Understanding price, interruptions and efficiency in your home-based business

Emails, mobile phones, texts have shortened our attention span and people expect responses pretty near immediately. Companies with global call centers offering service 24-7 have trained customers to become really impatient if they have to wait for an answer. If you aim to offer good customer service and take pride in efficiency it becomes a matter of principle to respond as quickly as possible.

Yet, the less people in an organization, and the more important a customer is, the more difficult it is to deny access.

So how do you charge for interruptions? Or don’t you?

First, here’s some perspective: If you weren’t in a home-based office but working in a corporate office in town your company would be charging out your interruptions. They would, for example, have made allowance for meeting times and budgeted for them so that somewhere along the line the client pays. If the client wasn’t paying the costs of internal staff meetings the company would soon stop being viable and you would ultimately find yourself looking for a job. So you be like the company and do the same and make allowance for a reasonable number of interruptions in your day - just think of them as unscheduled meetings!

If you work on your own you may well be taking on many roles – for example, secretary, treasurer, operations manager, credit manager, sales person, cleaner and production worker.

Don’t make the common mistake of thinking you are just a production worker, make sure you charge for all those other roles you do.

No matter where you work, life crops up, interrupting the flow. Minimize interruptions as far as humanly possible but factor in a percentage as part of your working day – just make sure there are not so many you become uneconomic. Build enough fat into your prices so you can take the occasional interruptive phone call, demand from a child, request from a friend and knock at the door.



© 2007 Jane Francis is the author of ‘Price Yourself Right: A guide to charging what you are worth’ [ISBN 0-595-38601-6] which is available at Barnes & Noble (US), WH Smith (UK) and at amazon.com.