Many a would-be entrepreneur blames lack of space for stalled business ideas. Renting offices is expensive, you’ve nowhere to keep stock, your home is too small… the list goes on. There is, however, always a way to make space and clear the decks for moneymaking activities.
Make a Home Office
Creating space at home for an office isn’t hard if you think outside the box regarding storage. Okay, so you might not have a spare room (although this is the ideal situation), but there are ways to designate areas of the house as work spaces.
In kitchens, you can clear out a cupboard and use it solely for office supplies so you have everything to hand when you sit down to work at the kitchen table. You could even use a floor cabinet as a desk by making a few alterations to the inner shelves and sitting on a breakfast bar stool so you’re at the right working height.
In living rooms, try cordoning off a section of the room to create a psychological barrier between relaxation and work areas. You can do this with a freestanding bookcase arranged perpendicular to the wall, or with a sofa positioned so its back faces the desk area.
In bedrooms, dressing tables can double as desks with the added advantage that once work tools are stowed away in the drawers you’re not reminded of work at bedtime. If the room is large enough, try to get hold of a decorative screen so you can hide the office area completely.
Spare rooms are best of all. Clear out the bedroom furniture and fit it with an office suite instead. If the room is large enough, you could even rent out a spare desk to a fellow home worker or business owner.
Sell, Save or Store
When you’re packing away things you don’t use, or clearing out space for a home office, the question of what to do with those items raises its head. Some of the things you could sell or donate to charity, but it’s likely you won’t want to dispose of valuable, personal or sentimental belongings.
Self storage units are the answer. They’re in every town in easy-to-reach locations and are cheaper than you might think. They’re also available for very short-term rentals, so if you just want to experiment with space at home you could try it for a week to test the waters. Chances are, once you experience the liberation and rush of new ideas that dedicated office or hobby space brings, you won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things. In which case you could sell items you won’t use again, and in doing so give birth to a whole new business idea.
Finding Riches in Clutter
Many online traders have stumbled into profitable business through starting small and finding a niche, often by first selling items of their own they no longer have use for. It’s a small step to go from there to purposely buying stock to sell.
The secret to successful trading, online or otherwise, is stock organisation and having the flexibility to take advantage of bargain bulk buys when they crop up. If you’ve experimented with self storage, maybe you’ve come across some of the many people who use storage units as business premises. It’s a growing trend, with storage companies reporting that nearly half their units are rented for business purposes.
Coupled with the new home space, you’ve actually put in place the efficient business system that lots of entrepreneurs have already discovered. All it takes is some creative thinking and using what’s already available in imaginative ways.
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