Some of you may not have known this, but Dream Gold is a home-grown and home-run business! Everything we do is done straight out of our cozy small bedroom. We thought it’d be interesting to write a blog post about our brutally honest opinions on the advantages and disadvantages that running a business out of your home entails.

You may think that being a home-run business is all fun and games and awesome, but that’s not true at all. We find ourselves consistently struggling to find the balance between our work lives and personal lives, which in the end does more damage than you’d imagine. Although we are aware that the advantages and disadvantages kind of play off each other, in the sense that they are intertwined in a way, since minor advantages can be pulled out of one of our disadvantages and vice versa.

Let’s take a look at all the disadvantages we have run into with being a home-run business:

• Lack of self discipline: Since we work from home, it is very difficult to fully understand and realize that we are actually at work. For example, we find it difficult to set appropriate work times and are often distracted from our own personal entertainment/leisure time, and considering we’re our own boss’, we can get away with it and not have to worry about getting lectured or possibly fired from slacking on the job.

• Work environment: Working at home makes it rather challenging to stay focused on the job and what has to get done. We’re not the only ones who live in this apartment, the rest of Serji’s family live here as well, so you can just imagine all the daily tasks and chores that get thrown our way, which can be insanely time consuming. We’ve found that working from our bedroom just doesn’t generate the same results as opposed to if we were to have our own office/work space. We feel we’d be less distracted and get a lot more work done.

• Storage: Since all of our stock is kept in our room, we find ourselves trapped in a less-than-ideal work space. Not only does it make it difficult for us to freely move around and work efficiently, but it also has a negative impact on our personal lives. Every now and then we tend to purge all the irrelevant or unneeded materials/equipment into our storage unit, which helps free up some of our space. For now, we just try our best to work with what we’ve got, but organizing and strategizing a fresh & tidy floor plan can really help in times like these.

Now that we got the negatives out of the way, let’s move on to our positive thoughts on what we feel are some of the advantages of running a home-grown business:

• Flexible schedule: Since we’re not tied down to strict shifts, like your average employed worker, it allows us to bend our schedule and have more time on personal projects, without worrying about losing work hours or our pay getting deducted from having to take days off. This can become a disadvantage though when you lack the self discipline and motivation to work.

• Save money: Working from home means we have access to our kitchen, which also means that we have access to food therefore we don’t have to worry about spending our precious money on buying lunches or snacks on our work breaks. Working from home also keeps us office rent-free, since our home is our office! Finally, since our home is our office, we don’t have to worry about transportation fees, such as filling up on gas, buying tickets for buses and/or trains, etc.

• Being your own boss: We saved the best for last, BEING YOUR OWN BOSS. Who wouldn’t rather work for themselves as opposed to working for someone else?! Being the boss means you call the shots, and you get to run your business however you’d like without taking orders from anyone else. Not only does being the boss give you the power to share your business with the world and give people the opportunity to work for you, but you also get to live with the feeling of self gratification and pride. It’s nice to be able to call something your own.

Hope you guys enjoyed this post and that it gave you some insight. Let us know what you think & if you run a business yourself, feel free to comment sharing your opinions/thoughts/advice!

This is the first post of our 2 part series. Keep on the lookout for part 2 on our solutions to the disadvantages explored in this post.