WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream By Christine Sutherland SMASHWORDS EDITION * * * * * PUBLISHED BY: Christine Sutherland on Smashwords How to Make More Money: The Simple Strategy that Outperforms Stocks and Shares, Real Estate, and Superannuation Copyright © 2011 by Christine Sutherland PUBLISHED BY: The Lifeworks Group Pty Ltd Work From Home! Choose Smart and Live the Dream Copyright © 2011 by Christine Sutherland License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold, and no part of this book may be used or included in other products. You may freely distribute the PDF of this book in its original form, but may not brand, alter, or mark it any way. Please be discerning regarding whom you forward a copy to. Share freely with professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are ethical, pleasant people. If you use this book as a tool to grow your business, remember to follow up promptly. You may like to photocopy this book and “lend” copies which you then collect, allowing you opportunity to present your business at the same time. Thank you for respecting the author's work. Work From Home Facts Fact: Right now almost everyone is desperate to secure their financial survival, and they know that a home business, in a proven and widely-respected industry which is immune to economic ups and downs, is their only chance. If only they can find such a thing. Fact: People already know that internet marketing is a lottery, not a business, and are intensely wary of these and other scams. Fact: Women, and parenting men, are still discriminated against in the workplace. Fact: Men and women are deserting the traditional workplace in droves in an effort to get quality and sanity into their and their families’ lives. Fact: A job done at home is still a job, and has no more security than any other job. Fact: In order to protect your and your family’s financial future, you need a high-grade business (over 74% of wealthy people accumulated their wealth in a successful business. Fact: Without doing the heaviest-duty due diligence, your chances of picking the right business are tiny (less than 3%). FACT: This book is your secret weapon in choosing the right business with the best possible chance of success. WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream CONTENTS FORWARD - Living the Dream Chapter 1 - Home Business, the Good News and the Bad News Chapter 2 - Income Acumen - What You Were NEVER Taught at School or University Chapter 3 - Your Financial Options Chapter 4 - The Process of Due Diligence Chapter 5 - What Will You Need to Do to Be Successful? Chapter 6 - What Personal and Professional Qualities Are Required? Chapter 7 - How Much Money Can You Make? Chapter 8 - What Next? ADDENDUM - Fears, Doubts, Junk in the Trunk Contacts and Support Site WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream FORWARD – Living the Dream The 2 big issues of our time for people with families are: 1. No time 2. No money Mothers and fathers spend their weeks on an endless treadmill of working for a boss, battling traffic, juggling kids and kids’ activities, cooking, cleaning and general home and yard care, and even struggling to get enough peaceful sleep to support their own physical and psychological health. Very few adults actually even get time for their own leisure activities. When a child or a spouse is sick, the remaining partner feels torn and guilty regardless of whether they decide to go to work or to stay home. When the job requires overtime, likewise – mothers and fathers desperately want to be with their children, but are forced to abandon them for an even greater part of the day because of the need to do whatever it takes to earn a living so they can keep up with the bills and make enough to provide food and shelter. For women the situation is often particularly grim. Women’s working hours typically provide a worse payoff for the time they’re sacrificing because they’re paid at a lower rate. Women are often forced to tolerate wide-ranging discrimination and insult in the workplace merely because they are women. From the subtle put-down, to blatant mistreatment, the working environment is often an even more stressful environment for women than it is for men. As large numbers of people leave home to go to work, whole communities are being laid waste because instead of being thriving hubs, they are mausoleums during the day, and merely a place where people go home to catch an inadequate sleep overnight. When we add to this the fact that missed working hours mean missed pay, and that so few people have job security especially in our deteriorating global economy, the stress becomes intolerable. No wonder disorders like anxiety, depression, anti-social behaviour, sleep disorders, overweight/ obesity, and sexual dysfunction are at epidemic levels. Families are living in a poisonous environment that is absolutely not conducive to physical or psychological wellbeing. No wonder people are voting with their feet and moving their working life back home, with a projected 65% increase in people working from home in the next 12 months! There Are Sound Economic Reasons for Working from Home Whether it’s a job or a business, working from home instead of from commercial premises makes sound economic sense. Analysts estimate that: - A single home-based worker can save the company approximately $20,000 per year. - By working at home and cutting out work travel, the employee can save $4,000-$21,000 each year for traveling costs. - It’s estimated that at least 50% of current employees could