On Telecommuting

Also see
How you can become a telecommuter # 2

How you can become a telecommuter #1

How you can become a telecommuter

(6) Become your own boss

I left this option for the very end because this option has most of the risks, but also can bring many rewards. Being your own boss is not just about “bossing around” (yup, only around yourself), it is about making lots of decisions, planning, executing, and so on.

… So you grew not to stand your boss, your job does not motivate you any more, let alone you have to drive every morning tens of miles to be greeted by your boss again and again…

One day you wake up with either “can’t do this any more” or “I have got an awesome idea — am going to build a killer Web 2.0. technology, or am going to sell stuff on EBay, or to prepare tax returns for sufferers before they suffer too much, or am going to become a free lance programmer, or am going to start a cleaning business AND get MY OWN web site, or”… you name it. .

This is all nice and dandy.

Before you declare to your boss, you can not stand him/her any more, I would suggest to consider doing a number of things:

• Go Google what you plan to do and your zip code — see who is out there
  Find them, talk with them, see how it is working out.
  People are often willing to share if nicely asked, and if you happen to bump into a ‘not nice one’, forget about him/her and keep exploring
• Think through business basics — yup, again we have heard it all…
  Oh well, at the very least, take a peace of paper and answer a few “basic” questions”
  Q: Do I need an initial capital?
  Maybe it is to buy a better pc, maybe it is to buy a better mob,
  whatever tools you may need, list them down and price them out, add that all up.
  Q: Do I have that capital or do I need external infusions
  If you have enough, all the luck to you.
  If you need capital, however large or little the sum can be,
  the two way to get it are:
  – debt - loan from a bank, from kind relatives, from a stranger on the street
  – equity - you have a really cool idea and you part of the ownership out to a kind neighbor, to an angel investor who may not have wings, or to a VC (venture capital companies), they often are not holly either.
  There is a third way — you may be able to get a grant, how long that may take and how large the grant may be depends on a lot of variables.
  Q: If it is a loan, how long may it take to pay it back
  Q: If I am shooting for a VC, do I actually know any?
  (A friendly note: VC do not give money to strangers)
• Think about your niche (yes, same old, same old)
  How others are going to know that you are better than A or B, especially if they have already ‘got burned’ with A or B.
  Or, if you are going to sell hm… shoes… or any other stuff on EBay — Go EBay that stuff and see what comes up. most probably there will be hundreds of entries; for starters read EBay’s manual on how you can come to the top of that list — that may give you an idea if you have stamina to sell shoes… .or that other stuff.

• Think who your first clients are going to be
  A good, a first sale are important in your “I am my own boss” business career.
  Think of your neighbors, friends, relatives that might be interested in the product or services you are going to provide (read: you are going to sell). See what their response is.
  If they are naggers, do not get discouraged, keep searching, they just might be envious of or oblivious to your “new idea”.
• Explore what licenses, federal and state registrations, and business insurances you may need to get for your business. There might be a Small Business Association office that may be helpful. In my experience, this type of organizations are less helpful than they sound by their name. Also, do not forget about finding out how much health insurance may cost you unless you are covered by your spouse or very healthy.

If those steps still keep your dream alive, then take a vacation and try what you want to do. Literally, play a role of your own boss for two weeks. Start develop relationships — your potential virtual online customers, or your neighbors, or potential freelance work providers, or start searching for those magic VCs and angels.

If after two weeks it seems like it is working out, and you have what you need or are on your way to what you need, then, ta da... You can show up in your office in jeans or without and declare your independence. I would suggest to show up nicely dressed, give a two week notice, help your boss find your successor and train him or her, and leave with good memories about you. Remember your boss may become your first client.

Now you are on your own. Working in jammies, enjoying life. Well, if it is a cleaning business, then the only thing you will get do in jammies, is taking orders from your site, if, of course you have a site and your clients know how to find it.

Just remember, ‘Leaders never quit, quitters never lead’. And, if it does not work out, you always have a choice to go back to the “corporate world”.

(2) Start looking for a job at a big company that provides telelcommuting (working from home) as an option

Many large corporations have embraced telecommuting practices and allow their employees work from homes or satellite offices. Working for a big company often may mean more security unless they are not doing too well and downsizing vs. telecommuting is they rhyme. Big companies often provide more support to their telecommuting employees than small companies, simply because ‘biggies’ have more means and often they save on telecommuters, so why not share some of that to make their telecommuting bees feel better.

