OpenOffice.org, the open source (and therefore free-of-charge) office suite. This keeps getting better with each release and is now a definite contender for lighter-weight office tasks. If you haven’t looked at it recently, it’s well worth a trial.

I find it very useful for those upgrading from an older version of Office and who are confused by the ribbon-based user interface, found on recent releases of Microsoft Office.

Read More:

KANSAS CITY, MO — (Marketwire) — 11/12/10 — Andy Willoughby, entrepreneur and founder of the 3 Step Plan Home Business System, reviews business strategy tips for entrepreneurs who want to launch a business in 2011 (www.3stepplan.com). Small firms employ half of all working Americans and create two out of every three net new jobs in the U.S. economy (http://tinyurl.com/38xrgvx), according to a White House blog.

Andy Willoughby, who is the founder of the 3 Step Plan, said that goal setting is the first vital step in launching a business. “Goals are the foundation of a business. The process of goal setting allows an entrepreneur time to reflect on the business model and the direction of the business. After the goals are set, they act as guidelines for business endeavors,” said Willoughby.

Willoughby offered additional tips about starting a business (www.andywilloughby.com)

Read More:

Here are a few business networking strategies that Dian Helbig reviewed on smallbiztrends.com.

1. Identify where you should go. All venues are not right for all people. You owe it to yourself to do your research and find the venues that make sense for your business.

2. Make a decision about which organizations you should join and which you don’t have to join in order to gain value from their events. For example, does it make sense to join a local chamber of commerce, or just go to the events that sound interesting and will most likely include people you should meet?

3. Register for the event and schedule it like a business meeting. Many people either don’t sign up for events or sign up for them and then forget to go.

4. Determine how often you should be networking in a given week, month or quarter. This will help you narrow down where you should be going.

5. Develop open-ended questions you can use to ignite a conversation. Try to find unique questions; don’t ask the same old “So, what do you do?” if you can help it.

6. Attend events with a plan to learn something new. This will keep you from talking too much about yourself and your business.

7.Prepare yourself physically and mentally for the event.

• Dress appropriately.
• Bring business cards.
• Turn your phone off or set it to vibrate.

Read More:

Scott Belsky, entrepeneur and author of  Making Ideas Happen, argues that most entrepreneurs struggle with jumping from one idea to another  without following through and executing one solid  idea and putting in into action.

From an article on Entrepreneur.com about Belsky, written by Tim Beyers, Beyers reports on Belsky, saying that startup failure rates suggest he is right, and he has built a business to address the problem. Belsky is the founder of Behance LLC, a firm in New York City which operates a networking website for creative professionals called The Behance Network, a tip site for productivity junkies called The99Percent.com, and sells web-based productivity software based on the Action Method.

The Action Method breaks work into a series of steps represented by verbs that specify the next things to be done in executing an idea. Write the plan. Ship the product. Invoice the customer. Belsky’s has three tips for using the Action Method to create a company that executes.

1. Hire the killjoys.
The first step to activating the Action Method, Belsky says, is to create an “immune system” that kills ideas. This means hiring killjoys to capture every action step and say no to new ideas — rightfully so, in most cases.

“It’s important for entrepreneurs  to hire people they don’t necessarily want to have a beer with but who can be the immune system in their startup,” Belsky says.

2. Work with a bias toward action.
No doubt accountability is a key feature of the action-oriented startup, but perhaps the most important attribute is a propensity to act. For that to occur, Belsky says entrepreneurs need   to unlearn some things.

3. Change your vocabulary.
While taking action can be the key to getting unstuck, talking action is often necessary to produce growth. “You need an environment where people are obsessed with taking action steps,” Belsky says.

Read More:

Entrepreneurs learn to appreciate businesses challenges, and for some of us, we learn to accept these challenges after we launch a company.  However, this is not always the case for everyone.  Sometimes it is best to take some advice from others when you are reviewing a company. Brad Sugars, writer for Entrepreneur.com, assesses his personal experiencesand shares three key questions he found to be helpful.

1. Is there really a market for my product or service?
   A truly viable market is an existing market in which people already spend money.

   Be careful in categories that are mature or with products that are essentially commodities (meaning buyers always buy based on the lowest price because there is no product differentiation). While you can make money in those markets, it is very difficult, unless you have a truly innovative answer to a long-standing industry issue or your product can always sell at a premium price point.

   You also need to know what share of the market your competition has (keeping in mind the top three players in any industry will have the lion’s share of the revenues), based on the total value of the market in your area.

   One of my former clients was a struggling transmission shop in an area with seven other shops and a total market for transmission services at less than $1 million per year. Some quick math will immediately show you why my client (and others) were having a rough go; there simply wasn’t enough business to go around.

   You can also save yourself a lot by testing and measuring your product and service on a limited basis to a small test market.

   In retail, this could mean finding “shelf space” by placing your product on a consignment basis with an established retailer, or going to local markets (flea, swap, farmers), setting up shop and seeing how things go.

   In a service industry, this could mean partnering with an established company and offering your service as an added-value proposition (think web design services to an established conventional advertising firm).

   The bottom line is if you are successful on a part-time or limited basis, the odds are good you’ll also do well full time, because you are successfully meeting the needs of a niche that is untapped or under-served.

2. Do I have enough capital?
   All companies need capital to survive, and a good rule is to have at least 18 months of both business and living expenses covered before going into business full time.

   Of course, that’s just a general number, and some companies (including my own) have “cash-flowed” themselves to success. But doing that requires a lot of creativity, courage and flexible terms with vendors and creditors (which these days can be tougher than it was several years ago).

   So how much do you need?

   A lot depends on your personal situation. Are you single, or do you have a family? Are you young (under 25) or a bit older (say over 40)? Are you willing to sacrifice and go without until your company gets going? Is your family?

   Only you have the answers for yourself.

   But above all, be as objective as possible and use the numbers as your guide. Ultimately, the numbers will determine your overall viability and success.

3. Do I really know my numbers?
   Numbers are the language of business, and you need to know and be able to measure your numbers to succeed and survive.

   What do I mean?

   If you look at your projections and see limited positive cash flow and marginal profit on paper, there is little chance you will see anything different in the market.

   You can rationalize all you want about what a great salesperson you are, or tell yourself that “if you build it, they will come,” but you need brutal honesty about the viability of a business that doesn’t show cash flow and profit in the planning stages.

   Simply put, how much of your product or service do you need to sell every day to break even? How much to profit? How much does it cost you to get a new customer? How much will that customer buy the first time around? When will that customer buy again (knowing that repeat business is really where your profits lie)?

   On the other side, what are your true costs?

   Again, in the planning stages, nothing is really known. To get a better picture, add 30 percent to whatever you expect the expenses will be and reduce your expected revenue by 50 percent.

   Read More:

Today, social media makes it easier for entrepreneurs and business owners to raise awareness about their products, grow businesses and reach out to business prospects. It is a simple tool that is essential in today’s business world.

In a recent article on  www.businessinsider.com, nine steps to social media strategy were revealed.

Read More: