Brandie Kajino’s Soho Solutionist site provides resources for everyone working from home

Soho Solutionist is the second site to be highlighted from my Top Sites for home business owners.

To explain the site’s purpose and focus I doubt I could improve on the words of site author, Brandie Kajino:

This site, and my business, are about making technology and small business tools accessible and understandable to real people. As a Professional Organizer, I also have a unique approach with my clients. I hope to transfer skills you can use in your business. My mission is to be helpful to you, so you can grow your business and change your corner of the world.

Soho Solutionist is definitely not one of those sites, sadly multitudinous, which have no evidence of intelligent human involvement and have some recycled articles on setting up a home office, surrounded by lots of advertisements for various products.

The Soho Solutionist site, like its owner Brandie, is practical and shows respect for the realities professionals face in working from home.

You can get a sense of Brandie’s practicality and intelligent approach to the challenges of working from home from the discussion I had with her earlier this year on my Des Walsh & Friends show on BlogTalkRadio – you can listen to/download the podcast here.

Home based entrepreneurs can use the Soho Solutionist site with the confidence that comes from knowing that Brandie has tons of experience in empowering busy professionals with information, technology, tools and simple organizing solutions.

On the  site you will find lists of resources, articles on home office organization, and of course details about how you can explore possibilities for working with Brandie to help your business.

There is also a blog and there are podcasts.

I’m open to adding more sites about professionals working from home, preferably authored by home based professionals themselves, to my Top Sites page. If you know of such a site, please let me know via the Contact page.

A personal klutz moment prompts some thoughts about risk management for home based businesses

I had an unpleasant encounter with a Danger sign recently, on a local beach where we go walking most mornings. Once I had recovered from the initial shock, the experience made me think about risk management.

To get this in context I must explain, more than somewhat to my own embarrassment, that this sign is, as far as I can tell, on a stretch of a couple of adjoining beaches where we walk most mornings, the only object where I could conceivably bump my head.

So you would be perfectly justified in thinking that would not be an easy thing for me to do.

Well, on the morning in question I did.

How could I have been so dumb?

What happened was,  I was climbing over some rocks at the time, heading for the pathway connecting the two beaches, all the while looking down, watching intently where I was placing my feet so I didn’t stumble.

Which is how, straightening up, I got to bang my head on the only item conceivably available for the purpose in about half a mile or more of beach area.

I had in fact given myself a nasty bump, even drawing some blood (the sign is made of good old-fashioned sheet metal). Fortunately, my cap protected my scalp to some degree. The external scar has gone, embarrassment lingers.

Anyhow, after getting over the initial shock, and on the principle of turning lemons into lemonade, I wondered how I could put the experience to good use.

Need to consider all the risks

The lightbulb moment was that intelligent risk management takes account of all known risks, not just one most obvious at the time. And this has a special relevance for those of us who choose to work from home.

Iowa based business risk management expert Thomas M. Bragg has a thoughtful post on risk management and home based business, making the following very pertinent observation:

Home-based businesses don’t have a free pass that exempts them from the need for risk management. In fact, I would argue that they have a more urgent need because each risk that becomes reality has a much larger relative impact on a sole proprietorship than it does on a larger business. (100% of a sole proprietor’s employees will be involved in dealing with a crisis, while only a portion of a larger business’ employees will probably be affected by a similar crisis.)

Being entrepreneurial doesn’t mean ignoring risk

Making a broad generalization which I am quite unable to substantiate empirically, it’s my belief that professional people who make a decision to work from home rather than be employed elsewhere are in a real sense entrepreneurs.

One of the words I associate with being entrepreneurial is “courageous”. And that’s because another word that goes with “entrepreneur” is risk.

A lot of things can go wrong when you work from home, for example getting seriously ill and not having adequate health cover or income maintenance insurance to get you through that time. Then there are the clients who turn out to be more trouble than they are worth, or just don’t pay or at least don’t pay in a timely fashion.

Managing risk is part of our job description. And we will manage it better if we don’t wait till we’ve banged our heads on it, so to speak.

Need a risk management plan

And while I believe most home based professionals I know are well aware of the risks, I wonder how many of us actually have a risk management plan in place?

A plan that takes account of all the risks we need to consider. More than just a SWOT analysis, although that would be a start.

What plans do you have in place for risk management?

This week’s top site is Solo Business Marketing, subtitled “Where Entrepreneurs and Success Connect”,  and is the work of my good friend and colleague and one of my favorite home based business owners, the ever enthusiastic  Shirley George Frazier.

Since 1990, Shirley has been amazingly successful at starting and growing her business, gaining print and televised media attention along the way, and speaking at business and trade shows throughout the USA.

She also wrote the book Marketing Strategies for the Home-Based Business: Solutions You Can Use Today

The Solo Business Marketing blog makes great reading, not just for solo professionals working from home, but for anyone in business who is looking for practical, experience-based advice on marketing.

Shirley has a lovely, easy style of writing, which is actually a perfect reflection of what you would experience if you were to have the benefit, as I have, of a direct conversation with her.  The warm, friendly and down-to-earth style of her blog posts can be experienced readily in such posts as:

Five Ways to Get Your Marketing Plan Back on Track

Yesterday evening I escorted a relative to the hospital. He had not eaten for two days and was feeling poorly.

Tell me you don’t want to read on.

