Expert advice on home-based working
LiveWork Network is delighted to promote two very different but equally inspiring and useful books on homeworking or, indeed, live/working.
Spare room start-up: how to start a business from home, by Enterprise Nation founder Emma Jones, is a cheerful guide for anyone convinced they’ve got a viable product, skill or service – and, of course, a home they can work from in comfort.
Work from home, which might seem to cover the same ground, takes a different tack – focusing more on how well you might take to home-working, followed by very detailed advice on how to make it work for you.
Written by former business adviser Judy Heminsley, drawing on 20 years experience of home-working, it is aimed at anyone wanting to work from home, whether they’re their own boss or employed by someone else.
top value
Both books are immensely readable. Spare-room start up is succinct but offers a very good framework for the budding entrepreneur, including a useful model for analysing your business strengths and strategies.
There is also ample practical advice, from marketing your product (or self) to a physical warm-up regime if you use a keyboard intensively. The book is also attractively designed, with pages for adding your own notes – possibly a clever ploy to make sure you’ll be too embarrassed to part with it in future years.
Work from home is encyclopaedic in scope, with well considered and intelligent advice on almost every subject a home-worker might trip over, from running a business to household politics.
Heminsley suggests dipping into the book as and when needed. But it is quite genuinely a compelling read, including some captivating sections on personality types and thoroughly worthwhile tips for making your preferred working hours productive.
And who could fail to like a book that stresses as a must-have ‘a friend with a dry sense of humour’.
Seriously, it’s hard to find fault with either book. So let’s try.
Spare room start-up emphasises the need for a comfortable, ergomonically sound office chair. Then suggests you can get one for £13.99. That sounds like the chair we all started off with, before ending flat on our back on the floor when the back rest fell off mid-phone conversation.
Both books appear to have accepted unquestioningly that a dog is a good work companion. A large dog that wants to go for a walk NOW is not. Nor is one resting its wet slobbery beard on the knee of the good trousers you wore to feel suitably professional.
But LiveWork Homes accepts that this is scraping the barrel of criticism so, with a burst of heart-felt enthusiasm, warmly recommends both books.
Spare room start-up: how to start a business from home by Emma Jones ISBN 978-1-9056-4168-0 £12.99 Available from Harriman House.
tel 01730 233870. email enquiries@harriman-house.com or click here
Work from home by Judy Heminsley. ISBN 978-1-84528-335-3 £12.99 Available from Grantham Book Services. tel 01476 541 080. email orders@gbs.tbs-ltd.co.uk or click here
