“I wish I'd had this book when I first started out-it's like having your own personal career coach. Reading this will save many new freelancers a lot of grief!”
-Allena Tapia, About.com: Freelance Writing Guide and Editor of Garden Wall Publications

“If you're an old-fashioned manager who's obsessed with face time, hide this book now. There is no way your employees will commute to their cubicles Monday morning after reading this entertaining manifesto for ditching the panty-hose and actually enjoying work.”
-Laura Vanderkam, author, Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues (McGraw-Hill, 2007)

“You could spend years with focus groups, assemble cross-functional internal teams to study and recommend organizational changes, or simply read Undress for Success to obtain the practical knowledge necessary to better serve your customers; increase loyalty and productivity; avoid layoffs; and improve your profitability for whatever comes your way. Kate and Tom are the 'guiding hands' for self-reliant control of your future success from home!”
-Jack Heacock, SVP and cofounder of The Telework Coalition, Washington, D.C.

Undress for Success offers honest, real-world information on home-based jobs, businesses, and careers that can change your life. Based on the authors' three decades of experience working from home, this comprehensive guide explores and explains everything you need to know about how to simplify your life with a work-at-home job or business. It's the perfect guide for anyone who's sick of the office lifestyle and ready for a change.

This practical step-by-step guide details the who, what, why, and how of working from home—the advantages and disadvantages, the skills and traits you'll need to succeed, and how to avoid losing your shirt as you attempt to undress for success. If you're an employee, you'll discover how to successfully pitch a work-at-home program to your boss or find a new employer who loves the idea. If you want to freelance, Undress for Success offers a guide for how to find, price, and get paid for your work. And if you want to run a business, it reveals the motivations, talents, and resources you'll need to get started; identifies best-bet home businesses; and offers true stories about what it's like to work where you sleep. If you're an employer or government leader, you'll find a fascinating look at the ways at-home workers are more productive, help reduce traffic, increase productivity, and even slow global warming.

This book offers work-at-home hope for everyone from high school grads to PhDs, secretaries to programmers, Gen Y'ers to Baby Boomers. From interviews with people who work at home, you'll learn about the techniques, technologies, and strategies that make them successful. Undress for Success is the ultimate guide for making the road less traveled the way to work.

"The best collection of teleworking 'How-To's' and 'Why's' that I've seen anywhere. This book is a gold mine for anyone seriously considering working from home. Whether you want to freelance, operate your own business, or stay fully employed while you work at home, you'll find dozens of hints and insights in this wonderfully entertaining and insightful book. And if you're an employer who wants to attract and retain talented people, give them a copy of this book, send them home, and reap the benefits of their productivity and motivation. They'll love you for enhancing their lives."
—Jim Ware, cofounder, Future of Work Program

"No one should attempt e-work until they understand how to be a competent e-worker. This unique and enlightening guide will help you open the door to e-work success—and improve every aspect of your life in the process."
—Marcia Rhodes, Public Relations Director, WorldatWork

"There's never been a comprehensive guide to all aspects of telecommuting, until Undress for Success. Whether you want to work remotely occasionally in your current job, find a full-time e-work job, or start a business that allows you to work from or at home, Lister and Harnish cover all of the bases in this comprehensive, easy-to-read guide that clearly outlines the rules of success."
—Cali Williams Yost, Fast Company expert and author, Work + Life: Finding the Fit That's Right for You

Tom Harnish is an expert on the technologies that make home-based jobs possible. As a consultant, project director, company president, and business owner he learned what it takes to make money using computers and telecommunications from over thirty years of successful and not-so-successful business development in fields as diverse as health care, home banking, and elec-tronic publishing.
For more information, please visit UndressForSuccessOnline.com

Undress for Success

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Imagine organizations in which bosses give employees enormous freedom to decide what to do and when to do it. Imagine electing your own bosses and voting directly on important company decisions. Imagine organizations in which most workers aren't employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life-money, interesting work, the chance to help others, or time with their families. -Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work

About 14 million people run home-based businesses or freelance in their frillies. In addition, depending on who you ask and how they count, somewhere between 5 million and 12 million Americans hold jobs that allow them to work at home in various states of undress.

The counting problem isn't because no one has bothered to study the work-at-home population. The IRS, Bureau of Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Small Business Administration, and a number of private researchers all collect data about people who work from home. But they all come at it with their own needs and biases. Some researchers count small businesses, others don't. Some surveys include people who work from home as little as one day a year, while others focus on people who primarily work from home. Some fail to distinguish between paid and unpaid work. None separate out those employees and business owners who work at home from those who work from home.

Bruce Phillips, a researcher for the National Federation of Independent Business, described during an interview the task of trying to find the real work-at-home numbers as "a statistical Vietnam-the data goes in, but you can't get it out." As a result, studying the work-at-home population is a little like trying to study meteoroids. We know there are a lot of them and we know they're important, but we don't know where they all are and not everyone agrees on which ones to count. Still, based on what we do know, we can begin to develop a model that's helpful.

E-work by the Numbers

While it's true that figures lie and liars figure, statistics do offer a useful insight into the nature of e-workers. Surveys show that men outnumber women e-workers five to three. Four out of five e-workers are married or cohabitating, and three-quarters are college grads. Fifteen percent are over age 55. Forty percent have a household income over $75,000 a year, and only about a third of those who work at home for an employer have been with the company for less than two years.

So a forty-year-old, college-educated, married man, who's been with his employer for five years is a shoo-in right? No, not really. There are lots of thirty-year-old, high-school educated, single women who e-work too.

The Nature of E-work

A program called Workplace Flexibility 2010 was started by Georgetown University to help policy makers and corporate leaders understand the need for more flexible work environments. They examined the jobs that offer the best fit for home-based work. Table 1.1 is a summary of their findings. You'll note that many of these skills are common to professional, technical, or sales functions. In fact, those types of jobs account for over half of all e-work. Table 1.2 summarizes the best job categories for e-working. If you look at the industries where those skills are dominant, as Table 1.3 demonstrates, business services accounts for the highest percentage. As we mentioned earlier, some of these industries, such as construction and real estate, don't truly offer the opportunity to work at home-that just happens to be where they're based.

The Trade-offs

Landing an e-work job or starting a home-based business may require retraining, and even a change in lifestyle. For many, the desire to work from home is worth the effort.

Robert is a registered nurse specializing in pediatric care. He wanted to work at home so he could be there if his wheelchair-bound father needed him. He found e-work as a telenurse. It meant a cut in pay, but being available for his father was more important.

Eleanor had a good job as a corporate bookkeeper but decided to freelance so she could spend more time with her kids. It meant a less stable income, but she says the move has really improved their quality of life.

Jim, an at-home legal transcriptionist, has a law degree but frequently moves because of his wife's military career. He doesn't practice law anymore, but he can take his job with him wherever she goes.

In the chapters that follow, you'll read how millions of others have made the road less traveled their way to work, and how you can too.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Undress for Successby Kate Lister Copyright © 2009 by Kate Lister. Excerpted by permission.
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