Home Business Information

HOMEBASED BUSINESS WAS ONCE the Rodney Dangerfield of entrepreneurship: It couldn't get no respect. When we first started writing about the concept years ago, many considered homebased entrepreneurs something less than real businesspeople--a cottage industry of part-timers and wanna-bes:

But that was then; this is now. And now, when you tell a cocktail-party companion you work from home, you won't get a condescending smile--you'll hear sighs of envy as a crowd gathers to hear how you did it

Technology that makes "virtual offices" feasible has helped create an industry of about 31 million entrepreneurs, according to Link Resources' estimates. The shrinking of corporate America is spurring still more growth as downsized employees turn to homebased business ownership. And more and more techsavvy twentysomethings, reluctant to ride the corporate treadmill, are choosing to work from home instead.

That's good news and bad news for homebased entrepreneurs. The good news: It's easier than ever to run a professional, efficient homebased business. The bad news: You've got more competition. So how do you stay abreast of these challenges? Read on . . .

Elbow Room

Making the most of your small office

A funny thing happened to IceBreaker Enterprises during a salesperson's visit.

"A salesperson came to us to pitch a package display," recalls Scott Walker, head of the Atlanta family-owned firm, which manufactures the novelty party game Walla Balla. "She came into the house and down the dark stairs to our dimly lit basement office. Throughout the entire meeting, I could tell she was uncomfortable about her surroundings, and that's when it hit me. I said to myself, 'This is not a business-friendly environment.'"

Paul Limburg's revelation was not quite so dramatic. Ten years ago, he started a computer programming and mail order software sales company, Limburg Engineering Associates, from his Torrance, California, home.

"When we first moved into our house, I started out on a desk that was a door propped up on two short filing cabinets. When I went full time, I got more formal about it," says Limburg about his 10-foot-by-10-foot office, which is now home to a desk, three computers, fax and copy machines, and at least 10 printers.

The key to successfully navigating space constraint hurdles such as Walker's and Limburg's is to look at your home from a fresh perspective. You can either tackle this task yourself or hire a professional.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- ResCare, Inc. (NASDAQ/NM:RSCR), the nation's leading provider of residential, training, educational and support services for people with disabilities and special needs, announced today that it has acquired the assets of SoCal Home Care, headquartered in Irvine, Calif. SoCal Home Care provides hourly or live-in services to the elderly or those with disabilities including personal care, meal preparation, housekeeping and transportation. Revenues are private pay or long-term care insurance based and are expected to be $2.1 million annually.

"SoCal Home Care expands our private pay, in home services, which have been a growth focus this year," said Ronald G. Geary, ResCare chairman, president and chief executive officer. "SoCal has an excellent reputation, and we're proud to have them as part of the ResCare family."

ResCare, founded in 1974, offers services to some 41,000 people in 34 states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and Canada. ResCare is a human service company that provides residential, therapeutic, job training and educational supports to people with developmental or other disabilities, to youth with special needs and to adults who are experiencing barriers to employment.

The Company from time to time makes forward-looking statements in its public disclosures, including statements relating to revenues that might be expected from new or acquired programs and facilities, other statements regarding development and acquisition activities, statements regarding reimbursement under federal and state programs and statements regarding various trends favoring downsizing, deinstitutionalization and privatization of government programs. In the Company's filings under the federal securities laws, including its annual, periodic and current reports, the Company identifies important factors that could cause the Company's results to differ materially from those contained in such forward-looking statements. Please refer to those disclosures.

The Norwegian data security company Norman ASA has enhanced its family of data protection products with Norman Personal Firewall 1.0.

The new software has been specifically designed for home users and small companies wanting to protect their PCs from being hacked or unauthorised persons getting access to shared files and directories.

The product contains a range of firewall functions to block unwanted communication to and from the Internet and it incorporates built-in protection from common Internet attacks.

Other features include easy and rapid installation, a cookie manager that enables users to choose whether or not to allow cookies to collect information about each PC user and an ad-blocker that disables web page advertising to speed up downloading time.

As specialization surpasses general utility as a deciding factor in many housewares purchases, retailers are betting that consumers want small electric products made with fewer features, but generally of better quality. While housewares segments often cycle between highly specialized items and ones that provide a wide range of uses, this specialization in small electrics has helped some items stand out and others fade.

In the lead up to the holiday season, items gaining were led by refrigerator and freezer appliances, up 39.6% in unit terms, according to ACNielsen, a category at mass that now includes a range of mini heater/coolers designed for dormitories and offices, as well as smaller refrigerators. A Wal-Mart store in Uniondale, N.Y., for example, offered a General Electric 4.3-cubic-foot refrigerator for $137.62, a Haier 1.8-cubic-foot refrigerator for $78.83 and a Sunbeam six-pack-sized heater/cooler for $33, with signage purporting the price had been slashed from $39.62.

