I’ve been running my own business for 8 years now and there hasn’t been a single moment when I have regretted giving up the 9-5 corporate drudge. Even when I have been up late at night or (more usually) up very early in the morning to fit it all in and still have time for a good family life. After all what is the point of working for yourself if you never get to see you family and give them the time and attention they deserve?
I know not everyone thinks that way as there are plenty of parents who put their jobs first and I know they won’t admit it but you just have to look at the time they spend with their kids. I simply don’t believe that quality time makes up for quantity time with children especially in the early years but also later on too.
So running my home based business has meant less sleep for me but hasn’t compromised the very reasons I am doing this.
When I first started my business my home office was full of the products I was selling online, and the boxes in which to pack them for shipping. Eventually I outsourced the packing/shipping to a company who provided warehousing for the products but found there were simply too many products getting damaged or the wrong products being sent. I was then faced with the dilemma of where to find enough storage space to house my stock at a price I could afford and where to find reliable staff who could do a decent job packing and shipping my products – which were often large and fragile (what a combination!).
The answer was literally staring me in the face as I regularly passed a local self storage facility. What I hadn’t thought of was that this was the perfect place for cheap storage because I had always associated self storage with moving house. How behind the times I was. It turns out their units were full of stuff for small online businesses and they even offered a packing service. It wasn’t of course “too good to be true” and who would want that anyway as there is no such thing – because there is a cost to this service but it turned out to be cheaper than the company who were supposedly the experts at this and, more importantly for me and the reputation of my growing business, they were good, reliable packers who shipped the right thing at the right time and the damage rate was very low.
My business is now thriving and growing in a way I couldn’t have imagined 8 years ago.
