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
All of this is laid out as a tidy, workable, day-by-day plan. Each section is stuffed with practical advice and tips on topics such as office leases, shared office space, moving to your new office, working with virtual assistants, writing and using a tips booklet, and giving a teleseminar.
Landers’ book suffers from a shortcoming shared by all books of this type: by aiming to apply to everyone, it isn’t a perfect off-the-rack fit for anyone. Of course, if you can’t think creatively enough to customize generic advice to your own situation, you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur at all. But this underscores one problem I see with Landers’ unflaggingly positive approach. He completely dodges the most important question a home-based business person should ask if he or she has “a home office from hell:” namely, “should I even be an entrepreneur? Is the state of my office telling me something?”
This leads me to the aspect of the book that irritated me. Over and over, Landers talks about the category of entrepreneur he tags “Lifestyle Gurus” being people who are “sitting at the computer in their underwear” or who want to work all day in their pajamas, or a sweat suit, or whatever. This is a clichéd stereotype that I find inaccurate and offensive. I have a one-person, home-based business.
Throughout my life, every aptitude, personality and vocational test I took asserted that I had every personality trait required to be successfully self-employed. These traits are quantifiable, and the most important such trait is a strong, even overpowering, sense of self-discipline and initiative. I prefer working at night, but I get up at exactly the same time every day.
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