Business At Home With Family Support

When you work from home, especially a home business, your family plays a vital role in deciding if you will succeed or fail, so including them in the process, preferably right from the start, is essential.
If your spouse doesn't support you, the added stress combined with the pressure from daily life and starting your home business can affect your productivity, your energy levels, and your health. If your children don't understand that you need time to work despite being at home, you can find that they stop being a pleasure and become a severe burden.
There are fortunately several ways to involve your family, even if they aren't exactly happy about
your choices.

1. Have a Family Discussion

Before making the jump, and definitely before you quit your day job, talk to your family about your new career choice. If your spouse thinks you're ignoring his or her concerns, it could cause them to resent your business, and worry about the future.

By talking with your spouse and children, you can get them excited about the potential gains, discuss problems, and when necessary make compromises. If you have a proper business plan, customer research, short and long term goals, etc, you will go a long way to setting their minds at ease. This will also help you figure out what you have to do for your business.

2. Ask For Help

Most people like feeling important, asking your family for help in the right way will help make them feel this way.

When you are discussing things with your family, after you have laid everything out and talked about their main concerns, say something like, "I can do this on my own, but if you could help me with it will make things a lot easier."

You don't want to sound like your forcing them to help you, and don't give them the worst possible job either. Let your partner and children know that you would appreciate their help and it would make your life easier, but you are willing to take no for an answer.

3. Get Them Excited

Your family should want you to be happy, so get them excited by showing how excited you are.

With your children, talk about how you'll be working from home, so you can play with them, help them with their homework, and be there to talk to them when they need help.

For your spouse, talk about the potential money that will come in, how you'll be happy to look after the kids more, how excited you are that you won't be working with your horrible boss, etc. Don't over exaggerate things, you will be working so you won't have the home spotless at the end of the day, and you will have to tell your children to leave you alone sometimes. Things can also go wrong, so don't expect the money to roll in immediately. But by keeping it reasonable, and talking about the good side of working from home, you can get your family more optimistic about your career plan.

4. Have a Back Up Plan

If you are quitting your day job, or moving to part time work so that you can work at home, your spouse likely has one overriding concern, 'what if something goes wrong?'

Don't expect everything to go smoothly, emergencies will happen, customers can leave, or worse yet never arrive, and you could find yourself running out of money. Come up with a plan for when, not
if, when something goes wrong, then share it with your spouse.

Also ask your spouse for some worst case scenario's and come up with possible plans to solve them together. By letting your spouse know you're thinking of the problems and not letting yourself get blinded, he or she should feel a lot more secure with your choices.

If you can get your family on-board with you and your work at home dream your potential stress and frustration will be halved. So when you decide to change your career.