The second-biggest gainer for the 52 weeks ended Nov. 02, 2002, was the electric fryer, skillet, wok appliance segment, up 26.3%, followed by popcorn poppers, up 25.2%, pasta makers, up 17.8%, burner and range appliances, up 12.6%, and griddle, grill, waffle appliances, up 11.6%. Trend down were beer and wine making kits, off 41.9%, electric knife and peeler appliances, off 20.6%, bread makers, off 19.6%, ice cream and frozen yogurt makers, off 13.9%, and juicer appliances, off 6.9%.

In terms of sheer dollar sales in the category as tracked by ACNielsen, coffee maker and tea appliances is the most valuable segment, turning in at $182.4 million, although it's second in units. Water purifiers and filters lead unit volume, but come in second in sales at $167.6 million. Sales for the griddle, grill, waffle maker segment come in next at $160.4 million, although it is fourth in units, with microwave ovens next at $141.8 million, ninth in units and toaster and toaster ovens at $117.4 million, third in units. Placing fifth through eighth in unit volume are blender appliances, cooker, steamer and dehydrator appliances, can openers and mixer appliances.

As life expectancy increases, opportunities open up for home healthcare providers

People living to the age of 100 represent one of the fastest growing segments of the American population. The fact that fewer of these golden agers are opting for nursing home care has cast a golden aura on the home healthcare business. According to Eugene Giunta, co-owner of Health Care Horizons, a home healthcare consulting and management firm based in St. Louis, there are about 10,000 in-home healthcare agencies in the U.S., with revenues expected to reach $63 billion by 1999. This segment of the healthcare industry has attracted a growing number of black entrepreneurs, among them Gwendolyn and Eric Johnson, a mother and son who operate a home healthcare business in downtown Cleveland.

After not being able to find adequate care for his 87-year-old grandmother, Eric launched Geric Home Health Care in 1992, with $2,000 in personal funds and credit cards. During the licensing process, his mother, Gwendolyn, a newly retired educator, joined the business. Eric, who formerly owned a construction business, set up two offices--one in his basement, the other in his mother's basement. Starting with private accounts, his first step was to approach the state for client referrals. When the state balked at using a new, unproven company, he challenged them to give Geric their most difficult clients, a challenge he knew he could handle. "Most were African Americans in high-crime areas in the inner city," says Eric. But his agency was well-equipped to deal with a market other agencies refused to service. "Besides hiring people with home healthcare aide certification, we also looked for caring people with a spiritual base," he says. "We became known as the inner-city specialists."

Geric's services include physical and speech therapy, bathing and house keeping. Eighty percent of the staff are certified nurse assistants; the other 20% are licensed practical nurses, registered nurses and in-office help. To offset the problem of shortages in trained staff, Geric started a training school run by a registered nurse certified to teach home healthcare. In 1995, Geric received $1.4 million in funding from two venture capital firms and expanded to other locations, including Detroit; Gary, Indiana; and Cleveland, Akron and Lorain, Ohio. Geric now has 600 employees and revenues of $12 million.

Small businesses--the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy--rely on their CPAs for business advice, making them a core practice area for many practitioners. In recognition of this important relationship, the AICPA provides specialized resources, advocacy and other services aimed at keeping this connection solid."

THE PCPS FIRM PRACTICE CENTER

This dynamic, new online resource provided by the Private Companies Practice Section (PCPS) offers free tools and information to help AICPA members strengthen their practices and better serve their clients. By clicking on the Resources tab on the center's home page (www.aicpa. org/pcps), members can find sections for closely held companies, not-for-profit entities and many other practice areas. The closely held companies section, for example, contains articles on how to find fraud in private companies or improve the value of boards of directors. The tax section provides news and informative articles on topics such as changes in the tax laws. Other sections address practice management, staffing, succession planning, keeping up with standards and technology and other issues important to firms serving small businesses. The center also contains a wide variety of premium content on subjects ranging from leadership to setting goals for firm partners. To introduce these special resources to practitioners who are not PCPS members, content on the site is available free to all AICPA members until May 15, 2006.

The Institute acts as an advocate for small firms and their clients, monitoring and responding to the many new and proposed standards and regulations in standard-setter boardrooms, in Washington, D.C., and wherever new regulations are being drafted.

Standards overload and complexity, for example, have long been burdens for smaller practitioners, and the current debate centers on whether accounting and disclosure requirements for public companies are appropriate for private companies. In 2004 the AICPA established the Private Company Financial Reporting Task Force to research and report on the financial reporting needs of private companies and the costs and benefits of GAAP requirements . Last year a group of members and staff of the Institute and FASB began discussing standard-setting process changes to improve GAAP's usefulness and relevance to key constituents of private companies' financial statements.