Sun Microsystems — Work where you hang your coat
SBC / AT&T — Promoting telecommuting since 1992
Intel — Intel even had a telecommuting CEO
Cisco — Smart Valley Telecommuting Guide
Microsoft — Telcommuting Confessions of Microsoft’s Staffing Manager

(3) Start working for a small (more liberal) business

This option, as anything else in life, may/will take time to find. Often this will be a business in your area, so you can meet up with your other co-workers not only over IM (Instant Messenger), but also in person. If you would rather work with a team of people rather than purely on your own and for yourself, start looking for this type of businesses around, ask your friends, let everyone on the earth know you are looking for a telecommuting job, join local business associations and networks, keep asking.

Very important: update your resume and make it clear you are looking for a telecommuting position. Have your resume available in different formats — text, word doc, pdf, an post it online, you never know what your potential employee may pump up and or what they may have for resume submission requirements.

If you do get a call for an interview, dress nicely, be nice. These are people you will be working with, you want them to imagine you looking nice behind your computer screen. You will have a chance to relax later on — wearing jammies and so on.

Examples of small business with distributed teams of people working mostly from homes — my company TnR Global, 37 Signals, IR3W, and many others. Just keep looking and be open to options.

(4) Government agencies offer telecommuting opportunities

Government agencies have gotten a mandate to introduce and promote telecommuting.
I have little experience of working with/at government agencies and can not help you there yet.

Most of the answer you can find at Telework America and then discuss with your supervisor.

5) Find a job at a virtual call center or become a virtual assistant

Virtual call center provide services for companies to handle customer support — inbound and outbound calls. They often hire people to work from home. Willow is one of such options and is promoted by the Telework Coalition. A few more options for virtual call centers from the Telework Coalition site. An average pay is $10 to $14 per hour.

The concept of a virtual assistant (VA) has become a reality in today’s world. Virtual Assistants provide administrative support to busy professionals. They often help search for info, prepare power point presentations, organize contacts, type documents. The International Virtual Assistants Association will give you some answer as to how to become a VA.

(1) Start from where you are, see if your current employer offers telecommuting options

You might have gotten lucky and your management is ahead of the curve. Look around, ask your HR department if telecommuting options are being offered.

If telelcommuting is offered, but not for your position, see what you can do to get a position where at least a few days a week you can work from home. Find out how your company supports telelcommuters — like who pays for phone bills, who maintains equipment if it breaks, will they reimburse for your home office furniture and alike.

If it is not offered, gently discuss this with your boss… Start from “what do you think about telelcommuting” and if she is thinking about it, there is your chance to promote the practice and help set it up. If she is not fond of it and would rather see you in the office, well then start looking for other options… more below.

As one of my friends says “my boss wants to see my alive body in the office everyday”.

I actually thought I would write how you can become a telecommuter. In this post I showed a picture (that is worth thousand words) of different ‘types’ of telecommuters. Let’s add a few words to it.

To start telecommuting, which often translates to working from home, you have a number of options. But before we get to options…

Let’s just agree that working from home still means working vs. sleeping and watching TV for the whole day, gardening, cooking, doing laundry. If you get to do those things (vs. work) and they pay your bills, email me and let me know of your magic. You certainly can make gardening and cooking for others to be your work, that is an option… Ok, let’s get to tecommuting options:

(1) Start from where you are, see if your current employer offers telecommuting options

(2) Start looking for a job at a big company that that provides telelcommuting (working from home) as an option

(3) Start working for a small (more liberal) business

(4) Government agencies offer telecommuting opportunities

(5) Find a job at a virtual call center or become a virtual assistant

(6) Become your own boss

See my next posts…

Found this great commercial from BT Group — Enable your people to actually work from home.

(YouTube does not allow posting videos in WordPress yet, only Blogger and LiveJournal.)

Robert Scoble argued with Peter Davis (and 60+ commenters) about whether podcasts are useful and have future or they do not. Since I am a constant ‘content absorber’ and value my time while absorbing it, here is my take on podcasting.

