I read an excellent article recently about starting and managing a family business. The article was sent to me by my mother-in-law and she found it on a blog called Design*Sponge. The article talks about the unique stresses associated with running a family business versus working for someone else. Such things as missing a steady paycheck, having to either pay for your own benefits or go without, and keeping your focus can be major obstacles to the self-employed.
In the eight months that I've been primarily working from home, we have discovered many of the things discussed in this article for ourselves. My wife and I have always spent the majority of our time together, and have even worked together some in the past, although we were not working for ourselves at that time. So the trial period mentioned in this article never really occurred or applied to us. However there was definitely a period of adjustment when I quit my regular day job and began working to take over the business.
One huge advantage that we had was that we were taking over a profitable existing business rather than starting from scratch. As I've mentioned previously, my mother-in-law had started the business and grown tired of it. Because of this, we knew that if we just maintained the status-quo in the business, we'd be able to make enough to cover my day-job salary. So initially this is what we were striving for.
What we didn't really know up front was how much work we were going to have to put in to manage the business in a way that worked for us. Even though it was an existing business that was managing workflow just fine, the methods that were in place simply didn't work for us. So we spent a good portion of the first few months creating and refining a workflow that worked the way we work.
We didn't have the need for any kind of commercial solution like Quickbooks to track our inventory and such. We simply aren't running that complex of a business. So instead we developed Excel spreadsheets to track inventory, income and expenses. We also created worksheets that allow us to track each customer from inquiry to shipment, and this has saved us tons of time.
Much of this type of business management is something that you can only do for yourself. Most people (especially the creative and entrepreneurial types) aren't going to be able to find an off-the-shelf solution for these types of workflow management that will satisfy them completely. There will always be a portion of the worksheet that you don't use, and something that you wish was there, but isn't. So it really does help to just sit down and create your own. I think we're currently working on our fourth revision now. Each time we get ready to print a new set we sit down and discuss any revisions and tweak them as needed.
The really nice part about getting the business flow nailed down in a way that works better for us, is that we are now doing the same volume of business in less time. Changes in equipment have had a major impact on that as well, but it's all part of the process of continually refining your workflow, and optimizing it wherever possible.
Because we can maintain the same income level in less time now, we have more free time to spend as a family which was the entire point from the beginning. Even better is the fact that if we get to a point where the need for more income outweighs the need for extra family time for a little while, we should be able to scale up the business and not have to worry about whether or not we can handle the increased workload because we know the process works.
The original article that inspired this one can be found here: http://www.designspongeonline.com/2010/05/biz-ladies-tips-for-running-a-family-business.html
It goes into further detail about working with your spouse, factoring in kids, and managing expectations as well. All of these are subjects that I can (and in the future probably will) expand on too, but I think this is enough for now. :-)
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