Tips for Buying a Better Home for Your Home-Based Business

From time to time I have guest blog posts and today we have the well educated Candace Sigmon helping us with purchasing a home for our businesses.

There’s a myth baked into the real estate daydream that more space means more freedom, more comfort, more productivity. But if you run a business from home, you know better. You know that square footage can be a red herring when what you really need is strategic design, smarter layouts, and fewer distractions. As more entrepreneurs ditch traditional office spaces for the comfort of their own homes, the house hunt has shifted from “How big?” to “How well does this work?”

Prioritize Flow Over Size

You’re not running a co-working space. You don’t need endless rooms and expansive basements you’ll never use. What you do need is a home that gives your business breathing room without letting it take over your personal life. Open layouts can help here, but only if they allow you to move from task to task without bottlenecks. A poor layout in a large space will always underperform a compact home where work, storage, and downtime each have a defined rhythm.

Separate, But Not Isolated

You’re going to need separation, yes. But the goal isn't exile. Look for homes that let you carve out a workspace that’s private enough for focus without sticking you in a garage with no heat or a windowless corner of the basement. A well-placed spare bedroom or a loft with a door can do the job. Natural light and airflow are not just luxuries, they're productivity tools. You should feel like a human, not a mole.

Zoning and Zoning Out

It’s not sexy, but before you fall in love with that mid-century dream or Craftsman stunner, you’d better make sure your city will let you run a business from it. Some municipalities still have outdated zoning laws that put unnecessary restrictions on home-based businesses, especially if clients or deliveries are part of your workflow. You want a home where your business can grow without local headaches. The irony of buying your dream property only to find your work isn’t welcome there can unravel everything.

Internet Infrastructure Isn’t Optional

Some listings are proud to tell you a home has cable hookups in every room. That’s cute. You need to dig deeper. Reliable, high-speed internet is the lifeblood of a modern home business. Before you sign anything, ask about service providers, test the signal in different parts of the house, and make sure the upload speeds match your workflow. Spotty Wi-Fi can cost you clients, credibility, and your last nerve.

Layer In Protection Early

Before you get too far into the home search, take a moment to think about what happens after the keys are in your hand. A home warranty is worth reviewing as part of your upfront investment, especially if your business leans hard on appliances or if the electrical setup will be working overtime. Extended coverage can offer peace of mind when your income depends on everything staying functional. You’re not just buying a house—you’re backing a workspace, and every layer of protection helps.

Functional Storage Over Aesthetic Cabinets

It’s easy to fall for a gorgeous kitchen with glossy cabinetry, but if you’re storing products, files, packaging materials, or photography equipment, you need more than a pretty pantry. Look for utility closets, built-in shelving, garages that aren’t just car caves, and mudrooms that can moonlight as inventory space. Think about how you’ll move within the space on your busiest workday, not just how it’ll look on Instagram.

Noise Is The Silent Killer of Productivity

The wrong kind of noise—leaf blowers, barking dogs, busy roads, loud neighbors—can unravel even the most disciplined entrepreneur. Spend time in the neighborhood at different hours. Visit during school pickup, during a weekday afternoon, during a weekend morning. See if you can hear yourself think. Homes aren’t just physical containers, they’re sonic environments. And for people who work from home, acoustics matter more than most people realize.

Your Clients (or Deliveries) Deserve a Seamless Experience

If your business involves foot traffic or regular deliveries, think beyond curb appeal. Can delivery drivers easily access your home without parking chaos? Can clients step into a designated area without passing your laundry or kitchen mess? Even if you’re not customer-facing, the flow of goods needs to be frictionless. Look for homes with side entrances, mudrooms, or a semi-private section near the front door that could serve as a mini-reception or drop-off zone.

Don’t Forget How You Live

It’s tempting to center the home search entirely around your business. But don’t build a work kingdom and forget the rest of your life. Does the space energize you when you’re off the clock? Can you close a door, mentally and physically, when you’re done for the day? Your business will take up enough space in your head; don’t let it consume every square inch of your home too. Make sure the place you pick feels like a life upgrade, not just a workspace with a bed.

