How Much Longer Until Home Based Businesses Join the Mobile Age

Home based businesses have been around for a long time; since the beginning of our species, really. In fact, working from an office is a relatively modern trend, driven by industrialization and centralization of businesses and resources. Essentially, people began to work from an office because conducting work from home became increasingly more difficult.

With the inception of the world wide web a few decades ago – and the more recent advancements in wireless and mobile technologies – this trend began to reverse itself. As mobile technology proliferated throughout the U.S., working from home was all of a sudden not just feasible, but profitable. Potentially more profitable than renting an office, or working for a company.

Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses for home business owners. Like all business decisions, there are important pros and cons that need to be addressed. As SDI is a tech company, this post will focus on technology, specifically how entrepreneurs and home based business owners can leverage mobile technologies to grow their business and make some money.

Even though SDI is historically a website and software development company, our business over the last decade or so has been primarily app development. To be more precise, most of the work we do is small business apps and enterprise solutions for SMB. Through this extensive experience, we’ve learned a few things along the way.

Home Business Plan

• Opening, operating, and maintaining an office is an expensive endeavor. Just renting alone can easily cost upwards of $5,000 a month, especially in Silicon Valley, where SDI is based. When you tack on utilities, insurance, internet, and office amenities (i.e. water), you can be looking at monthly costs close to $10 grand – just for the office.

Home-based businesses don’t have to confront that issue. Sure, they have other considerations, but all and all, home businesses only marginally add to already existing home utility costs. Even for small scale multi-employee home businesses, paying home internet and phone costs for your employees is still considerably cheaper than operating an office.

• Access to company materials and resources was one of the primary drivers behind the push towards office jobs. Back before easy access to the internet, the technologies needed to connect to the web (i.e. computers, hardline, software, etc) was expensive and frequently unavailable to the public at large.

With the advent of mobile technologies and cheaper production costs, this is less of a hurdle than what it was once. Just take website development: where it once cost many thousands of dollars, we can now do it for as little as $800.

• Another boon the internet grants us are digital meeting applications. Before things like SaaS and PaaS, office space was a critical element to not only having a meeting space but to being considered a legitimate business. Today, people can attend a meeting from anywhere in the world, from multiple locations.

This advancement revolutionized global business and is one of the key features to any business, but especially those that do business abroad. In fact, there’s even a ton of money to be made creating a SaaS/PaaS program which can be rented/sold to large businesses – which brings us to our next point.

• When working from home first began to be possible once more, the legitimate concern for most business owners was two fold:

a. How do I know my employees are actually doing their work; and

b. How does a geographically disparate workforce share ideas, work, documents, and other such considerations.

As stated above, this is a totally valid concern that business owners have (and should have). Fortunately for the aspiring home entrepreneur, the solution to both these problems is not only the same but readily available.

The aforementioned Saas and PaaS programs can be custom designed to match the needs of any business. This means that you can not only use it to track unintrusively the work your employees are doing, but you can also provide a centralized location for employees to communicate, work collaboratively and share documents, ideas or information.

Heck, a decent SaaS program is invaluable to any company, no matter the size. It can help to manage all aspects of a business, from multiple locations to human error. When you throw cloud-based tech on top of that, what you have is a recipe for success.

Good cloud-based SaaS and PaaS solutions are an excellent money maker. They are easily customizable, maintainable and up-datable. More importantly, since it’s an ongoing service a SaaS owner can charge clients a subscription. A well-designed SaaS program can make its owners a bucketload of cash.

To conclude, home based startups and fully fledged business have a lot of options today. As the technology has improved, business are going mobile and home-based throughout all major industries and sectors. Home businesses are no longer bound to the same restrictions as they once were.

Mobile Solutions

SDI is a mobile app, website and custom software development company based in California. For years, we have specialized in designing and developing tech solutions for startups and SMB, including home businesses. We pride ourselves on the work we do and we love working with passionate innovators and entrepreneurs.

Got an idea you think would make a great home business tool? Got a few ideas you think you could use to create a home based app making company? Contact us or give us a call at 408.805.0495 today and we can get started right away.