Your Home Office - Top things to make your office at home succeed

By Brad Trupp
Editor, 4hb.com

You work at home. What are the top things you need to make your office at home succeed for you?

• Separate space where you can work with out being disturbed. A door you can close is an added bonus if you do not live alone.
  
• A large desk with lots of drawers for storage. A hutch is nice too so those extra papers and supplies are always with-in reach.
  
• A real comfy chair. After all, you are going to live in it every day.
  
• Separate phone lines for business calls. Nothing ruins your professional image like a 6 year old answering a business call. If you dial in to the Internet a lot, you should have a separate line for that too.
  
• A fax machine. If you do not want to get a separate line for the fax machine, then at least get a second number with distinct ring pattern and a fax machine that can distinguish rings and pick up faxes only.
  
• Voice mail – missed calls are missed opportunities.
  
• Music. It soothes the soul. Maybe a small television too if you are a news junky but not if you will not be disciplined enough to ignore the soaps and game shows.
  
• A computer – it should be reasonably new enough to run current software. Discuss the lease vs. buy dilemma with your accountant.
  
• A Laser printer. Relatively inexpensive these days and the output look way more professional than an ink-jet or that old dot matrix.
  
• A Scanner. You can use it for photocopying. Add a little spice to those proposals with pictures.
  
• A Tape backup unit or a CD burner. Hate to lose your work? Make backups. Keep some recent backups off-site perhaps at a friend’s house or in a bank safety deposit box. Make sure you have boot disks and recovery software prepared in advance – before you need it.
  
• A battery backup or UPS. It is very cheap insurance against power outages. Make sure you have enough capacity for at least 10 minutes.

Got any questions? Please visit the Entrepreneur’s "For Home Business" Information Web site at http://www.4hb.com/. Celebrate your home-based and home-office small businesses and get resources for your continuing success

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Copyright © 2000 Brad Trupp