HFMA members enjoy unrestricted, free on-line access to all of the content of the Resource Center. Nonmembers may view certain resources that are available to the public, including the comprehensive content index, and may purchase individual documents through the Member Services Center.

Navigating the Resource Center

The quickest way to view a comprehensive listing of resources that HFMA has to offer on a particular topic is to use the "Search" function found at the right of every HFMA web page. You'll quickly locate relevant material from the Resource Center, HFMA publications, educational programs, and other areas of HFMA's web site.

To browse the Resource Center by broad content topics, click on "Focus Areas" in the menu at the right. These areas are set up to help you browse the wide variety of H FMA technical resources available to you on-line.

What Information Is Available?

Information ranges from accounting guidance to reimbursement issues to regulatory compliance for all healthcare settings, including group practices, integrated delivery systems, managed care providers, long term care providers, and home health agencies.

Some key features in the Resource Center follow. You can access these topics from the main menu at www.hfma.org/resource.

Focus Areas

HFMA's Focus Areas include Medicare Payment, the Business of Health Care, Revenue Cycle, Managed Care, HIPAA@Work, and Leadership. Within these six major focus areas are in-depth reports, timely summaries, time-saving tools and Internet guides. Here are the types of topics you'll find within each Focus Area:

Medicare Payment

* Hospital Inpatient and Outpatient PPS

* Physician Services

* Other PPS

* Compliance

Revenue Cycle

* Billing and Coding

* Performance Measurement

* The PATIENT FRIENDLYBILLING[R] Project

HIPAA@Work

* Transaction Standards

* Privacy

* Security

Business of Healthcare

* Financial Performance Statistics

* Capital

* Resource Management

* Tax Compliance

* Corporate Responsibility

Managed Care

* Plan Provider Claims Workgroup

* EMTALA

* Prompt Payment

Leadership

* Workforce Issues

* Compensation

* Leadership

New in the Federal Register.

TOKYO -- Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501), Hitachi Air Conditioning Systems Co., Ltd. (HACS) and Hitachi Home & Life Solutions, Inc. (Hitachi H&L) today announced the agreement to reorganize their operating frameworks with the aim of developing and reinforcing their "lifestyle zone solutions business." Underpinned by existing consumer-focused businesses, the new organization will extend sophisticated support for lifestyle infrastructures in the home, office, stores and other locations with a particular focus on comprehensive air conditioning, all-electric homes and digital home electronics.

Highlights of the reorganization are as follows.

1. HACS and Hitachi H&L will merge on April 1, 2006.

2. Hitachi's Consumer Business Group will assume responsibility for overseeing all marketing and sales activities involving comprehensive air conditioning systems, all-electric home products, digital home electronics and related products. It will be responsible for sales activities in these business sectors on a global scale.

3. The Consumer Business Group will establish a specialist division devoted exclusively to comprehensive sales activities, which will primarily target large customers such as high-volume retailers and companies operating large chains of stores. This division will offer comprehensive solutions that make use of digital home electronics, comprehensive air conditioning systems, products for all-electric homes and other products.

Work is underway on setting up an organization and business strategy to prepare for the start of operations under this new framework. Although details have not been finalized, the new framework will concentrate on the following initiatives.

1. Use the merger of HACS and Hitachi H&L to reinforce the comprehensive air conditioning and all-electric homes businesses

The new company to be formed through the integration of HACS and Hitachi H&L intends to grow by conducting a comprehensive air conditioning business extending from home air conditioning systems to large freezing systems. In addition to the washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and other products in the home appliance business, an all-electric home business will include hot water supply systems, kitchen appliances and other future core products.

Authors Sunny and Kim Baker, in doing research for their book, Peterson's Ultimate Home Office Survival Guide (Peterson's, $18.95), interviewed hundreds of home-based entrepreneurs and telecommuters to determine what they have in common as a group and how they have fared. Among the findings: * The ideas for successful businesses ranged from ordinary to weird and mundane to extraordinary, but the business idea seemed to be less important than the entrepreneur's desire to succeed. * Age, sex, and ethnic background were not relevant in forecasting the success of the ventures. * Education also was not a predictable factor of success. * Motivation and productivity levels of telecommuters often surpass the performance of their peers who work in an office. * Many of the home-based entrepreneurs were unemployed when they started their businesses. * Most of the entrepreneurs started with less than $5,000 in the bank, and some had no savings. The Bakers' book covers topics as varied as developing plans and setting up operations and work zones, managing time to increase productivity, selecting furniture, making sales, and handling promotion and legal issues. The book comes with a CD-ROM containing information for the home-office worker, including printable forms, lists of home-based-business opportunities, a sample business plan, links to related World Wide Web sites, and Internet browser software. The guide is available in bookstores.

