The first time I opened The Home Office from Hell Cure and started to glance through it, I laughed out loud. Jeffrey A. Landers has written a lively and entertaining guide for people who have launched a one-person business from their garage or kitchen table and are having trouble combining the typical chaos of home life with the structure of a workplace. A “home office from hell” hinders a new business from growing and becoming profitable because it has too many distractions and no professional facade to present to clients and peers. Landers wants to help entrepreneurs everywhere change that.

Both the book and the program are broken down into short, easily absorbed bites. In his Introduction, Landers explains, “I talk to entrepreneurs every day and I believe many of you fall into the trap of spending way too much time daydreaming and not enough time doing...Mark my words--doing is the key.” The Home Office from Hell Cure consists of “step-by-step, manageable, daily tasks to get you onto a schedule that will take your business to a whole new level in only 100 days.” Not only are the tasks organized into steps, the steps are assigned to specific days, and each section concludes with a summary and checklist of the actions that have just been described.

The Home Office from Hell Cure is very well laid out, both in book design terms and in its presentation of content. The very short chapters, grouped into eight sections, are set off with clip art, sidebars and a few cartoons, none of which distract from the main message. The book has a cheerful, energetic can-do tone that is never condescending. There’s only one minor thing about The Home Office from Hell Cure that irritates the heck out of me, and I’ll get to that.

Landers wastes no time qualifying his arguments — he never specifies what sort of business he has in mind. The illustrative anecdotes scattered through the book include small businesses of every kind. He leaves it to you, the reader, to decide how you can apply his steps to your own business, and has you filling out little questionnaires and “quizzes” to that end. In this respect, The Home Office from Hell Cure is a quasi-workbook, rather than an iron-clad prescription for success.

Despite this built-in flexibility, The Home Office from Hell Cure is definitely focused. Lander’s program is easily summarized as follows:

• Determine whether you have “a home office from hell” (this is where I started laughing)


• Determine what kind of entrepreneur you are: “Growth Maven” or “Lifestyle Guru”


• Establish a professional environment for meeting your public (a real or a virtual office space)


• Outsource your “drudge work” by contracting a “virtual assistant” or hiring staff


• Become a “Nexpert”--a “niche expert” in your business area--and promote, promote, promote, through public speaking, publishing articles and booklets, giving teleseminars and doing media engagements