Work-At-Home Is Where The Ceo Is
Each morning, Stella Chase gets out of bed, puts on her work clothes and makeup and begins the commute to her job.
She doesn’t have far to go. Her interior design business, Stellar Interiors, is just a few feet down the hall, in a bedroom of her house.
“I could go get a storefront out in downtown, but that would just be a whole lot of overhead,” said Chase, who opened her business a year ago. “I find working from home is the best option for me. It means low overhead and everything is centralized.”
Chase is one of more than 126,000 business owners operating a home-based business in Oregon, according to a 2002 survey done by the U.S. Census Bureau. Nearly half of the nation’s 23 million businesses are home-based, according to that survey.
The advancement of technology and the widespread use of the Internet has helped create a population of work-at-home professionals who are shaping the workplace, said Verna Reardon, chairwoman of the Computer Application and Office Systems department at Portland Community College’s Cascade campus.
Some industries, however, still carry a stigma that home-based business owners are less professional, Reardon said.
The bigger challenge, said Dylan Paul, owner of Able Carpentry in Beaverton, is networking. “The overhead of running a home-based business is low,” Paul said. “But the downside is low visibility. That’s one of the reasons I joined the chamber, to get my business out there.”
Plus, it can be hard to balance work with pleasure. Tiffany Estes, owner of Whole Brain Creative, a graphics design and marketing firm, said she abandoned her home office after four years, because she felt like she was always working.
Photo by ianus.
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