Home business futures

It may sound a strange concept but we have to look at the success of home working and realise that as technology and flexible working arrangments grow more companies will be looking at cutting overheads by locating their staff remotely.

We have been told that outsourcing is dying due to the SME's looking inward and reducing outgoings with the idea of keeping everything in house.

Well here is something that may tip the scale for the future of Homeworking.

I went to Comfort In Derbyshire (might have spelt the name wrong) Arkwrights mills and was interested to find a outsourcing programme from the early days of the industrial revolution. What the designers and architects had achieved was homes and business in the same location, neighbours collaborating on projects and production in the loft space of all the houses.

This was a simple and innovative practice literally a cottage industry and today we are not limited by the need to be in close proximity because we have modern communication resources. Here's the wrinkle for the growth of small enterprise, in the supply chain often we have relied on external commissioning to raise income because we don't get products to market places through direct production. But take a small publishing house looking for authors they have many ways of finding authors and descriminating why not reverse the process, create an authors co-operative and develop the resources for printers and publishers to chase, if they don't meet yor requirements don't use them.

There is a model for a house building programme for self build activities, the plot purchasers locates the plot through an independent Estate Agent (Lone worker) and through the line of contacts the whole project is finished by lone workers supporting the self build, even having troubleshooters online and ready to support if needed.

The new future of the home worker is to be more aggressive in the market place, trade on value and limited overheads, not grow the business to become a multinational coporation but to create and massive network of service suppliers building customer loyalty and more referrals.

Not too eloquently put but I hope you catch the drift.

Thanks for reading