Home Based Businesses

Balancing life and work, By Bob McCarthy For decades the term "home based business" connoted a hobby, and a person who dabbled in an MLM or network marketing company, pestering friends and relatives to purchase products and join their "downline" in the hopes that by building a deep enough team the dog-eared photo of the dream mansion in Maui would become a reality. And while for some participation in such ventures did bring them more income and the freedom to choose, for many others, after prospecting friends and family, the dream died, or perhaps reality set in. Today, for many people, direct selling is alive and well perhaps not as a speedy path to an amorphous goal, but a real-life business experience that allows them to balance work, family, learning and independence. A fact sheet published by the Direct Selling Association states that in 2006, U.S. retail sales totaled $32.18 billion. Face-to-face selling, including selling in the home accounted for 75 percent of sales and almost 98 percent of those in the direct selling industry are with a multilevel type of company. Send Out Cards D'vorah Lansky of Glastonbury, Conn., started in network marketing 15 years ago. "I had taught elementary school for 12 years and loved teaching, but when my son was born I wanted to raise him. So I stayed at home and started various home businesses over the course of several years," said Lansky. She liked the flexibility a home based business provides. "I could work in windows of time. When he napped, I could work," she said. At one point, from her participation in online forums, she became involved with helping women on military bases around the world build their home-based businesses while stationed with their spouses in places like England, France and Spain. "What I found was that online networking and business forums are really powerful, and I was lucky to connect in situations where people wanted to help each other, have their questions answered and build a virtual community. I feel fortunate to have come into the [network marketing] industry at a time when online networking has become more and more prevalent," she said. Eventually, Lansky transitioned from her initial business into her new venture, Send Out Cards. Send Out Cards is an online business where registered users log onto the Internet, select a card, personalize it with their greeting and click to send it. The recipient receives a real, hard copy card in the mail. "I transitioned into Send Out Cards because I wanted a business where I didn't have to carry heavy things. So I started using the cards to thank customers in my previous business, reminding people to re-order and in return get a gift," she said. Her re-orders started to increase as direct result of the cards, she said, at which point she recognized an opportunity. In October 2006 she transitioned full time into Send Out Cards. Lansky sees the business as an integration of her love of teaching and helping others. Foremost in her approach is ensuring that she and the people she enrolls and mentors in the business focus on income producing activities, not the opposites. The "opposites," she said, are the things that sidetrack people. She said sidetracked people get up in the morning, check their email, visit their web site, place a few orders, file some papers, answer the phone and spend time putting out fires; and their day evaporates with all that non-income producing activity. "But," asked Lansky, "Did they make any phone calls, did they follow up. Did they make any sales appointments? Income producing activities are people-related activities that have to do with selling, following up or training." Such selling activity, she said, requires a goal, a plan and a structure. Lansky has the structure down pat. If the goal is to reach the next promotion level in a business, that takes a specific number of product sales or team enrollments, which translates into presentations and closings. "That can be daunting, but if I plan over 90 days and figure how many weeks and then days, it becomes a manageable number," she said. She suggests people use their calendar to plan their presentation schedule, map out their office hours and family time, and prioritize their people time. She advocates having a dedicated a work space "Even if it's a folding table in a large, walk in closet"- getting buy-in from your family, having a schedule and following a plan. She recommends posting your schedule on your "office" door for everyone to see, use color coding to show your income producing or work time, personal time to recharge your batteries and a third color for family time. "Color coding your week let's your family see that they are important and have dedicated time during your week," said Lansky. "Many people work their home based business part-time and have another job or family obligations, this allows them to prioritize and block out their weekly schedule." "People with a plan make time for appointments, for follow up and for training their team," she said. The Pampered Chef Sharon Gagnon of East Longmeadow will have been an independent kitchen consultant for The Pampered Chef for 15 years this coming January. "The main reason I became involved with a home-based business was so I could be a stay-at-home mom," said Gagnon. When she left her job as a dental hygienist to start a family, she and her husband "practiced" being a one income family, and it worked. "However, I was finding that I could use some extra cash for the fun things," she recalled. "My first intent was to be able to pay for dance lessons or going to the movies, the little social things. But those costs can add up." Gagnon went to a Pampered Chef kitchen show party because the name intrigued her. During the show she talked with the consultant. "When she described the [kitchen] tools she was using, it sounded perfect for me," she recalled. "I love to cook, and I started doing it and it has been a blast." Pampered Chef is a home based business, but the selling usually takes place in someone else's home. A consultant is invited to put on a cooking demonstration at an individual's or hostess's home. The consultant and the hostess confer on a recipe of the latter's choosing. The hostess provides the ingredients and invites guests and is rewarded with free products. The consultant brings the kitchen tools and prepares the recipe, in the process describing how the tools can save time in the kitchen, ease meal preparation and improve one's cooking all designed to make the kitchen more user friendly. At this point in her career, Gagnon is a director and trainer with The Pampered Chef. "My goal," she said "is [to have] two shows a week, two nights per week, which is three-four hours out of the house for each show. Each show nets a minimum of one hundred dollars, and usually more from our commission on the sale of tools [to the invited guests]." "As you share the opportunity with others, you can move up into a management position. If you have two people on your team, you are considered a future director. After you have five people you are considered a director," said Gagnon. "Even if someone is not an experienced cook, the company provides numerous training options including DVDs, online training, local district and national meetings." "When I first started [with The Pampered Chef] we had to rent the training videos from the home office, watch them and return them. Today