When you run a business from home, the stakes are different. You’re not just picking a place to sleep and eat. You’re picking a place where ideas will grow, where your workday starts and ends, where your professional energy is either boosted or drained. So forget the pressure to go bigger. Go smarter. Find the home that fits how you live and how you work, not just the one that wows you on a tour. You deserve a space that works as hard as you do.

Unlock your organization’s potential with Kevin Sidebottom’s proven strategies for success— transform your team into top performers and drive growth today!

How Is My Business Doing?

Running a successful business requires an understanding of financial metrics, and one that often takes center stage is the gross profit margin. While it's an important indicator, solely relying on this metric may present an incomplete picture of your business's overall health. In this post, we'll explore what gross profit margin is, the costs associated with it, and why it shouldn't be the sole gauge for assessing your business's performance.

What is Gross Profit Margin?

Gross profit margin is a financial metric that represents the percentage of revenue retained after deducting the cost of goods sold. It's calculated by dividing the gross profit by total revenue and multiplying by 100 if you want a percentage.  Forget that last step if you are just focused on the dollar figure.

This is the direct cost of producing goods or services sold by a company is broken into three main areas. The first one is the material cost of the goods and services, the logistical costs to move these items around and then variable costs like that of the sales teams and labor to manufacture the goods and services.

Why Gross Profit Margin Should Not Be The Only Valuable Metric

While a healthy gross profit margin is desirable, it doesn't provide a complete picture of a company's overall profitability.  Gross profit margin doesn't account for fixed costs, such as rent, salaries, and utilities. Net profit, deducts all expenses and provides a more comprehensive view.  These costs are essential for maintaining the day-to-day operations and need to be considered when assessing overall profitability.

Gross profit margin also doesn't consider market conditions, competition, or external factors that could impact business performance. Adapting to these variables is crucial for long-term sustainability.

To truly gauge how well your business is running, it's essential to adopt a more comprehensive approach. Consider metrics like net profit margin to figure out how strong your profits are.  Evaluate customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and innovation as these factors contribute to sustainable growth.  A well-rounded understanding of various financial and operational indicators will guide more informed decisions, ensuring your business thrives in the long run.

Make sure you know if you are running a successful business and if you need help reach out below!

Have a great week!

“Businesses wonder why it is still hard to be thought of as the brand of choice with the best customers and top employees.    How can our business make more profitable transactions and stay out of the commodity battle with low profits?  How can we land and keep top talent in our organization with the salary wars.  Kevin teaches your sales and leadership teams how to build the key ingredient to be successful with their relationships and take your goals to the next level with high levels of engagement.

Kevin’s website: www.kevinsidebottom.com

Kevin’s email: kevin@kevinsidebottom.com

The Sales Process Online Membership Site 

The Sales Process Uncovered Book 

How Are You Managing Your B-Word?

I have posted multiple blog posts and Youtube videos on the B-Word.  That word that people often think about as a curse word, but one that used properly will help you succeed.  Yes, I’m talking about budgets.

Using the B-word sounds like it is taboo and most people don’t talk about it much.  The issue is because people don’t like talking about how much money they have.  They don’t want to risk others looking poorly on them because they make more or less than the others around them.

People do however like to talk about their cars, extravagant vacations, large homes / kitchen renovations, and other stuff.  They like posting to social media about all their stuff and experiences, but not how they are paying for it.  Budgets have become a taboo word just like talking about paying with cash.  People talk about cars and reference their monthly payment instead of the total cost.

I used to do this too to impress all the people that I didn’t like just to show my status.  What I found out though is that the really wealthy people actually use fundamental financial terms when they talk about doing things.  What is the budget for doing thing?

The really wealthy don’t even reference the financial part of budgets.  They refer to the time investment for this new venture.  The really wealthy actually talk about time as a part of their investment criteria.  Time is one of those things that no matter how much money we have, we can not add, or multiply time.  We can not add more time.  We can minimize the time required for a venture, but not buy more time.

We should be using budget into our vocabulary if we want to get to a better quality of life.  Whether it is a time commitment, financial investment, or energy commitment, we need to make sure we are budgeting for all aspects.  This will help us understand if the cost is worth the investment. 

I recently detailed my wife’s and son’s vehicles.  Total investment on a nice warm Saturday was about four hours.  Their vehicles are smaller than my truck and are easier for me to do.  I decided that I would work on their vehicles because combined it would cost me about $250 for five hours of my time to do both.  The cheapest detailer I could find would cost that much for one vehicle.  

