Working from home isn’t easy if you’re trying to run a business.
Read why some of the pitfalls of working from home might not be the best thing for an Ecommerce/eBay/Amazon business in our useful infographic.
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Did you know that your e-commerce business could operate out of a self storage unit? It can. Many do. In fact in the UK there has been a steady increase in the number of businesses using self-storage units to run their businesses from. In 2013 43% of self storage unit rentals were to businesses, a 3% increase on the previous year.
Self storage facilities first made an appearance in the UK during the 1980’s, with 815 sites now located in the UK according to the UK Self Storage Association. Self storage units offer many benefits for small to medium size enterprises (SMEs).
Chief amongst these are lower operating costs and considerable flexibility.
The benefits of using a self storage unit are particularly well suited to the growing e-commerce industry in the UK. According to the retail think-tank Retail Excellence e-commerce is the fastest growing retail market in Europe.
If you, like many, are setting up an e-commerce store on the likes of Amazon, eBay, Esty, Shopify or other online retail platforms your initial inclination may be to run that business from your home.
You may want to rethink that move. While there are positives to working from home, recent research suggests that the negatives of working from home may outweigh the positives.
We’ve produced a useful infographic that breaks down some of the pros and cons of working from home vs a self storage office in a visual way:
Ecommerce Entrepreneurs: Work from home or a self storage office? [Infographic]
It’s 8:30am. The alarm goes off. You hit snooze a few times and begrudgingly get out of bed. It’s 8:57am. Only a few minutes to get too work! Hastily you don your bathrobe and make a frantic dash for the kitchen, stick on the kettle and make a bee-line for the kitchen table. Flicking on your laptop you glance at the time. 8:59am. A minute early for work. You celebrate your rapid commute to the office with a congratulatory cup of freshly brewed hand roasted Rwanda Blue coffee. Ah, life is good.
However the reality of working from home, especially if you run an e-commerce business may be somewhat different. Aside from the leisurely commute you may also experience the following:
Perhaps the three most important implications of working from home revolve around your routine, flexibility and freedom.
First up, routine. An open schedule is the enemy of routine. Sure working in your bathrobe is convenient. Maybe even a little fun at first but it blurs the line between personal time and work time. Research has shown, repeatedly, that the most successful people tend to be those who have well established routines.
As Mason Curry, author of the 2013 book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work puts it;
a solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.
Rather counter-intuitively when working from home your flexibility can also suffer. That blurry line between your time and work time is easily stretched with your new ‘home’ schedule. Suddenly you have lots of time to do lots of things. The shopping. Walking the dogs. Paying the bills. Picking up the children. However your flexibility is much like a rubber band. The more it’s stretched the more it loses its elasticity, its flexibility, its purpose.
So in order for you to remain effectively flexible you must impose structure and be somewhat less flexible with your time. Difficult if you work from home.
Finally there’s freedom. If you work from home you run the risk of giving up the freedom that an office provides. The ability to say ‘no’ to the everyday demands you’ll face at home and the ability to literally and figuratively shut the door of the office after a day’s work.
Within the UK it’s a growing trend. Each year more and more businesses are choosing to operate out of self-storage units. Why? We’ll get to that in a minute. But first you have to get rid of the idea of a self storage unit as just a place where you store boxes.
Having office space in addition to a place to store and pack products and stock is a very attractive combination for the booming e-commerce retail sector.
The advantages are many:
Perhaps you feel that working from home is the best solution for you. Maybe right now it is.
The reality, however, is that as your business starts to grow the advantages of operating your business from home are likely to prove inferior to the benefits of utilising an office space in a self storage facility. There is, after all, no long term rental commitment needed.
“What do you have to lose?” is the wrong question, because this is about business: what do you have to gain?
Ecommerce Entrepreneurs: Work from home or a self storage office? [Infographic]
At My Storage Pod we’re aware that there are different options available for Self Storage in Chester and North Wales, including container storage.
We provide high quality, safe and secure indoor storage for a number of reasons, but we wanted to make the differences between Indoor and Container storage clear for our customers.
We’ve created this “infographic” which features some facts about Indoor and Container Storage so people can decide for themselves.
Click the image below to view the full infographic – if you’d like to use it on your own website please use the embed code at the bottom of the page:
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Things have been getting busy at My Storage Pod in the run up to summer. Increased numbers of house moves and more people ‘de-cluttering’ has meant that pods are filling up fast! After doubling our capacity in February there is plenty of space to accommodate new customers.
Less than a year after first opening our doors, My Storage Pod has become a popular facility for the local community. Several businesses now occupy our pods and offices with one user describing the facility as ‘an excellent, modern facility, that is easy to find and most importantly of all, easy to access’. For business users the clean, dry environment with round the clock CCTV coverage provides a perfect alternative to containerised storage which leaves contents vulnerable to damp.
For local people, My Storage Pod has made it so that they can store their belongings without having to travel far each time they need to access their belongings. My Storage Pod has proved ideal for customers in Chester as well as many towns in Flintshire including Mold, Buckley, Deeside and Hawarden. A recent customer described their experience at My Storage Pod as a ‘pain free process of payment, very reasonable price compared to other local storage facilities, the key code makes things really easy’.
At My Storage Pod we hope to increase our role within the local community and become known for our great value product and great customer service. On a side note we would like to congratulate our sponsored football team the Mold Alexandria Under 11’s for doing so well in their recent games and wish them every success in the future
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Call Us Now on 01244 550022 or email us at info@mystoragepod.com for a quotation specific to your business needs.
We have secured a contract with a defence company for archive storage of over 500sq ft. Customer confidentiality is of paramount importance to us and is assured at all times to our customers.
“My husband restores vintage mountain bikes and he has an enormous amount of spare bike parts that have historically taken up the garage, garden shed, spare bedroom etc but since i’ve started using my storage pod i’m starting to get my house back and a lot less rows in the house!!!” Mrs J Moss (05.04.13)
“I use my storage pod for all my jet ski and surf boards out of season – it’s great to confidently know that my stuff will be safe” Mr M Ridley (17.04.13)