the technology has greatly improved the ease of training new consultants," she said. Gagnon said she does not give demonstrations with an eye to recruiting members for her team. She believes that "business is everywhere" and has had people come up to her and say they want to do what I'm doing "But that is not the norm," she said. "People normally don't come to our demonstration job hunting. They are coming for a night out. We are serving food and have an excellent reputation. So people are coming to have a good time. They are coming for the fun of it." As is Gagnon. "After 15 years I could not even imagine having to work for someone besides myself any more," she said. "I am motivated by the incentives. We are paid well, but in addition we have incentives including trips and contests for new product. But the driving force for me is the vacations. Prior to doing this, I was a dental hygienist and one of my patients owned a travel agency, and his life sounded much more exciting than mine." Mary Kay Donna Roberts recently achieved the status of Sales Director with Mary Kay. Born and raised in Springfield, she graduated from STCC and worked as a physical therapist's assistant (PTA) for 20 years. Initially she worked at a private treatment center, then for a national rehabilitation company and eventually became the Business Development Manager. That was a position she thought would give her more flexibility. "But," she said, "The hours each day increased and I found that I had less flexibility." "My kids had never been in daycare, it was either my parents or my mother-in-law caring for them. But the turning point came one day when my youngest son said to me, 'I don't know where home is. I only visit.' That was heartbreaking," said Roberts. "What he said was tough, and I went to work the next day and gave a six week notice. My license is still active, but this is the path I have chosen and it is fun," she said. Roberts admits that at first it was great because she could do all the housework she had usually left until evenings, but soon realized that an apparent abundance of time quickly disappeared into, what D'vorah Lansky called "non-income producing time." Roberts realized that organization and time management were critical components for running her business. "I had a wonderful person [her Mary Kay director] sit down with me and tell me pointers, including having a six month plan and a to-do list. You need to separate client time from phone calling time and from inventory time," she said. "So I adjusted my schedule accordingly. I block out family time, I block out time to teach aerobics, and I block out Mary Kay time. Then I'll put in where I am going to work my business." The title of Sales Director recognizes that Roberts has been steadily working her Mary Kay business. "It means [I am] committed to my business and committed to building a team. A Director has a team of 30 or more which each one owing their own business and what I do is mentor them," she said. "They are all new to the business and came for a variety of reasons including an opportunity to be entrepreneurial, even though most of them currently work a full time job." And Roberts is very specific about how she has built her team. "I look for sharp women. Women who like the products and who are looking to change something in their life," said Roberts. Just as she did in hers. eWomen Network In December, 2006, Shana Bourcier of Hampden, Mass started the western Massachusetts chapter of eWomen Network. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, their web site states the organization is a "dedicated community of women-owned businesses, corporate professionals, and entrepreneurs who want to support and network with other dynamic women." Using their Accelerated Networking, they claim to "have pioneered a whole new way for women to build relationships and transact business." Bourcier said she was looking for a new career path, after a starred career in corporate America. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College with a major in French, she lived in Paris her junior year and upon being graduated went to work for Monitor, a Cambridge-based consulting firm. Later she worked for an international language company starting English as a Second Language schools on the west coast. Subsequently, she worked in a position that had her developing corporate strategies and joint venture possibilities for Fortune 100 companies. That job sent her globe trotting to Togo, Morocco, Nigeria and the Philippines. Eventually, she and her husband moved to upstate New York and Bourcier devoted her energies to raising and home schooling their six children. They returned to Massachusetts in 2004. Bourcier said she kept busy. "My energy was primarily directed to my family and my husband's dental practice," she said. But she maintained her self-directed study in a search to identify sources of current cultural, economic and social challenges. "That search lead me to develop a vision for an operation I wanted to build called Infinite Worth Enterprises," she recalled. She passed the idea by a friend in Phoenix who advised that she investigate eWomen Network because it had helped grow her business as a graphic artist. Intrigued, Bourcier attended a meeting in Boston, which at the time, had the nearest chapter. One impetus for Bourcier was "Free Agent Nation" by Daniel Pink, in which the author estimates there are 30-60 million "free agents," entrepreneurs and solopreneurs in the country. "It is an emerging movement given where we are in history and the leverage of technology," said Bourcier. "I decided we needed a chapter of eWomen Network in western Massachusetts. I came home and pitched it to some friends, and then decided I would do it." Since last December, the chapter's meetings have been dinners because many of the people who would benefit from this kind of network at presently more available in the evenings. A focus of the chapter is to expand the members' networks and empower them with resources that can help them start, build or expand their businesses. (eWomen Network does welcome interested men to join.) "People can't make it happen on their own," says Shana. "We need a team; we need other people supporting us; we need our version of a corporate infrastructure. eWomen Network serves as the catalyst for and helps facilitate that process of sharing information, exchanging ideas and resources and helping each member accelerate the growth and development process." Whether the business is home based or brick and mortar, starting up or expanding, Bourcier said the need for collaboration in the Pioneer Valley is high. "I can serve as a clearing house for women" she said, "But other organizations need to become more interconnected as women increasingly seek instruction on business management, access to capital, even micro-financing. Even then, many of them don't know what they are looking for, or [they] have a vision but have not set it high enough because they are used to flat lining or the status quo." Bourcier sees membership and participation in eWomen Network as something "that can spark them and lift their eyes to new possibilities, learn how to leverage time and intellectual capital." And, as with Lansky, Gagnon and Roberts, primarily from a home base. Bob McCarthy is the Editor of Business to Business Magazine. He can be reached via e-mail at: RCM@reminderpublications.com