successfully work from home. Even if just 40% of the workforce actually worked from home it would save the economy a massive $650 billion a year! AND we could cut oil imports by 37%, a great help to the environment! But a Job at Home is No More Secure than a Job Elsewhere With even major firms going bust, and more trouble on the way, it’s not surprising that analysts predict 2011 will see a 17-year high in unemployment. Almost every major industry is in deep trouble: retail, hospitality, manufacturing, tourism, real estate, the finance industry, housing and construction, and even food production and distribution. I know, I see the closures daily. Almost no-one has job security. A Job at Home Can’t Provide Total Flexibility and Can’t Provide for Your Future A job at home has the same disadvantages of a job anywhere. You still have to operate under the instructions of an employer, and that will determine what work you do, and when. And you are still in the trap of being paid only for the hours that you work, not for what you create. You’re bearing the costs of running the business (your home office, your extra electricity and gas, and a myriad of other costs) and yet you’re not getting a return on this investment. You’re certainly not establishing an income that will continue to properly support you in your retirement, or which can deliver a better lifestyle for your family right now. The Great “Work at Home” Scam It’s a sad fact that the Federal Trade Commission has found that an estimated 90% of “work at home” advertisements are scams or linked to scams. Every year the Commission takes hundreds of legal actions against these but more pop up all the time. The commission estimates that from just 4 successfully-prosecuted cases, consumers lost around $30 million! The Commission also estimates that every year the perpetrators of these scams earn around $750 million. Obviously People Need Sound Advice as Protection Against Rip-offs The reasons that practically everyone wants to work from home are obvious, logical, and healthy every which way you look at them. But people need to realise that if they really want flexibility, and they really want at least a degree of wealth, then a home business is the best choice. However unless they plan on being amongst the losers (ie, the poor consumers coughing up $750 million a year thanks to scams) they need sound advice. The good news is that this sound advice is right here, in this simple little book, backed up by online support at no cost. Enjoy reading this book and making the most of it! Any questions about the book, or even if you just want to chat about a business you’re considering, feel free to write to me at info@lifeworks- group.com.au. WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream Chapter 1: Home Businesses, the Good News and the Bad News The good news is that you hold this book in your hands, and that it is indeed possible to build a successful home business, even one that is a million dollar earner, without burning yourself out, without ignoring your children and family, without risking the very home you’re based in, and without spending a lifetime to achieve that. The bad news is that there will be people who read this book in the hope of turning their current home business into a million dollar home business, who will discover that they have chosen the wrong business, or will discover that regardless of which business they may choose, they are not personally or professionally equipped to succeed. I would like to re-assure you that even if you are the latter, it is not too late to change horses, or to learn how to become successful, provided you have the right attitudes and are open to learning. There’s an old saying “don’t throw good money after bad”, and that has never been more true when it comes to business. You can save yourself an awful lot of pain, loss and suffering by recognizing sooner rather than later that it’s time to “bite the bullet” and hook your wagon to a better opportunity, or to step up and develop yourself personally and/or professionally. There’s another old saying “you can’t make a silk purse from a pig’s ear” and although that may sound derogatory, if people are negative in their attitude, if they don’t actually like other people, if they have no interest in growing personally or professionally, then the best advice I can give is to get the best job they can, and give up on the idea of building a business, because business success is always about the quality of relationships you create and maintain - relationships with customers, colleagues, and your whole wider network. So to sum up, this is a book which shows you exactly why you have so far not been able to make the money you want, so that you can, in a fully-informed manner, decide what’s going to be easier for you: keep doing what you’re doing, or make an intelligent choice to go in a different direction. This is also a book which specifically describes the personal and professional journey required to become the creator of a million dollar home business. That’s fun for me to share because I get to spill the beans on one of the most remarkable set of self growth tools the world has ever seen. Be prepared, and enjoy! WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream Chapter 2: Income Acumen – What You Were NEVER Taught at School or University He sat at the table, head in hands, anguished at his struggle to provide for his family. Finally he blurted out “Will somebody just tell me how to earn real money and I’ll do it!” This book is for all those people who simply