NOT long ago, using your home as an office was regarded as something done only by fledgling entrepreneurs and start-ups. But not any more. As it becomes increasingly accepted, a growing number of business people are choosing to work from home permanently — no matter how big their firm gets.
More than half of all new companies are now founded from home, according to Enterprise Nation (www.enterprisenation.com), an online information service for home workers. A recent YouGov poll found that up to 8m people run a commercial operation from their own homes.
Emma Jones is the editor of Enterprise Nation and director of Redbrick Enterprises, a consultancy that advises on home working and enterprise. “It is becoming much more acceptable to admit publicly that you are running a business from home,” she said.
This September she is launching Britain’s first glossy magazine for home workers, also called Enterprise Nation. She said: “One of the key things we wanted to do is to give a more professional image to the whole home-working sector. We want people to feel proud about running a business from their own property.”
She said that the knowledge-based businesses being started these days lent themselves particularly well to being based at home. The sectors showing the biggest increase in self-employment were “professional services and personal services, all things that can be run straight from a computer at a home base”.
Jones said the three key factors in the increase in home working were technology, which increasingly allows people to work anywhere, demographics, fuelled by the large number of over-fifties choosing to run their own firm and lifestyle.
A perfect example is Homefinder UK, a property-finding business set up three years ago in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, by Steven Bletsoe and his wife, Freya.
The Bletsoes, who have three children, initially ran their business from home because they had no other choice and, as soon as the business was doing well enough, they took offices in nearby Halifax.
After 12 months, however, they realised that both they and the business, which by this time had four employees, would be better off being based at home. So they moved back and asked their staff to work from their own properties, too.
Steven Bletsoe, 31, said: “We initially moved into offices because we saw it as a promotion and because we thought it would give our employees a work mentality.
“We were getting a negative reaction from estate agents because we were based at home. But when we moved back home, businesswise we were different people. We were a lot more mature and we didn’t feel the need to apologise for working from home.
“This time round we knew we were doing it because it was actually more beneficial for us to work there and not simply because we were small. When we visit clients we act in a professional manner and I honestly don’t think they care where we work. People’s perceptions of businesses based at home have changed.”
Homefinder UK now has a turnover of £100,000 a year and far from restricting their growth, the Bletsoes are using their home experience to expand the company.
They have just received planning permission to turn their front room into a “shop” where clients will be able to visit — and plan to sell franchises of their business that people will be able to run from home.
As for the negative reaction from estate agents, he said: “I don’t know whether they have stopped being negative or whether we just ignore them. But the point is, I don’t notice them any more.”
Fay Easton is the director of the Shrewsbury Enterprise Partnership, a public-private venture whose main project for the next three years is to promote home working in the Shropshire region.
She said that many people were choosing to adapt their houses to create separate work spaces rather than move out to an office. “People are building on or adapting their homes to make a much clearer definition between the domestic and work space,” she said.
“They are not looking for a corner for a desk, they are looking for a dedicated professional workspace, be it for manufacturing, publishing or food production. We are seeing a change from the ground up. Home-based businesses are really getting their act together.”
She said that while a stigma undoubtedly remained about businesses based in the home, the solution was for such firms to present a completely professional image.
“Nowadays you don’t have to advertise the fact that you are at home. You can use a mailbox number, you can trade on the internet, and you can even use an 0800 phone number so nobody knows where you are based,” she said.
“There are all these facilities available out there to get a professional image.”
Rosa Wilkinson, managing director of the Department of Trade and Industry-backed Small Business Service (SBS), believes that home working is vital for the creation of an enterprise culture.
She said the SBS had started looking at the type of advice available to people running businesses to make sure it was equally relevant and accessible for those based at home. She is also keen to examine regulations to ensure that they do not have a bad effect on home-based enterprises.
One area she wants to look at is tenancy agreements, many of which contain clauses preventing tenants from starting up a business from their property.
She said: “Many social- housing tenancy agreements have evolved over generations and may have lost pace with what we need in a modern economy.
“So I want to ask a few questions about why they look the way they do. Are they unnecessarily preventing people getting into enterprise, possibly in those areas where you might most want to see development of new enterprise — areas of high deprivation? “In general, we don’t want to put any blocks on enterprise and enterprising behaviour.”