To me, ‘podcast’ is no more than a new word and new buzz. Educate me on what I am missing. — Podcast is a bit of shortened version of content-rich-sound options that have been out there for years.

Audio books have existed for years, first on tapes, then as digital files. For three or more years, Audible.com has been offering WSJ news every morning for those who want to listen to news while commuting. When I used to commute (drive) to work, news stream in the morning was useful, still audio books worked better than news. Burning news on CD or downloading to a sound device every morning was quite a bit of a task and the next morning it is old news anyway. There is also choice of radio for news and interviews. (Soon available on mobile devices too.) (Aka, competition.)

It has taken many ups and downs for Audible to start making it, and they are subscription based. With podcasting being positioned as free content en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast, and with audience becoming more and more ad and promotions averse, it would be very interesting to see viable business models for businesses offering podcasts.

Since I started telecommuting, I have not found podcasts helpful in delivering information either. Glancing over content on-line is much more efficient. Rarely there is an engaging speaker (in a video file) that would make it through all other content out there.

I guess in the areas where there is no connection, like one of the commenters commented, podcasts can help, but then again, one has to have connection to download them often enough, otherwise it is old news, or it is a timeless audio book.

When jogging outside, podcasts, or any content-rich-sound for that matter, do not work for me either, music does. Music is ‘content free’, it has rhythm and can either add to speed or take from it. With any ‘content rich’ sound, I find myself concentrating on what that last sentence was and miss the next one; at the end I do not get much info, and missed an enjoyable run too.

If my iPod happens to be out of juice (and there is not time to charge it up), TVs in the gym work ok, but then, there is more visual to that rather than just sound, and even if I miss something, not a big deal.

Where I do find ‘podcasts’ helpful – record your own speeches, listen to your voice and see if you like the sound of it. Master your speech making that way.

Good luck to Robert with his new endeavor and to prove all naggers wrong. It is worth trying even if only for the experience of building his own thing.

This list of collaboration technologies providers I will be analyzing in my next posts. There are many, often with no clear differentiation — at least on the front end functionality.

It would be interesting to see how all these companies will be able to sell to fairly the same market with the only significant difference - some are more for small businesses, some target enterprise level customers.

Stayed tuned and we will walk the road together!

Yesterday my colleague Jade and I went to “Collaborative Technologies Conference” in Boston. This was the most educational and the best organized event out of hundreds I have been to. Too expensive to my liking, but they were very much worth the price; we did use free passes. Presentations are available here (for free!). Very valuable for telecommuters and companies promoting telecommuting and collaboration.

If you are still at the very start of the road to collaboration and telecommuting, and wonder what this is all about, do glance at this one: Virtual Team Spaces. Slide 14 will tell you the story. People are Important. Technology is only the means.

We ‘interviewed’ every stand in the pavilion about what products they were offering and at what price points. In the next post I will write about those that impressed us, and I guess those that did not.

Lessons learned or reinforced:

1) Lots of very similar collaboration technologies and products are mushrooming all over.

Just glance at this list of vendors. Forty or so. Notice GoToMeeting and WebEx are not even there. Needless to say, many more are not on the list but are out there.

2) The choice is overwhelming, differentiation is undervelming.

3) It is going to be very hard for organizations to make “the right choice”. As often in a saturated market, buyers will be choosing based more on emotions than rational. Only those sales people that will listen and that are sharp in knowing their product may have a chance.

4) Switching from one vendor to another will continue to be costly for big companies. As such, once settled, most probably, they will continue with the choice, even if the choice is “not that right”.

5) Switching from one solution to another is inexpensive for small businesses where there is less concern about infrastructure, compatibility, security. Pricing and simplicity (’usability’ in web 2.0 terms) will make a difference.

Example: Webex, GoToMeeting, Convenos — All three let you meet virtually, share docs, exchange opinions. So far, we found Convenos to be the best one — less expensive ($30 vs. $50 a month as in the other two cases), cleaner interface, combined with VOIP to let you talk vs. to make you add Skype to your presentation.

6) Most important lesson:

People matter. Develop and employ technology to empower them, but take the focus off technology and do listen to those who work for you, who you work with. At the end, they are the ones who do the work and can make it or break it.

… Attended a webinar from Citrix on “Get the Facts: How GoToAssist Compares with WebEx for Support” to see which tool I may want to recommend for telecommuters.