Home TeleVoice Is a

Stand-Alone System That

Turns One Phone Line

into 25 Mailboxes

"Hello. You've reached Ersatz International, the world leader in business consulting services. For sales and marketing, press 1. To order Ersatz publications, press 2. To hear a recording of business tips from CEO Ben Bogus, press 3. To send a fax, press 4. And to leave a message for anyone on the Ersatz staff, press 5."

Sound familiar? Voice-mail messages greet thousands of business callers every day. Market researchers say U.S. businesses will spend close to $1 billion this year for voice-mail systems.

Though criticized for being somewhat impersonal, voice-mail systems are hard to beat for efficiency and dependability. Besides routing calls to different extensions--which answering machines can't do--they capture every message accurately, work round the clock, and don't take vacations.

Voice mail can work just as hard for a small, home-based business as it does for a sprawling office complex. Ersatz International could be a big outfit in a glass tower downtown or a one-person operation in a basement office, but you'd never guess by the way its phone is answered.

Until recently, a sophisticated voice-mail system was too expensive and too elaborate to be practical for a home office. Prices for most stand-alone systems start at about $3,000; those that sell for $500 require a dedicated computer.

But a new system called Home TeleVoice, introduced at last winter's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is designed to appeal to home and small-business customers. With a list price of $750, the system offers the features of voice-mail systems that cost three times as much. And it's a stand-alone product that doesn't require a dedicated computer.

Although Home TeleVoice costs more than some single-line voice-mail circuit cards for MS-DOS computers, it can be an attractive alternative. Some computer cards, such as the Bigmouth system (Talking Technology; $295), require a dedicated computer. That can bump the price of the entire package up to more than $1,000, not to mention the demand for desk space.

Even cards that can operate in the background, such as The Complete Communicator (The Complete PC; $495), will gobble up a sizable chunk of hard-disk storage. A system with four mailboxes consumes from 6- to 16MB of disk space.

Two years ago, former U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey (R-N.H.) gave up his chair at Daniel Webster's original desk in the Capitol to seek his fortune in front of a computer on a farm in the New Hampshire countryside.

After spending 12 years at the center of national political power, Humphrey is forging a new career in private business as an international trade consultant with special emphasis on the former Soviet republics. His interest in doing business in Russia is indeed a grand turnaround for a cold warrior who a few years ago had promised reporters to use his "desk on the floor of the United States Senate as a weapon against Soviet tyranny."

"Times have changed, and we must move with them," Humphrey shrugs. "Russia is no longer the Evil Empire. The people are well educated and hard workers. This country is the richest in the world in terms of oil, gas, and minerals of all kinds, including precious metals. Once they get their system reorganized, I think their standard of living will rise rapidly. It will be a very lucrative market."

A commercial airline pilot who was elected in 1978, Humphrey fulfilled a long-standing promise to voters not to seek a third term in 1990. Because he didn't look forward to a life of hanging around the bars and backrooms of Washington as a lobbyist, Humphrey found himself in a position not unlike many in these days of corporate layoffs and economic uncertainty. He was looking for what amounted to a third career at age 50.

Having served on both the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, Humphrey thought international trade would be a natural extension of his Washington experience that would fulfill his continuing interest in world affairs. He also reasoned that such a business would not require much start-up capital.

Humphrey rounded his consulting business--The Humphrey Group, Inc.--with modest savings and a vision to help smaller U.S. companies get into exporting. "I figured all I needed was a couple of telephone lines, a fax machine, and a computer," Humphrey says.

Running an efficient business operation often depends on having the right computer system. For owners of businesses with small budgets, however, choosing just th right computer system can be an anxiety-provoking experience. So much seems to depend on the decision, whether you're upgrading or buying for the first time.

The aim of this guide is to help reduce computer-purchase anxiety. To accomplish this, we've broken the technology down into four computer-power levels-based on price, type of applications used, and intensity of usage. For each level, we profile a corresponding business. We then suggest appropriate computer-system choices (both IBM and Macintosh), together with matching printer alternatives.

CHOOSING BETWEEN IBM AND MAC

The choice between IBM-compatible and Apple Macintosh systems used to be fairly clear-cut. Macintoshes were the pricey, user-friendly, graphics-capable alternative, while IBM compatibles were the lean, mean number crunchers.

The confluence of several industry developments, however, has changed all that. The summer 1990 advent of Microsoft Windows 3.0 for IBM compatibles did a great deal to bridge the ease-of-use gap. And with Apple's fall 1990 announcement of three new, lower-priced Macs, the price-power differential just about disappeared. With high-quality Macintosh software available in every major application category, and affordable microprocessor power for IBM compatibles sufficient to run graphic-based programs at a manageable pace, the field looks even today. More than ever before, a choice between an MS-DOS computer and a Mac will rest on personal preference rather than clear technological criteria-unless, of course, you have a major client who works with a particular system.