Forum - Pros and cons of home-based businesses?

If your starting a business from home you might want to consider using 08xx numbers as your contact telephone numbers?

Why would you use a 0800/0844/0843 number translation service?

Many businesses use NTS. Here are some of the key benefits:

Call routing

NTS numbers can help you to control where and when your calls are received. There are many options available, including routing calls based upon time of day and day of week, routing on no answer or busy to another number or voicemail and even routing based on the geographical location of the caller.

Increase sales response
Free phone numbers, 0808 for example, are widely recognised as a very powerful marketing tool, research has shown that advertising responses can increase significantly when using one.

Professional image
NTS numbers are usually associated with large companies that have a wider presence or image, therefore the use of these types of numbers could possibly help to improve perception and image for a smaller business.

Portable
Companies sometimes move premises and it's not always possible to keep the existing telephone number, this can be a problem regarding company literature, signage or even your customers being able to contact you. By using a NTS number, this problem is easily overcome and you’ll never miss a call, simply by changing where it translates to.

Monitor marketing
Many NTS numbers can be pointed to the same telephone number, which gives the opportunity to use different numbers for different promotions, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing against budget. For example, a company could use different numbers in Yellow pages & Local adverts, to the one on their website, our live call reports, has the ability to see how many calls each number receives over a certain period.

Disaster recovery
In the event that your landline telephone number develops a fault or you had to evacuate your building, the NTS number can instantly be re-routed to an alternative number or a voicemail service that could play out a special announcement for your callers.

Advanced Options
There are main more advanced options such as call queuing, call recording, caller greetings, message playback, pre-connection messages, ratio plans and voicemail facilities. Using our in-house development expertise, it is also possible to create bespoke solutions by combining any of our capabilities to match more precisely your business's requirements.

http://numbers.lascomsolutions.co.uk offer numbers and a full ranage of calling services a a very affordable £9.95 per number

I've worked from home for more than 20 years and there has been a noticeable shift in people's perception of home-based business. It still depends to some extent on what your business is, but there is far more acceptance of home businesses and less doubt about their professionalism. In some cases, like the creative industries, it's almost taken for granted that you work from home if you're self-employed!

And of course it's up to the individual to make sure they always conduct themselves and their business in a professional way, even if they work from a corner of the kitchen table.

I love the flexibility of working from home (which I have done for the last 15 years). No time and energy wasted commuting to work, work/life balance easier to manage and no office politics.

The pros and cons will be different depending on your personality. Extroverts require external stimulus so may find it better to work in a public space with wifi. Introverts, who prefer their own company, need to make the effort to get out of the home office in order to obtain some external stimulus.

Check out www.workfromhomewisdom.com for ways of dealing with potential isolation issues.