A year into her third stint as a home-based digital consultant, Alex Butler cracked. “To this day I don’t know why I did it. It was grey and horrible outside and although I was enjoying the freedom of freelancing, I hated sitting at home alone.”
She posted an invitation on the online noticeboard Eventbrite asking other homeworkers to meet and work together for the day at a London co-working space. “I couldn’t believe it when eight complete strangers turned up,” she says.
Since that meeting in 2011, Butler’s initiative grew to host up to three events a week. She called it KindredHQ.com. It is one of many UK networks helping small business owners avoid the isolation that often accompanies working from home. Some, like KindredHQ.com, aim to be non-corporate. Attendees bring their own laptops, sit, work together and socialise, but do not pitch for new business.
“If you hate networking, this is high-impact but low-difficulty,” says Butler. “It sounds strange – why would you sit with a bunch of strangers? But there’s absolute magic about it because you get talking about what you do and people are always really interested. It solved the isolation I was feeling.”
Building networks
Other homeworkers opt for networking solutions more tailored to their profession. Mancroft Communications director Chris Brown works from his village home in Denton, Norfolk. Although his wife and two young sons are in and out of the house, he says he feels “isolated in business terms”. “Bouncing ideas off other people, discussing views and ideas, or just getting someone to review your work is difficult,” he explains.
As a result, Brown joined several local business communities. He attends morning meetings organised by 4networking.biz, which he says are “half business, half social occasions”. He makes new contacts through Norfolk Chamber of Commerce events, and sits on a Chartered Institute of Public Relations professional standards panel. “I keep in touch with people I’ve met afterwards on LinkedIn,” explains Brown. “I’ve found a couple of clients through events, an accountant and somebody to provide my insurance.”
Brown set up these contacts within eight months. Previously he did the same in Cambridge, and points out that moving house means you have to start again. But when he compares the experience to running a home business in 1999 and 2002, he says it was far more isolating then due to the lack of social networks. “Back then we had the internet but it was dial-up speed, and there was nothing like LinkedIn or Twitter,” he says. “It was far more isolating. If someone phoned you’d keep them on the line and chat about whatever because it was the only person you’d talk to all day.”
“There are others out there”
Branding and design business director Ryan Tym shares Brown’s approach to countering seclusion. He runs his company Lantern from his London home, but regularly beats home-working blues by attending workshops and courses hosted by business support organisation Enterprise Nation. He has tried a speed-dating style networking event, where he met 40 businesses in 40 minutes, and also makes new contacts online through creative community Startacus.
“Twitter is also a really good way of keeping in contact with people,” he suggests. “It constantly feeds you information and gives reassurance there are others out there doing the same thing.” Although Tym values the interaction provided by social media, he says it’s important to bring online conversations into “real life” by meeting virtual contacts in the flesh.
Tym also counters loneliness by working in clients’ offices when possible, replacing emails with phone and video-calls, and listening to foreign radio. “I switch to the odd random European station where I can’t understand what’s going on,” he explains. “You don’t end up focusing on what they’re saying, it’s just background noise.”
Feeling lonely
Justine Hackney, owner of Renewable Energy Marketing, was surprised how much working from home impacted her happiness. After two years based in her rural home in Welton, Somerset, she noticed changes. “In an office you’re normally thinking about work-related things and having banter with the person next to you, but when you’re alone all the spare time fills with worries because you haven’t got anyone to bounce off,” she suggests.
Hackney discovered working alone left her short of conversation. “If you’ve been sitting in a house for a week writing about a subject people often switch off from, when you go out you feel you have nothing to say,” she describes. “That was unusual because I was always bubbly before. It affects your confidence.”
In response, Hackney took up a creative project to balance her moneymaking hours. She joined a campaign to save a small music venue in a nearby village under threat of closure. “I got passionate about it, set up a quick website and Facebook page, and within two weeks more than 1,500 people joined,” she recalls. “The bigger it got, the more hours I worked, but the more I was having fun. Because I felt positive and fired-up, it helped me focus on my work and do that quicker.”
The campaign succeeded and a local newspaper gave Hackney an award for her efforts. The experience also taught her that investing time in voluntary, community projects positively impacted her business. She has since taken up a pro-bono marketing project for a local art installation. “The work I’m doing for my clients has new meaning,” she says.
Hackney’s experience is typical, according to Work From Home Wisdom founder Judy Heminsley. She says homeworkers can suffer “small fish syndrome” which negatively affects their work. “If you’re just sitting in your house, you only see people celebrating successes on social media rather than what’s going wrong,” she explains. “It’s easier to focus on difficult things and start thinking smaller without realising – that maybe you can’t go for that bigger contract because you’re just a small business.”
Heminsley’s antidote to this problem is to leave the house. She was one of the first to set up Jellys in the UK – free coworking events similar to KindredHQ. Since 2009, home-based small business owners have held Jellys with advice from UK Jelly. “Feel like you are part of the world – you’re not just shut away in your little cell,” she says.
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Simply Business, the UK’s biggest business and landlord insurance provider, and sponsor of the supporting business growth hub.
