Craig Lingard 2007

How To Work From Home - Part One | Craig Lingard

I have been self employed for most of my working life. I’ve set up and run lots of small business from computer cleaning to painting and decorating through to italian marble plastering and property development. I like to “call the shots”. There’s nothing like the feeling of successfully working for yourself but I have to say, they haven’t all been successes. I’ve struggled with all of the businesses I have owned, mainly due to lack of cashflow.

I enjoy working from home and avoiding the traffic and travel that comes with “tick-tock” jobs and routines. In this two part article, I’d like to tell you a little bit about my latest adventure in working from home.

Back in 2007 I was chatting to a friend on the telephone and we were discussing our current situations. I was struggling to make money with my internet business and he was struggling to meet the huge loan payments on his shop and was having problems with staff. We concluded that we could help each other. I would go work for him as the shop manager which would relieve some of his staffing problems and run the general shop business and allow him to develop new niche markets, propell the business forward and generate more cashflow to allow him to reduce the loan burden.

I opened the shop at 8.30 in the morning, closed it at 5.30 in the evening, worked six days a week and never took a lunch break. Of course, I realised that I was spending all of my time helping someone else to develop their business instead of my own, but I reasoned that they had the money to do this and I did not. So I told myself, “head down and get on with it!”. This worked well for a couple of years, although I lost all focus on my internet business for a time, I was keeping my families heads just above water.

At this point I was undergoing a complete relationship breakdown with my long term girlfriend and when I finally met my current girlfriend I started to realise that the “work-slog” routine was driving me insane. I had to get back to working for myself. Developing my own future and building something tangible for my kids.

I decided to move out of London, cut my working week at the shop to just three days and spend the rest of the week developing my own business from home and spend more time enjoying life with my new woman. The move took a bit out of me. At nearly forty years old maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew! I had a six hundred mile round trip to work now. My plan was to travel to London early Thursday morning and go straight into work. I’d work through to Saturday and travel home either Saturday evening or Sunday morning.

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