Mary M. Byers - Making Work at Home Work: Successfully Growing a Business and a Family Under One Roof

making work
at home work

making work
at home work

successfully growing a business
and a family under one roof

mary m. byers

2009 by Mary M. Byers

Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Byers, Mary M., 1962
Making work at home work : successfully growing a business and a family under one roof / Mary M. Byers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8007-3275-2 (pbk.)
1. Home-based businesses. 2. Working mothers. I. Title.
HD62.38.B94 2009
658 .0412dc22

2008049312

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked KJV is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Recipes from The Great American Supper Swap by Trish Berg and are used by permission of David C. Cook, Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. For copies of this book call 800-323-7543 (or online at www.davidccook.com).

Recipes from Once-a-Month Cooking: Revised and Expanded by Mimi Wilson and Mary Beth Lagerborg. Copyright 2007 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martins Press, LLC.

Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920. www.alivecommunications.com

To Marissa and Mason
you are why I work at home.
And to Stuart
you make it possible.

I love you all deeply.
Thanks for being a part of both my home and business team!

contents

I am grateful to be able to do work I love and to do it from home. Its not easy, but my path has been sprinkled with wonderful family and friends who encourage, love, and support me. I am blessed.

Please do not be offended if you do not see your name on this page. I am who I am because of who I know. And Ive been touched by many people over the years, all of whom have helped create the person I am today. The following have been especially helpful as I worked on this project.

Beth Jusino, my literary agent, and Jennifer Leep, my editor, helped craft this idea. Im grateful to be in partnership with you. Sarah Albracht, Tracy Dowell, and Pat Essig were all generous in sharing their experience in the field of network marketing. Thanks for enlightening me!

Im indebted to adviser June Walker for sharing her tax wisdom with those of us who work from home.

Because I am not an accountant or financial planner, I asked several individuals to review the chapter on retirement planning to be sure I dont lead you astray. Thanks to the following who helped in this regard: Cindy Sumner, speaker and author of Dollars and Sense: A Moms Guide to Money Matters; John Sumner, president, Sumner National Bank; Michelle J. Usher, CPA and manager, Sikich LLP; Andrew Paoni, MBA, vice president, Sikich Cozad Asset Management, LLC; and Brent Davis, AAMS, Edward Jones Investments.

Special thanks to the 125 women who responded to an online survey about the challenges of working from home, and to the two dozen more who candidly shared their experiences with me in person.

Special thanks to Bob Rechner, executive director at the Illinois State Dental Society and my former boss, who continues to be an extraordinary mentor and friend and who provided me with my first work-at-home contract. (Are we really old enough to have known each other for twenty years?) Im also indebted to Bill Zepp, CAE, executive director of the Oregon Dental Association, for being one of the first individuals to hire me after I retired. You helped launch my business.

As always, Julie Kaiser and Tara McAndrew, my beloved fellow writers, checked in occasionally to make sure I was still alive. Julie and my mom, Nancy Carlson, also proofed the manuscript for me. Thanks for loaning me your eyes and expertise as I neared the end of the project. Julie also helped with the work-at-home mom profiles youll see throughout this book. (And Mom, thanks for the soup that kept showing up for lunch at just the right times! More importantly, thanks for being so generous with your encouragement over the years.)

Finally, to work-at-home moms everywhere: the path is hard, the pay may not be great, and the tangible benefits may be sorely lacking, but the intangible benefits are rewarding beyond measure. Be strong. Stay the course. And dont forget that time invested in your family is never wasted.

One of the hardest decisions I ever made was to leave full-time employment outside the home in order to be more available to my children.

One of the hardest things Ive ever done is to run a home-based businessalso to be more available to my children.

If you too have experienced the challenges of successfully growing a business and a family under one roof, this book is for you.

The genesis of this book was rather simple. It began as my quest to more fully understand the dynamics of balancing work and family when they coexist under one roof.

I understand that balance is an issue most of todays working mothers wrestle with. However, a large portion of working women leave home to make their living. What about those of us who have a short commute down the hallway? Theres a big difference between heading to an office each daywith the child care support system this necessitatesand doing your work with children underfoot or hovering in the background.

In my own search for practical guidance about working from home, I discovered that though its easy to find resources to help women decide what type of home-based business to start, its not as easy to find resources about sustaining both a home and a business after the start-up phase. This lack of information was what led me to write Making Work at Home Work.

If youre like me, youve discovered that starting your business was the easy part. Its keeping your business going while meeting your family commitments thats difficult. Though Ive been in business for myself for over a decade, there are still days when I wonder, Why am I doing this? Its hard to be a wife, mother, and CEOand to be equally good at all of these jobs, especially during a busy season of work. There have been many times when I thought it would be easier to let the business slide so that I could focus more fully on my family or conversely to check out temporarily on my family when the demands of business required more attention. But I believe that my home-based business is a perfect provision for me and my family. It allows me to do work I love, contribute to the family income, use the skills I have, and most importantly, have flexibility in my schedule, which is precious to me.

Ive relied on a cadre of other working mothers to provide input and feedback to help ensure that this book is helpful and practical and one youll turn to time and time again. (Thats my hope, anyway!) Over 125 work-at-home mothers responded to an online survey with questions designed to explore the heart of work-at-home issues. More than two dozen women also shared in person the joys and struggles they encounter as they work from home.