Home Business 101: It’s Not about the Money.

This short article first appeared on my blog, Men At Home, a place for men who run a home business. . .or plan to. I’ve wanted to post it here, too, since I know so many coaches who also work for home and had the same “vision thing” that i did when I started my business in 1991. If any of this makes sense to you, or you have has a similar experience, I’d love to hear from you.

– Frank

Why did you decide to start a home business? What were your primary motives?

To get away from a crazy boss? To leave a company that was either sinking or had become too stressful to work for? Was it because you had no choice — the company fired you or, euphemistically, asked you to resign? Did your circumstances at home change and you needed to find a way to spend more time at home and make more money, too?

Was it an opportunity to make lots of money that you were chasing?

Or was your decision to start a home business primarily about realizing a dream you had? You wanted to do something special? Do something no one had done before? Integrate all the dimensions of your life into one place — that “centered life” we used to talk about?

No doubt there are other reasons — and I’d love to hear about yours.

But today I want to tell you what my reasons were and how they have changed slightly over the past 16 years.

Yes, the first little factoid is that I have been working on my own, from home, for over 16 years now. Not every year has been a roaring success — some indeed were rip-roaring disasters, sometimes due to business problems, but more likely due to seismic disruptions in my personal life.

But I really started my own consulting practice — first called Maracom and then Emerge Communications — because I had a vision of what work and life were supposed to be about. I was 40 when I did this, so I was not naive or simple-minded about it. I believed that the time I spent working was important time and ought to contribute to my overall growth as a person and my self-actualization as a human being.

Lofty goals, indeed. Though the vision-thing was a bit amorphous, what I was moving away from was also very clear to me: away from demeaning, counter-productive office politics, co-workers and senior executives who would lie to look good or get a promotion, the daily tensions and stresses that come from working in a mis-managed environment where no one trusted anyone else.

The odd thing is that I was not the only one who felt that way. A very close friend felt the same way. He was a bright Dartmouth grad, and always willing to work with me on internal conspiratorial projects. But for him, and for the rest of my coworkers, what seemed like a sickness to me seemed like normal to them. I kept wondering what was wrong with me when I felt driven to leave and they field duty-bound to suffer and stay.

My friend later told me it was primarily fear — the fear that comes from leaving the safety of the mother ship, even though the ship was sinking. He said there was too much risk to go out on his own. Then, in rapid succession he was hired and laid off by a number of corporations. That elusive, riskless, workplace he was seeking never materialized.

When I started my home business, it was not about the money. It was about a vision of how I wanted to work and how I wanted to live. My work — marketing consulting and publishing — became a means to that end. Even with the work I did, I was picky about who I worked for. There was no sense ditching Mr. Mean at corporate for another Mr. Mean as a client.

There’s more to this story — I had just gotten started and it looked like I could give this story a happy ending. But there were a few detours –personal and business detours that changed the vision and the strategy to achieve it. Those changes have also meant a re-examination of what I am doing now. . .and why. That said, even though it has been 16 years, one thing has stayed constant: it is still not about the money.

Talk to you later. . . .