Many corporate types who want to simplify their lives put their hope in telecommuting. I’m unusual in that most of my corporate life was spent telecommuting, from 1989 through 2001. And although it was a blessing in some ways, the primary difference between telecommuting and regular commuting was—surprise!—the length of the commute. It was pleasant to be at work thirty seconds after leaving home, and home thirty seconds after leaving work. And it was good to be only thirty seconds away if I needed to attend to a family matter immediately. But other than that, I might as well have been elsewhere while at work; it was a different world, and there was no way for the family to participate in what I was doing.
When I talk about how we’ve simplified our lives by giving up on doing work for hire and starting our own home-based business, folks are puzzled—surely life is more complex, not simpler, when you take on all the duties involved in running a business, duties that used to be taken care of by others while you focused on executing your own small function in the corporate machine.
I try to explain the reasons that things really are simpler. For one, even though I have many new areas of responsibility when running my own business, each of them is much smaller in scope and complexity than those jobs were at my old company; planning is simpler, execution is simpler, customer service is simpler, finances are simpler. For another, I am in control of all aspects of how the business operates; I decide how grand or how modest the plans will be, whether they will be executed quickly or slowly, how the customers will be treated, how deeply the finances will be tracked and analyzed. Crazy goals or missed deadlines or angry customers or shortfalls in income are no longer mysteries to be pondered, since I created them all myself.
Still, I’ll grant that more time and energy are required to get a business up and running than to continue punching a clock, enough to be a net loss to family life in the short term. Our way of addressing that problem has been simple—we’ve made the business part of family life. Some businesses can’t be run with the aid of the family, and it would certainly be possible to run our business without enlisting the family’s aid. But we deliberately chose a business where the family could participate, and we have grown in ways that allow family participation to increase. One obvious simplification that results: the workers are partners rather than employees, all of them vested in the success of the business, and therefore none of them need any special motivation to perform their work well.
Anyone thinking about switching about corporate life to a home-based business as a way of simplifying needs to think carefully about how their family might participate in the work. Active participation on their part will not only increase the scope of the work you can take on, it will strengthen your home life as the entire family works to build a legacy that can be enjoyed now and passed on to future generations. Successes and failures, joys and sorrows can be shared openly and fully. From the youngest to the oldest, everyone will have made a meaningful contribution to the result.
The lack of a thriving family economy is a fundamental obstacle to certain kinds of godly living; I’ve written about this here and here. Even though my own family is fairly deeply involved in the operation of our business, their involvement is feeble compared to that which seems to be essential to the operation of a multi-generational small scale family farm. We continue to look to such a farm as a model of the kind of family economy we want to create—and we continue to wonder if a family farm is the only way to get there.
I’ve been reading Joel Salatin’s articles on holistic farm management, and on allowing his children to start up various “holons” within the family business.
It seems like a wonderful way to allow children to get involved, take their own responsibility for a piece of the business, without risking the rest of the business if it doesn’t work out. It also allows children to grow into a larger “piece of the action” as they get older and more capable, and also to focus their efforts in an area where they have a special interest and/or ability.