(PRWEB) August 18, 2004
Yasmeen Abdur-Rahman (home-based business owner) was interviewed by the Editor-in-Chief, Dawn Rivers Baker of The MicroEnterprise Journal (http://bit.ly/1rtw6l9)
While public awareness is slightly better than it was ten years ago, the challenges facing home-based microbusinesses continue to pose formidable obstacles to lifestyle entrepreneurs.
Yasmeen Abdur-Rahman is, in many ways, a typical microbusiness owner: bright, independent, and almost invincibly optimistic. As an African-American woman, she is a member of one of the fastest growing groups of new small business owners — although that fact does not seem to have helped her much, in spite of all the attention focused on those groups in recent years. Her experiences, both good and bad, mirror a lot of what is happening out here in the real world, far from the echoing halls of Congress.
Yasmeen owns and operates The Brownstone Workshop, the 11-year-old microbusiness through which she provides a range of business services from her home office in Cary, North Carolina. Average annual revenues fluxuate pretty widely but in general this microbusiness earns less than $ 30,000 per year — possibly not the kind of volume that would gladden the heart of the SBA but it’s working for Yasmeen. She calls herself a lifestyle entrepreneur, one who has little interest in growing her enterprise much beyond her own immediate financial needs.
Besides, she loves what she does and, for her, that is the biggest reward.
The business started out as a survival strategy, when the New Jersey native was laid off from her job with a large pharmaceuticals company after relocating to North Carolina. She started out as a virtual assistant, with business coaching services added to the mix a little more than a year ago. She still does some administrative work, and turns to that when her client base doesn’t meet her financial needs. But coaching is her first love.
“The coaching work is really my passion,” she says, and her current short-term plan is to work to boost that side of the business. She is hoping to be able to add enough new clients to her load within the next year to enable her to turn to coaching full time.
Yasmeen is typical of many microbusiness owners is another way, too. One of her biggest problems is access to capital. When she lost her job, she was initially forced to use credit card debt to survive and, later, to start her small business. That, in its turn, has done some damage to her personal credit and that keeps her from being eligible for the standard sources of working capital that are touted as being available for small businesses.
She is not exactly enthusiastic about using them, anyway. “I’m trying to stay away from loans and things,” she told me. “I’m still working to get my credit score back to where it was before I got laid off.” She hesitates to use credit cards as a source of working capital for the same reason; she is still paying down that earlier credit card debt and doesn’t want to add more to it. And, for all the intense attention focused on access to capital by the federal government, nothing that is available seems to meet Yasmeen’s needs.
As a matter of fact, Yasmeen would probably be a good candidate for the services offered by the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center, a microenterprise development program located in nearby Raleigh that offers both Microloans and peer lending programs. Except, of course, that one wonders how the program will continue to function if the Bush Administration has its way and the Microloan program is terminated.
Alternatively, small business owners are often advised to use their equity in their homes to collateralize loans to capitalize their businesses, but that option is not available here, either. Like many home-based business owners, Yasmeen is a renter. In addition to the financing issue, being home-based in a rental house gets in the way of both marketing and customer acquisition, she tells me.
Even though her local zoning ordinances are pretty home business friendly, she can’t place signage outside her house because it doesn’t belong to her. For the same reason, even if she could afford to build an office into the house to give her a professional space to meet with clients, she doesn’t have that option as a renter. Not too surprisingly, she says she would like to move out of her home office.
“People don’t take you seriously if you are home-based. You look more professional if you have office space for meetings,” says Yasmeen. She looked into the services of a local incubator that rents office space but found the prices beyond her reach. If her local Small Business Development Center or Women’s Business Center offers such services to small business owners (as some of them do), she hasn’t heard about it.
She is using electronic communications to address the problem of meeting space in innovative ways, offering both telephone and email coaching services even to local clients. To a degree, it has been working for her and adds to her ability to portray herself advantageously to potential clients who might value that kind of flexibility.
All of the issues that Yasmeen cites have been brought to the attention of the Small Business Administration in recent months, as that agency has launched a modest initiative to better address the challenges of the nation’s 14 million home-based businesses. Problems with physical space, marketing challenges, access to capital (particularly for renters without home equity to fall back on) and, above all, lack of credibility are issues that have been flagged by the SBA for future attention.
In its turn, the SBA has its own challenges in making its services available for home-based businesses because they are among the most elusive of the already-elusive microbusiness segment of the economy. There are all kinds of elements to running a home-based business that encourage them to maintain a low profile, from regulations to that credibility issue, and all of that makes outreach difficult.
But the greatest challenge facing the SBA in its efforts to serve home-based microbusinesses will undoubtedly be in crafting services that actually help them to do what they really want to do, which often amounts to nothing more than supporting themselves and their families, staying off welfare and crafting a life for themselves that makes them happy. These business owners have little interest in boosting SBA stats on jobs created and increased federal revenues, and most have no desire to be the next FedEx or Intel.
For Yasmeen, in addition to ensuring her own economic self-sufficiency, operating her microbusiness offers her unparalleled opportunities to show her 15-year-old son some of what is possible for his own future. “I’m hoping and praying that my son gets as much from me as possible,” she says. “I want to show him that you don’t have to be a millionaire to start a business.”
Amen.
Contact Yasmeen for a ‘free’ consultation at 732-423-5177 or via email at yasmeen033@aol.com or http://bit.ly/1rtw6la;
Copyright © 2004 by The MicroEnterprise Journal.
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