Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning we get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through our links, at no cost to you. Please read our disclosure for more info.
Last Updated on January 20, 2024 by Work In My Pajamas
Most successful companies started doing business from entrepreneurs’ homes. One of the best examples for this is Apple Inc. Huge tech corporation with the best success story that’s ever told. Apple was started in Steve Jobs’ parents’ house on Crist Drive in Los Altos, CA, where Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne and him constructed the famous Apple I, one of the most popular personal computers of all times.
Even in the digital era, every business needs to have an address. For entrepreneurship beginners, running home business is probably the best choice, at least in the first few phases, when their project doesn’t require hiring additional workers.
In This Post:
What is business agility anyway?
Business agility represents the ability of business enterprise to rapidly respond to market changes. This response needs to be efficient and cost effective. Reasonably agile businesses can survive big changes in supply and demand, while the most agile ones can use these changes to increase their profits and market share. There are many different ways in which business agility can be maintained, and most of them work perfectly on home-based businesses.
Benefits of home businesses in terms of business agility
Although most work hub tenants wouldn’t agree with our premise, we think that home is a perfect environment for developing an agile business enterprise. These are some of the benefits that using home as your business headquarters bring:
- Improved scalability – Although home businesses have certain limits when it comes to scalability, they can easily withstand hard hits and declines. Unlike bigger businesses that have huge amounts of funds tied to their assets, home businesses can easily survive difficult periods. Entrepreneurs who run their companies from home don’t pay a lot of money for running costs, and they can make quick changes in order to survive.
- Ability to test different business models – Home business allows entrepreneurs to do a lot of testing in initial phases of their company’s development. Work hubs, rented offices or premises of different business incubators allow limited amounts of changes to office design and layout and ask for advance payments for their services. On the other hand, home based entrepreneurs can start businesses in many different ways, until they find the concept that suits them in the best way.
- Improved market and customer tracking – Most entrepreneurs who work from their homes are available for work 24/7. This means they can closely follow changes and instantly react on every indication that market is going to change.
- Close communication with customers and suppliers – Home business owners establish close and more personal communication with their customers and suppliers. This allows them to have a perfect insight in market processes and to choose different promotional actions to increase customer satisfaction. They can hand out visa gift cards, presents, introduce discounts and organize sales as an immediate response to current events and market changes, and without too much preparation and strategic planning.
- Adaptive planning– In big corporations managers need to follow certain decision making procedures and annual or quarterly plans, while entrepreneurs who run business from their homes, usually skip that complicated process and make immediate decisions based on current market situation. Of course this doesn’t mean that small home businesses don’t make elaborate plans, just they can change them in accordance with current events and market performance.
- Agile workforce– Home businesses usually hire from one to ten workers, and most of them own some amount of company shares. That’s why home business employees are more willing to learn new things, attend courses and apply newly learned strategies to company’s business model.
Although many millennials avoid working from their own home and pay large sums for renting office space or joining work hubs, starting home business is still one of the most practical ways to jump into entrepreneurship. Using above mentioned benefits in the best way can further improve business agility and increase company’s profits and market performance.