The investment of my time was good and my son actually helped so it was a teaching moment.  For my truck that would take me at least four hours to do, I am going to pay to have that done.  The reason being is it will be able to be done while I work and the trusted individual doing the work will do an amazing job for me.  

I grew up with not a great deal of money so I value being able to do things with my own hands, but as I have gotten older and make more money I am realizing that by outsourcing some things it will free me up to do more meaningful tasks that will provide me a better return on investment. 

I will be allowed more quality time with my wife and kids by having someone else do some of the work as well as possibly skipping the potential for a harmful accident.  Another example is cutting down a large evergreen tree in my back yard.  I have the tools to do this, but paying someone to drop the tree that is in a tight spot will likely cost me a great deal less than dropping the tree on the neighbor’s fence, sending me to the emergency room, etc.  I would gladly pay someone the few hundred dollars to avoid a ride in an ambulance and potential to damage property.

Just because we can do something, does not mean we are less of a man or woman because we chose to let others perform the work.  By using budgets to figure out the payoff and decisions we will be able to make the most impact with our resources.  

We need to use budgets in our vocabulary in order to get to a better place.  

Have a great week!

“Businesses wonder why it is still hard to be thought of as the brand of choice with customers.  How can our business make more profitable transactions and stay out of the commodity battle with low profits?  I equip your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate explosive revenues with greater profits!”

www.kevinsidebottom.com

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lWIVasmkFsoYL4h0AqIZgH6LC3qaw_gI/view?usp=sharing – client profile sheet

https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Process-Uncovered-Success-Influence/dp/0578421518 - Book

https://kevinsidebottom.kartra.com/page/5AF12 - Sales Process Uncovered Online Training

https://kevinsidebottom.kartra.com/page/68N10 - Trustworthy Online Training

Why You Should Use The B Word

Have you ever wondered how you are going to pay an unsuspected bill that pops up?  Ever had a surgery that you did not know how you were going to pay for, but it was life or death?  What about dreading to go to work, but you do because there are car payments, house payments, credit card payments etc.

Most people are living paycheck to paycheck and can not afford to take pay reductions, furloughs, or worse being let go. One slip up in the paycheck will put us in a downward spiral financially.

Today I want to focus on how to add security to your way of life!  Today we talk about the B-word.  That’s right…Budgets.  Now stop rolling your eyes for a few minutes and read on.  This will truly help you!  It helped me over a decade ago when I finally got control of my finances.

Dave Ramsey offers an amazing course called Financial Peace University that I took over a decade ago.  I have applied his principals ever since taking that class.  The core aspect to this training is you guessed it, the Budget!  The budget is the foundational part about becoming a millionaire.  Of all the people doing their debt free screams on his show and the millionaire half hours 99% run off of a budget.  If you want to be wealthy in the future, you’ve got to do your budget! When interviewed the millionaires said they use a budget to make money work for them to grow their wealth.  No surprise lotto tickets, no rich uncles deciding to bless them, a budget.

Corporations also use budgets to make sure they do not run out of money.  By using budgets, corporations are able to apply income to certain business units in order to fund develop products, marketing, employee growth, legal services, etc.  The point here is that they are very intentional to make sure they are on budget to make money work for them.  Successful Corporations (Banks, Amazon, Apple, etc.) make money work for them to grow their wealth.  

We cannot just fly by the seat of our pants and hope for the best with financial security.  You Only Live Once (YOLO) unfortunately is not a term that works well with finances.  It’s the B-word that most people make disgusted faces when said out loud that will enable you to thrive long term.

During this pandemic season, I have had to reduce my income by 20 percent, we bought my wife a new used vehicle, and my wife changed jobs with a month of no income from her.  We were able to review the budget, see where we could cut costs during this season as well as move forward without getting into arguments.  It was one less item to worry about during this not so fun time.  We have been able to pay down the mortgage as well during this time.  Not just pay the mortgage payment, more payments onto the principal.