They highlighted two differences and then went on with PRing GoToAssist, which was fine since it was their seminar. I just found it a bit too ‘funny’ that not that many differences were found, yet that is what the subject of the seminar called for.

Two major differences I picked up on:

GoToAssist connects you with customer within 31.18 sec (yup, the .18 is interesting) while WebEx takes 1 min 3.14 sec. I found this difference was out of range for making a difference. Most web meetings and/or support calls I have participated in always take time to start — “can you hear me?”, “hold on I need earphones”, “can you turn your sound down, I hear echo”.

The second difference did seem to be important. Webex requires a heavy 10 Mb download and install, requires ActiveX or JRE or local Admin Rights. GoToAssist needs only 660 Kb Download and no installation and does not require ActiveX or JRE or local Admin Rights. GoToAssit has got that one right on. Time is money and heavier install might make a difference at the same price point, let alone and average user would not know what ActiveX or JRE are.

As I get to try these two tools and similar types that are pumping up, I will write my own impression of what works better.

In my quest about blogs and thinking about how to make my blog of value, I kept searching for ‘’meaning'’ (in blogs).

It is fascinating.

On one side, blogs and bloggers have come a long way and HAVE become a marketing and PR power for themselves and for companies they blog for. On the other side, majority of population in the US and the world is still so far from relating to what blogs are and how they can benefit from blogs or why they may want to start writing their own blogs.

Blogging is becoming a science in itself. Simple Google search on ‘why blog‘ will give you zillions of opinions on ‘why blog’, ‘how to and how not to (blog)’, ‘what works and does not’.

Having read 40-50 posts like that, and, oh well, having been intimidated by how far all advanced bloggers have gone, all I arrived at is one still has to find his own style by walking the road and testing what works and doesn’t. Intimidation is off, and am proceeding with making my blog of value. “Winning through intimidation” is the book that makes wonders when you find yourself in the sphere of those who have sharpened their pens and mastered/tested their ideas for years.

At the end of the day what makes it — Content is king, and one has got to blog for and with readers, not to and at them.

To capture a few points about blogging and posts that registered in my memory out of all:

1) David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati, analyzed the state of blogosphere on his blog (bullet points are quoted from David’s 05/01/06 posting):

• Technorati now tracks over 37.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour.

About 1/3 of that is written in English, 1/3 - in Japanese, and about 1/6 - in Chinese.

I read this as to become successful (in my definition - fairly readable) in blogging, one must somehow differentiate her blog among other 11 million ‘English speaking’ blogs. To ease that up a bit, take into account 55% of follow-ups and then apply the 80-20 rule twice, a new blogger competes with about 200,000 top bloggers along with all else on the net. Why 80-20 rule twice? Because it is really the top of the top that makes a difference. Apply it three times and you would be even closer to the top. Yes, sure, my finance mind keeps seeing math where it may not apply. The fact is still the fact: to bring oneself to the top, one has more work to do than if he/she’d started three years ago and kept at it.

2) Seth Godin in his Incomplete Guide on Blogs points out that there are essentially three types of blogs:

• Cat blog - a blog by and about oneself, one’s cat and, other life events.
  Cat type blogger can (and should) be happy with low traffic to his blog.

Why should? Because to be unhappy about the fact the world is not interested in your life stories is to be oblivious. People first want to be heard before they want to hear. If you think you hear them by making them aware of how you/your cat felt today, think some more… Be happy because you have already reached your audience — your remote relatives and friends are now aware of what’s going in your life, and that is already a step forward in your communication with them.

• Boss Blog — Blogs by bosses to make the public aware of strategic developments and tactical moves at their companies. Usually bosses can not reveal any news until it is not news any more, and as such, while might be educational for some, these blogs often lack zest important for majority to come back

• Viral Blogs - Blogs aiming start conversations, to bring points up, to spread ideas.

Viral blogs are the blogs that readers keep coming back to and keep spreading the word about. These are the blogs that are shaking traditional media, traditional (interruption) marketing, and traditional all.

3) I learned a lot about first steps and next steps in blogging from Guy Kawasaki’s blog.
4) A few more links that I found helpful in understanding what blogs are:

Blog’s view and Updated Manifesto

5) Blogs I found of interest are in my blog roll.