Rise of the homeworker

According to the 2009 Labour Force Survey there are 691,000 people in the UK whose commute to work consists of no more than a short shuffle across the landing from bathroom to spare bedroom, or a stroll past the veg patch to the ‘office’/shed at the bottom of the garden. These people are homeworkers and they have increased in number by nearly 100,000 since the last survey in 2006. This article on the Guardian website gives lots more facts and figures about the rise of this phenomenen and discusses some of the (mostly) pros and (relatively few) cons.  While the gist of this article is about being an employed homeworker, there are also many people working from home for themselves.

If you’re running your own business, the ability to run it from your own home has another, very important, advantage: it’s a lot cheaper than renting office space. This is one of the reasons that Auditel is such a low-overhead business opportunity. If you’ve got a computer, internet access and a phone, you’ve got all the infrastructure you need to be one of our cost and purchase management consultants. In fact, you don’t even need a computer because you’ll get a laptop as part of your franchise package.

Get to know some Auditel Franchisees

One of our 2010 intake of consultants, Lee Freeman, who trained in March, has given an interview to the Total Franchise website. As you’ll see from his interview, Lee trained as an accountant but held senior FD posts in the UK and Europe before deciding to start his own business. Like most of our consultants, he carefully weighed up the pros of cons of starting somthing on his own from scratch or buying an existing stand-alone business before deciding that franchising gave him the right balance of support and freedom to build a successful long-term business for himself and his family.

Below Lee’s intereview are also links to a series of other interviews with Auditel consultants, both new and old-timers (sorry William!), from a wide range of professional backgrounds.

Discover franchising – new dates for May 09

Our new series of Discovery Seminars has been going extremely well so we’ve added some more dates for May. Seminars are held at our head office training suite in Winchester and start at either 10am or 1.30pm. As well as presentations and Q&A sessions about the Auditel cost management consultancy opportunity, you will have the chance to meet members of the Support Team and, if there is a training session in progress, perhaps also with existing franchisees.

Franchising proves the most popular route to starting a home business

Enterprise Nation hosts the UK’s largest website for home-based entrepreneurs and as well as providing hundreds of free resources, advising the government on this increasingly important sector of the economy and running the annual Home Business Awards they also produce an annual Home Business Report. The latest of these was published in October 2008 and one of the most surprising results (from their point of view, not ours!) was the number of respondents who started their home business by way of a franchise. Read more…

Tomorrow's World of Work Today

The Chartered Management Institute recently published a document called ‘The World in 2018’ – outlining what it believes to be the most probable picture of the world of work and management in 2018. The home as a place of work and business has a big part to play in this scenario planning.

This is what the Institute had to say about business models:

“Business models will change their nature, be more diverse, more customer-centric and change more quickly. We will see a polarisation of business models from global corporations to virtual-community-based enterprises. Large corporations will grow even bigger and there will be more small niche-oriented specialised associate businesses around.”

Auditel has been operating as a ‘virtual-community-based enterprise’ offering specialist niche services since 1994 so why wait until 2018 to be part of the new world of work? If you’d like to find out more about running your own Auditel consultancy, visit our website or call us on 0800 583 3355 for more information.

Join the homeworking revolution

A survey of 500 small businesses by telecoms company O2 shows that since the beginning of the year nearly 10% have chosen not to renew the lease on their office or business premises, deciding instead to work remotely from home. They estimate that over 400,000 small businesses have stopped paying for premises since the onset of the credit crunch in November 2007 and that almost two thirds of those still working from a dedicated business premises are seriously thinking about quitting them within the year.

Read more…

Start a business from home and save money

According to the home business website Enterprise Nation, you can be at least £30,000 in pocket by starting a business from home when increases in the value of your home and savings on fuel costs and motoring expenses are taken into account.

Supported by research carried out by estate agents, Homefinder UK and motoring experts, The AA, Enterprise Nation reckon that having an office in the house adds an average £28,000 to the value of your home while avoiding the daily commute can save over £2,000 a year. Read more…

60% of new start-up businesses are home based

Reassuring news for anybody who is thinking off setting up a new business from home in 2008. You’re not alone and, what’s more, your aspiration is key to the UK’s economic future. According to a new survey carried out by the website, Enterprise Nation, home-based businesses account for 60% of new start-ups, with professional services like Auditel accounting for many of these. Read more…

Work from home and reduce stress

According to a study of 800 commuters by Dr David Lewis carried out in 2004, the average daily commute in the UK is 45 – 60 minutes. That’s a whole day a week wasted on overcrowded trains, snarled up motorways and uncomfortable buses. A whole day when you’re not with your family or doing something constructive and interesting with your life. And to add insult to injury, Dr Lewis also found that commuting is positively (or should that be negatively) stressful: in extreme cases he measured stress levels in commuters higher than those in fighter pilots and riot policemen going into battle!
Read more…