Budgeting has brought my wife and I closer as we talk about our future dreams and actually budget to make it a reality as we travel along in our marriage.  We even give our kids a budget for clothing and after school activities that they can manage how they choose.  They just need make sure they can afford it.  If they don’t have enough money, then they can’t do the activity.  Now the emotion is taken out of the discussion and the focus is on simple mathematics.  

If millionaires and corporations do budgets to succeed, what is keeping you from doing a budget?  

Do you not have the time?  

Does it seem like you don’t know where to start? 

What if I had a quick excel file you could use that auto calculates and allows you to do a budget?  Would that be useful to you?

Reach out and I would be glad to help you succeed with your finances and help you start the conversation with a financial advisor in order to win and have a better future!

Have a great day!

“Businesses wonder why the majority of their sales teams struggle at winning profitable business.  I equip your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate explosive revenues with greater profits!”

www.kevinsidebottom.com

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lWIVasmkFsoYL4h0AqIZgH6LC3qaw_gI/view?usp=sharing – client profile sheet

https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Process-Uncovered-Success-Influence/dp/0578421518 - Book

https://kevinsidebottom.kartra.com/page/5AF12 - Sales Process Uncovered Online Training

https://kevinsidebottom.kartra.com/page/68N10 - Trustworthy Online Training

Do What Wealthy People Do

What do Wealthy individuals do?  That is a question the majority of our population have.

I have sat with quite a few millionaires and learned this some interesting things.  First thing I learned is that 99% of wealthy individuals did not inherit their wealth.  Yep, that is right, they built it from the ground up.  Almost all of them did not win the lottery either.  So how did they do it?

The main reason these wealthy individuals did it is by using a Budget.  Yep, I used the B-word! They use budgets financially, with their time, and when they decide to take on a new venture. 

Hardworking individuals believe the B-word as a taboo discussion topic.  I get it!  I fought against using budgets until I took a class that helped me understand that if I tell my money what to do, it actually does what I want it to do. 

When I learned how freeing budgets can be, I was left wondering why I did not do this sooner.  I would have had so much more money at the end of the pay period and would have been able to invest more of my hard, earned money.  Yes, budgeting can be freeing for you and your loved ones.  My wife can use her money to buy whatever she wants with it. 

My wife and I started out our marriage with the monthly budget meeting.  We go through all of the line items including clothing, vacations, gifts, food, electric, etc.  If she decides to buy a whole bunch of coffee, she is free to do so without me condemning her because it is her money to budget for whatever she wants!  Have you ever had a fight over your significant other buying something that you haven’t agreed on? 

The monthly budget has helped our communication greatly as a by-product.  If you are in a relationship then you already know communication is huge in a relationship. 

Budgeting has been one of the single most effective ways for my wife and I to prepare for emergencies, taking vacations, date nights, etc.  We have had times where we had emergencies and by having a budget, we were able to overcome those emergencies quickly.  We also need to buy a new roof for our house that we have been planning for.  Roofs are pretty expensive and we will be able to afford it because we put it in the budget. 

You know what else has been great?  We actually give our kids a budget for clothing and after school activities that they can manage how they choose.  They just need make sure they can afford it.  If they don’t have enough money, then they don’t do the activity.  Now the emotion is taken out of the discussion and the focus is on saving up so they can do that activity in the future.  My hope is that they will keep budgeting for the rest of their life so they can retire with even more money that my wife and I.

Had we started earlier on investing into retirement we would have millions more when we retire.  Not a million…Millions! 

If you want to be successful and have a great retirement, you need to start with a budget.  I do not make any money off of this, but I also highly recommend you take financial peace university from Ramsey Solutions!  It is the class that started me on my financial journey over a decade ago and has helped our family with getting on track for a better future.

What is keeping you from sitting down and doing a budget? 

Do you not have the time? 

Does it seem like you don’t know where to start? 

What if I told you that if you emailed me, I would send you a FREE excel file that you could use for your own budget?   It does all of the calculations for you.  

Would that be helpful? 

If you want to become wealthy and have HOPE for your future, email me today and I will send you a copy of the budget file we use so that you can get on the road for a better future.

Sincerely,

Kevin Sidebottom

“Businesses wonder why the majority of their sales teams struggle at winning profitable business.  I teach your sales team to walk with the customer through the five buying decisions, and in the correct order to generate more sales with high margins!”

www.kevinsidebottom.com