The Challenges and Blessings of Starting a Business from Home
Tags: Business, Jamie Pitts, The Work at Home Woman, WAHM, Work at Home, Work from home
Posted in How to Work from Home 
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By Jamie Pitts
Our online business had humble beginnings. My husband’s Internet start up was a victim of the dot-bomb in 2000 which left us with no income. For several years I had been talking to my husband about working together to create a website where families could easily find quality childcare. I really didn’t want to go back to work until the children were in school full time. However, it was the perfect time to try something new and risk starting a new business we were both passionate about. We invested all of our personal savings into this venture and it paid off.
Starting a business from home was not without its challenges. We had to establish definite work hours where we couldn’t be interrupted. While the children did their best to respect our work hours, we had to hire child care to help with the children when they came home from school. My daughter was 4 years old at the time and my son was 6 years old, so thankfully they were not young toddlers who couldn’t understand that mommy needed to work. The one thing that we didn’t fully realize was how many long hours it would take to get our business off the ground.
There were many blessings about working at home. Even though I was working, I was still at home, and between phone calls and emails I was able to be there for my children. It was so convenient to be able set my own schedule. I could work late when the children were in bed in order to be able to sneak away the next day to attend my daughter’s school play. I learned that it was important to maintain balance and not let my work consume me which is easy to do when you work out of your home. Just taking 5 to 10 minute breaks throughout the day helps to reduce the stress and tension that can build up from long stretches of focused work.
I think the most important thing to remember when considering starting a business from home, is that you have to enlist the cooperation of everyone in the family to support this venture. Everyone will be affected, however, everyone learns how to work together to support each other, ultimately bringing us all closer. I really didn’t want to be away from my children before they were in school full time and it was a blessing that we were able to start our business from our home in this way. Looking back, it was the best thing we could have ever done.
Jamie Pitts is a mother of two children and the co-founder of Great Aupair. Her personal understanding of the challenges faced by working mothers helped to create one of the Internet’s leading aupair and nanny matching websites.
7 Responses to “The Challenges and Blessings of Starting a Business from Home”
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November 19th, 2009 at 7:31 am
Bravo to Jamie! It’s so important to go into a business from home venture with a plan and family support. Glad to hear that it worked so well for you!
Julie Taylor
http://www.jadcc.com/blog
November 19th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Excellent article Jamie and you did a fabulous job of showing the best and the worst of working from home. Take care and God bless.
November 21st, 2009 at 10:19 am
Jamie, Your article is great! I am doing a presentation in my communications class on balancing work and family, from the home-based business aspect. I am wondering do you feel the desire to work from home was sparked in any way by family values or biblical principles you may have been brought up with?
May God bless you,
Brenda Christian
November 30th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Thank you for your kind comments. In answer to your question Brenda, the desire to start my business from home was born out of my desire to be a conscious parent. I wanted to find a way to create a business and honor my commitment to my children at the same time. In the process of juggling both, I realized that family life does not have to be compromised in order to make a living.
Many Blessings,
Jamie
December 1st, 2009 at 4:18 am
A good source of info for online business are the entrepreneur magazines. You could subscribe to one or two types of them and learn about setting up an online business. They usually offer some very good insights when it comes to setting up your business.
December 1st, 2009 at 4:19 am
I’ve been working at home for over a year now. I knew absolutely nothing about it either but I stumbled upon something called Maverick Money Makers. I saw it online and on television, so I gave it a shot and it has worked nicely for me.
.-= Virtual Family´s last blog ..Find your eternal love =-.
December 19th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Congratulations on your success Jamie. I too am a mother of two trying to start a business from home. I just launched a website, http://www.FamilyHotTopics.com, which still under development and it seems like an enourmous task, with page views in the hundreds instead of thousands. When starting your business, how did you manage to take it to the next level when it seemed like the growth was slow??
Thank you,
Angelica