Why Falling in the Street is a Great Marketing Lesson

This week, during one of my fitness walks through town, I found myself tumbling onto the concrete. My right foot turned slightly inward, and that’s when my body met the pavement.

“I cannot believe this is happening!” I shouted in my head, wondering if I’d get up and keep going or call on my cell phone for medical attention.

More (don’t know about you but I had to know where all that was going!)

I interviewed Shirley on my Des Walsh & Friends show on BlogTalkRadio back in February this year. You can hear/download the recording of that here.

Solo Business Marketing – Top Site. Check it out.

It is my intention to feature a new Top Site every week. If you have a favorite site on home based business or which would be of direct benefit to professionals working from home, please let me know so I can consider it for inclusion in the TopSites section of this site: please note, only sites with original, quality content and authored by a home based business person will be considered.

Some freely available resources to help people thinking of starting a business, or starting over

In over twenty years of being in business I’ve had a lot of good business advice. My only regret is that I wish I’d followed more of the good advice, sooner.

I’ve also had plenty of bad or unduly self-serving advice and my regret there is in having followed some of that until I had enough experience to see through it.

Sound familiar? My guess is that if you are in business and are not super omniscient and always amazingly successful you have had both of those experiences too.

So is there something to be done, when embarking on a business, or when re-starting our existing businesses, to cut through the fog of theories and advice that are not going to serve us and get to some good, practical advice which will enable us to get on with the business of business, with confidence as well as optimism?

Yes there is. And, believe it or not, it is provided by government!

The heading to this post says “free” resources. That’s not completely accurate, because these resources have been put together at taxpayers’ expense. But they are freely available on the web for anyone who wants to use them.

As a taxpayer, you can say, “At last, something useful from the government!”

If you are one of those people who believe nothing good can come out of government – what do they say, one of the great lies is “I’m from the government, I’m here to help you”? – then I ask that you put aside your skepticism for a moment and check out the resources listed below.

Because what has happened in several countries is that governments have paid some people to put together “starting a business” checklists and resource lists, with lots of links, to save people having to do all that themselves.

In this post I’m just including links to sites provided by federal/national governments – USA, Canada, UK, Australia. I know from previous research there are other such sites provided at State/ Provincial level. And maybe even at local government level although I have not looked into that yet.

The US Government’s Small Business Administration provides a Small Business Planner.

From the UK Government there is Practical Advice for Business: Starting up .

The Canadian Government’s Canada Business site has Starting a Business.

And the Australian Government’s business.gov.au site has Thinking of Starting a Business .

One note of caution. I have found sometimes with such sites that you can be clicking on a link to resources that are really third party ones and which do promote products and services commercially. If that is the case with a particular government-provided resource, it should be clear from the site: it’s a while since I have researched such sites so I don’t know the current situation. Just be aware.

If you know of other such national/federal or state/provincial government provided free resources for business, do please share them. There may even be regional or local government sites that you know of and have found helpful.

The time has come to set up a regular schedule for my blog posts

I’ve been aware for a long time that having a schedule in place for my blog posting would increase the likelihood of more frequency, and would quite likely have a positive impact on the quality of the posts overall.

I acknowledge I’ve resisted the idea. Part of my not completely sub-conscious rationalization has been that having a schedule might inhibit my creativity or my capacity to write more inspirationally. My conscious mind knew that was rubbish.

The decision

But today I decided it was time for a change, time for a proper schedule.

An online search showed there was no shortage of blog posts available on the topic. Some I found thought-provoking or helpful, or both. Some covered the bigger picture, including research for your posts, commenting on other blogs and so on. My focus was on getting clues for the more immediate process of drafting and publishing the actual posts.

The wisdom of others

The first post on this topic to catch my eye was Blogging Schedule by my friend Robyn Tippins. This was written just over four years ago and includes some includes some practicalities about blogging when people have daily responsibilities for young children.

Then from 2007 there was good advice from the blogging maestro Darren Rowse (Problogger) in Plan Your Next Week’s Posting Schedule

In May last year Jacob Stoops provided a detailed explanation for those interested in using Google Calendar for their schedule.

One post I found quite fascinating was from late last year by Alex, at 16 years of age indisputably in the “digital native” camp, who nevertheless finds paper works best to help him keep on track with his schedule. His post How to create a blogging schedule you will stick with is eminently practical:

So since apps aren’t “in your face enough,” I write down my daily tasks on a piece of paper and stick it onto my cork board by my desk. Now, my sched­ule is always in the corner of my eye when I work and I will know that I have things to do that day.

Organizing my schedule

So from all the advice I’d read, how will I schedule my posts?

As a start, I’m applying these five guidelines:

1. at least one post on each day Monday through Friday – weekend posts optional
2. a structure with a theme for each day of the week
3. aim for short posts (so as not to get stuck writing long ones – which a lot of people won’t read anyway!)
4. list each day’s topic in my paper diary and check off each day when done
5. track progress and monitor for any improvement in traffic, review at the end of the month

I have a topic list will share that in a separate post.

My own thirty day challenge

In just a few days over a month from now it will be six years since I launched the first version of this Thinking Home Business blog, on Typepad, so I’m taking a deep breath and committing myself to a one month blogging challenge. A thirty day challenge, although not a commitment to blog on each of the thirty days – rather to produce a blog for every week day over that period.

Do you use a schedule for your blog posting? Or perhaps you tried it and it didn’t work? Care to share what has worked (or not) for you?