Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Lister is an authority on small business marketing, finance, management, and growth. She has owned and operated three successful home-based ventures, including a consulting business that helped hundreds of entrepreneurs raise millions of dollars and an aviation business with seven aircraft and twenty-five pilots.

Tom Harnish is an expert on the technologies that make home-based jobs possible. As a consultant, project director, company president, and business owner he learned what it takes to make money using computers and telecommunications from over thirty years of successful and not-so-successful business development in fields as diverse as health care, home banking, and elec-tronic publishing.
For more information, please visit UndressForSuccessOnline.com

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Are you tired of torturous commutes, endless meetings, and countless interruptions? Do you want a better balance between work and life? For thousands of people just like you, a work-at-home career is their road to freedom, control, and happiness. But what kind of home-based work is available? And, how do you separate the real opportunities from the thousands of bogus work-at-home scams that dominate the Internet?

Undress for Success offers honest, real-world information on home-based jobs, businesses, and careers that can change your life. Based on the authors' three decades of experience working from home, this comprehensive guide explores and explains everything you need to know about how to simplify your life with a work-at-home job or business. It's the perfect guide for anyone who's sick of the office lifestyle and ready for a change.

This practical step-by-step guide details the who, what, why, and how of working from home—the advantages and disadvantages, the skills and traits you'll need to succeed, and how to avoid losing your shirt as you attempt to undress for success. If you're an employee, you'll discover how to successfully pitch a work-at-home program to your boss or find a new employer who loves the idea. If you want to freelance,Undress for Success offers a guide for how to find, price, and get paid for your work. And if you want to run a business, it reveals the motivations, talents, and resources you'll need to get started; identifies best-bet home businesses; and offers true stories about what it's like to work where you sleep. If you're an employer or government leader, you'll find a fascinating look at the ways at-home workers are more productive, help reduce traffic, increase productivity, and even slow global warming.

This book offers work-at-home hope for everyone from high school grads to PhDs, secretaries to programmers, Gen Y'ers to Baby Boomers. From interviews with people who work at home, you'll learn about the techniques, technologies, and strategies that make them successful. Undress for Success is the ultimate guide for making the road less traveled the way to work.

Aus dem Klappentext

Are you tired of torturous commutes, endless meetings, and countless interruptions? Do you want a better balance between work and life? For thousands of people just like you, a work-at-home career is their road to freedom, control, and happiness. But what kind of home-based work is available? And, how do you separate the real opportunities from the thousands of bogus work-at-home scams that dominate the Internet?

Undress for Success offers honest, real-world information on home-based jobs, businesses, and careers that can change your life. Based on the authors' three decades of experience working from home, this comprehensive guide explores and explains everything you need to know about how to simplify your life with a work-at-home job or business. It's the perfect guide for anyone who's sick of the office lifestyle and ready for a change.

This practical step-by-step guide details the who, what, why, and how of working from home the advantages and disadvantages, the skills and traits you'll need to succeed, and how to avoid losing your shirt as you attempt to undress for success. If you're an employee, you'll discover how to successfully pitch a work-at-home program to your boss or find a new employer who loves the idea. If you want to freelance,Undress for Success offers a guide for how to find, price, and get paid for your work. And if you want to run a business, it reveals the motivations, talents, and resources you'll need to get started; identifies best-bet home businesses; and offers true stories about what it's like to work where you sleep. If you're an employer or government leader, you'll find a fascinating look at the ways at-home workers are more productive, help reduce traffic, increase productivity, and even slow global warming.

This book offers work-at-home hope for everyone from high school grads to PhDs, secretaries to programmers, Gen Y'ers to Baby Boomers. From interviews with people who work at home, you'll learn about the techniques, technologies, and strategies that make them successful. Undress for Success is the ultimate guide for making the road less traveled the way to work.

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Undress for Success

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Imagine organizations in which bosses give employees enormous freedom to decide what to do and when to do it. Imagine electing your own bosses and voting directly on important company decisions. Imagine organizations in which most workers aren't employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life-money, interesting work, the chance to help others, or time with their families. -Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work

About 14 million people run home-based businesses or freelance in their frillies. In addition, depending on who you ask and how they count, somewhere between 5 million and 12 million Americans hold jobs that allow them to work at home in various states of undress.

The counting problem isn't because no one has bothered to study the work-at-home population. The IRS, Bureau of Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Small Business Administration, and a number of private researchers all collect data about people who work from home. But they all come at it with their own needs and biases. Some researchers count small businesses, others don't. Some surveys include people who work from home as little as one day a year, while others focus on people who primarily work from home. Some fail to distinguish between paid and unpaid work. None separate out those employees and business owners who work at home from those who work from home.

Bruce Phillips, a researcher for the National Federation of Independent Business, described during an interview the task of trying to find the real work-at-home numbers as "a statistical Vietnam-the data goes in, but you can't get it out." As a result, studying the work-at-home population is a little like trying to study meteoroids. We know there are a lot of them and we know they're important, but we don't know where they all are and not everyone agrees on which ones to count. Still, based on what we do know, we can begin to develop a model that's helpful.

E-work by the Numbers

While it's true that figures lie and liars figure, statistics do offer a useful insight into the nature of e-workers. Surveys show that men outnumber women e-workers five to three. Four out of five e-workers are married or cohabitating, and three-quarters are college grads. Fifteen percent are over age 55. Forty percent have a household income over $75,000 a year, and only about a third of those who work at home for an employer have been with the company for less than two years.

So a forty-year-old, college-educated, married man, who's been with his employer for five years is a shoo-in right? No, not really. There are lots of thirty-year-old, high-school educated, single women who e-work too.

The Nature of E-work

A program called Workplace Flexibility 2010 was started by Georgetown University to help policy makers and corporate leaders understand the need for more flexible work environments. They examined the jobs that offer the best fit for home-based work. Table 1.1 is a summary of their findings. You'll note that many of these skills are common to professional, technical, or sales functions. In fact, those types of jobs account for over half of all e-work. Table 1.2 summarizes the best job categories for e-working. If you look at the industries where those skills are dominant, as Table 1.3 demonstrates, business services accounts for the highest percentage. As we mentioned earlier, some of these industries, such as construction and real estate, don't truly offer the opportunity to work at home-that just happens to be where they're based.

The Trade-offs

Landing an e-work job or starting a home-based business may require retraining, and even a change in lifestyle. For many, the desire to work from home is worth the effort.

Robert is a registered nurse specializing in pediatric care. He wanted to work at home so he could be there if his wheelchair-bound father needed him. He found e-work as a telenurse. It meant a cut in pay, but being available for his father was more important.

Eleanor had a good job as a corporate bookkeeper but decided to freelance so she could spend more time with her kids. It meant a less stable income, but she says the move has really improved their quality of life.

Jim, an at-home legal transcriptionist, has a law degree but frequently moves because of his wife's military career. He doesn't practice law anymore, but he can take his job with him wherever she goes.

In the chapters that follow, you'll read how millions of others have made the road less traveled their way to work, and how you can too.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Undress for Successby Kate Lister Copyright © 2009 by Kate Lister. Excerpted by permission.
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