don’t have enough: enough to live on, enough to escape debt, enough to fulfill dreams, enough to retire in real comfort. This is how to never have too little ever again. Some people end up with a lot of money in spite of having no income acumen. For instance a person may marry a very wealthy partner, be given money by their parents, win the lottery, or be paid millions for a talent. You could pin your hopes on that, but that would be pretty much leaving things to fate rather than taking control. That kind of “roll of the dice” way of becoming wealthy is not what this book is about. You might be relieved to hear that this book is also NOT about internet marketing and I hope by now you realise that this is for obvious reasons – except for a lucky few, that’s a pretty dumb way to go about achieving and maintaining wealth because no matter how you automate it, it’s still a job. And it’s notoriously fickle, with great ideas going from “flavour of the month” to “yesterday’s garbage” in a blink. You can spend months or years getting to the top of Google, only for the search algorithms to change and to find yourself invisible all over again, and your traffic (and business) down the drain. So I would NEVER advise anyone to consider internet marketing as a business – the only people who make money out of it are the gurus who sell off their unwanted secrets because they’re now out of date! Do you think if someone really does have a strategy to make money from the net, they’re going to accept even $1000 from you, when they could be enjoying a monopoly all to themselves? Not likely! By the time you see those strategies on sale, they are dead in the water! So with that in mind, this book is designed to deliver the crucial knowledge of wealth creation and maintenance that hardly anyone is ever taught, and which was certainly not part of any diploma or degree program you may have studied. The simple reason that I can share this information is that the businesses I’m going to be talking about cannot become over-saturated, and are so open to competition that practically anyone can make excellent money, and people who’re prepared to commit can make incredible money. And none of that will detract in any way, shape or form, on what I do in my own home business. It’s win/win! In a nutshell, this book outlines the 4 options for making money, and demonstrates that 3 of them are either a poverty trap or leave you exposed to risk, and only 1 of them (the home business model) is simple, rapid, and risk-free, as well as holding the single biggest potential for you to quite literally choose your income, and choose whether that is hands on, or totally passive income. Will you do this simple strategy? Pretty much 100% of people COULD do this strategy because you don’t need any special skills or knowledge to start out – it’s just that most people don’t, and as you read more you’ll see why, and you’ll also understand why anyone with an ounce of pro- activity does so well. However I can guarantee that 99% of the people reading this book will either not take action, or will not take correct action, and are not open to even free learning OR ASSISTANCE to take action using this simple strategy. Over the last 37 years I’ve been involved in business, it’s often been tough to watch people who COULD succeed, not even try, or give up at the first hurdle. I’ve reconciled myself with this somewhat over those years, but I still hate to see people struggle, or short-change themselves, when I know they could be working smarter, and getting a lot more out of life. Read on and decide for yourself whether you are one of the 1% who will benefit from this simple strategy. (Co-incidentally, studies show that by age 65 less than 1% of people will be wealthy. With pensions and superannuation likely to crumble as governments seek to support the baby-boomers as they move into retirement, this is a figure that you need to take very seriously.) Why Home Businesses Fail Home businesses fail significantly less than the failure rate of traditional businesses, and slightly less than franchises fail. Some people try to blame the failure of home businesses on the business model itself but there is really no evidence for that. The real reasons that home businesses fail are the same reasons that ANY business fails: either the new business owner failed to do adequate due diligence (even though they THOUGHT they did), or the new business owner was simply not personally or professionally equipped to run it successfully. This book will comprehensively cover these matters so that you can literally guarantee your success in your home business, to any level you desire, whether that is a few hundred dollars per month extra, or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month extra. How Much Money Do You Need or Want? Some people have small dreams and some people have enormous dreams. If you were to sit down and make a list of every hope, desire or goal that you had, without once thinking in terms of money constraints, what would be on that list? Are you happy to live with those kinds of constraints, or in your heart of hearts would you prefer to have more choices, and be able to confer the same benefits on your children when they were ready to handle that freedom? The amount of money that you need or want in order to feel that you have “enough” will be different to what someone else requires. If you feel that you can live on a few hundred dollars a week and you feel confident that your current savings can generate that in your retirement, or if you feel confident that your