Business

Running a Home Business? Separate Professional from Personal

More and more people are running businesses from home these days. In fact, back in 2013, it was discovered that approximately 69% of entrepreneurs start their businesses from home. Though there isn’t any reliable data for more recent years, we can only imagine that this number has increased, considering the technology that has made such an endeavor easier over time!

 

Running any kind of business from any sort of location is, of course, tremendously challenging. But there are unique challenges posed when working from home. Specifically, problems of privacy. How do you keep your professional life and your private life separated when the two are taking place in the precise same location?

 

Of course, this isn’t just a problem for reasons of maintaining a healthy work-life balance, though there is that to consider as well. Your privacy can actually be at risk if you’re not keeping it separate from your business. So let’s go through some essential tips that will help separate the two.

 

Separate social media accounts

 

A strong social media presence is a must for any business these days. And even if people who follow your business accounts know your real name, you shouldn’t post any personal stuff on the business account. In fact, it’s probably best that you avoid, where possible, anyone knowing your personal accounts and business accounts are in any way related. And even if you’ve managed to maintain this, you need to be extremely careful with what you put on your personal social media accounts! You may want to create one account for personal and business because it makes you seem more approachable – while this is admirable, it presents too much risk to your privacy.

Hidden home address

 

Most businesses have their address visible on their website, right? So what do you do if your business is at home? The answer isn’t to share your home address with the world. Just because you’re doing business from home, it doesn’t mean that people have to know so much about your personal details. You may think you have a legal obligation to share the address with customers or clients, but this is incorrect. You can actually set up mail forwarding, creating a virtual address pretty much anywhere you can think of. You can use this as your visible business address! Giving out your home address won’t seem like such a smart idea if you end up with a particularly vengeful disgruntled customer…

 

Two phones
Finally, you can be the kind of fly person who gets to have two phones. Of course, it’s not actually that much fun if you think about it. You have to have two phone contracts, which can be fairly expensive. But the alternative here is to share your mobile number with anyone who wants to do business with you. And that presents way too much of an intrusion into your personal life. If you want to make calls via mobile, then you’ll have to get another phone. Of course, you could make things much simpler and get a home business landline set up, separate from your regular landline.

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