I work from home.
Well, for right now.
This means any number of things from day to day, but mostly it means I have a hell of a time trying to find paying work, and that I have a challenge ahead of me for keeping business separate from family and home life.
Granted, it doesn’t mean I’m not successful with what I do, and how I do it. It just means it’s more of a struggle – or even more an active effort – than working at a regular job with a regular company.
In my time as a self-employed individual, I have learned a couple different things about decision making. I have also never dogged my way through the 9-to-5 lifestyle as a long-term employee, so I have a fairly pristine outlook on goings on when working from home.
What is decision making?
Decision making is exactly as it sounds – choosing between two or more alternatives and sticking with it. In decision making, we make our way through a number of different stages – research, evaluation, choosing, and monitoring – and along the way, we learn a lot about new things we never imagined having knowledge of and take major steps and, at times, risks.
Decision making as a manager is different from decision making as an owner. As a manager, you are spending someone else’s money, leading you to be prone to taking on more risk. As an owner, you are essentially making decisions for your child, meaning life-and-death choices are harder. Of course, very rarely is a decision life-or-death for a major corporation. Wal-Mart can open a failing store and operate it for years to come, and it will survive just fine, so long as other stores make up for its shortcomings.
As a small business, especially home-based, choices are often tougher. We cannot fail for an extended period of time in any area, or things are going to start to go south in our personal finances.
Additionally, small businesses are often in the market for investors and other forms of financial help. If a home-based business owner shows a history of poor choices, getting a credit card or loan in a time of hardship is bound to be more difficult.
Fiscal decisions
When it comes time to make a choice, money often plays a major role in business activities. Sometimes, the choice is between a bad option, such as a loss, or a good option, like a positive return. Other times, we are choosing between good money and better money, or a short-term boom as opposed to a long-term boom. Yet other times, we choose between two evils: an extreme loss of money, or a moderate loss of money.
Money, unfortunately, is going to be at the root of almost all business decisions. Regardless of how we personally feel (which is almost bound to be an emphasis on money anyways), we also have to take into consideration our stakeholders – any employees we have, our families, who rely on our income, and potential investors and creditors.
Ethical Decisions
Sometimes a decision isn’t strictly financial, or can even be completely non-financial. In almost every situation, we will have to come up with an answer to an often challenging ethical dilemma.
While ethics is a topic I plan to cover somewhat frequently and deeply over the years to come, I only want to get into a basic discussion right now. When it comes to ethics, you will need to keep your ethical viewpoint in mind, such as being an enlightened egoist, keep your utilitarian (or not) values in check, and go for a good that you will stand behind. It isn’t always going to be what other people think is right – indeed, we all have different views of ethics – but if you act ethically and in such a way that you view as right, people will respect that.
And now we come to the bottom of the barrel…
Personal decisions
In the meantime, you’re going to be making personal decisions for your own life and your family.
Sometimes, these decisions will involve your business. Often, they reflect on your personality, and come with a public reputation attachment as well.
In making personal choices, you will often influence those people around you who pay attention to you, or even look up to you, or are out to hurt you. Competitors, fans, friends, and visitors will all be looking at your history – including your personal decisions – to determine if they want to give you their business or if they can destroy you.
One key to remember: do not act in a way that betrays you. What I mean by this is that there are difficult decisions and there are easy decisions. Regardless of the level of difficulty, and regardless of what other people think about it, make decisions in a way that you agree with personally. As the owner of a business, you have many reputations to care about, and many stakeholders, such as employees and your family. This means they will try to influence you. If you do not act in a way that you agree with, you will be unable to defend that decision if anybody asks, and you will begin to resent yourself – to feel like you’ve “sold out.” Do not do this.
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