pension or superannuation fund will pay that out in retirement, then maybe you already have all that you require and this book is a waste of time for you. Pass it on to someone else. Given what’s happening to the economy I’d consider that type of confidence deeply unwise, but it’s not my job to convince people of that. However if you know that you need or want more than what you already have, if you want to get rid of debt, or if you have hopes and dreams that require more cash, or if you want to be able to help your children more, or help a worthy cause dear to your heart, then this book is perfect for you. Likewise if you are currently in a situation that is causing pain because you don’t have enough power of choice in how you spend your time, if you’re being torn from the people who need you because of a job that controls you, then this book is perfect for you. The big message in this book is that unless you already have an adequate, secure source of residual or passive income, then you need to find a way to get that. Trained to Be Poor! Did you ever hear these words as you were growing up? [...]... from here?” In this way keen and excited people will identify themselves, and others have an easy way out, and are more likely to refer people to you Your second job, when you feel ready, is to become a leader, working personally with others to help them achieve their goals and dreams Hopefully you’ll choose the right opportunity where that is actually possible WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the. .. people from joining you and doing incredibly well by any standard Thirdly, comparing your earnings to the earnings of others is one of the most destructive things you can do in this business I’ve seen good people crumble when they look how well one of their peers is doing, compared to themselves Don’t put yourself in that position, and don’t do it to your team WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream. .. to pick the strongest, most lucrative and most enduring business you possibly can WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream Chapter 4: The Process of Due Diligence Crucial to your success is picking the right company, and here’s a simple list of due diligence items that should always be carefully checked but almost never are You can ignore these and just go by gut feeling, or just believe the sales... book/s WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream Chapter 7: How Much Money Can You Make with a Network Distribution Home Business? As you can imagine, this is something that varies enormously from person to person, and from company to company Your company should be able to show you audited, published average earnings of distributors at all levels These figures should represent commissions from sales... business WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream Chapter 5: What Will You Need to Do to Be Successful with a Network Distribution Business? First up, although in time you’ll want to be an expert on your products, your initial attention needs to go into learning exactly what is the duplication model used by the business You’ve got to understand the business first and get cracking with the close... money? How old would you be by then? What are your chances of getting hold of that cash if you continue doing what you’re currently doing? Is there really a faster way that can short-cut years of arduous saving? Let’s take a look WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream Chapter 3: Your Financial Options Option 1 – Get Another Job or Win a Raise If you want to stay in the job lottery (and maybe you... sales at the same time, by not only discounting auto-ship over standard purchases, but by giving back a massive rebate in free products of the consumer’s choice This leads to consumer’s trialling products they otherwise would not have experienced, and liking these so much that they add them to their future orders Who gets the benefit? The company, the distributor who found the customer in the first... found them If I got 100 video emails in my inbox I’d be putting the whole box through another layer of filtering to block them out 7- There should be a flow of consumables via automatic monthly delivery that pretty much every customer WANTS One of the biggest complaints about network marketing is that there is no genuine consumer market because the only people who buy and use the products are the distributors... a worse scenario than the Great Depression In relation to share trading there are “outfits” (I won’t dignify them with the word “organisations”) which promise to teach you to make money on the stock market whether it is doing well or poorly If this were true then don’t you think the most skilful and highlyexperienced brokers in the world would be doing it for themselves? Sure there are success stories,... goals for the business, and together you'll determine how much time can be devoted and when Your sponsor will help you make a list of people who may be interested in seeing the products, and others who may, like you, be entrepreneurial and open to evaluating the business options for themselves so they can also work successfully from home This will NEVER mean pressuring people or trying to convince them . at info@lifeworks- group.com.au. WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream Chapter 1: Home Businesses, the Good News and the Bad News The good news. Fears, Doubts, Junk in the Trunk Contacts and Support Site WORK FROM HOME Choose Smart & Live the Dream FORWARD – Living the Dream The 2 big issues of