Darina Loakman.com

On thursday last I attended a function in London hosted by Emma Jones of Enterprise Nation to reveal the predictions for home-business in the UK in 2009

It was a great evening held in a spot I’m becoming very fond of ! 1 alfred place and I met some very interesting home-business owners of which you will be hearing more about over the coming weeks.

Some of their predictions came from surveying a myriad of home-business owners across the UK, but I’m not going to reveal too much yet, because I was thinking it’s been a while since we’ve had a survey here, the last one showed some very interesting comparisons when we used the US so I thought it would be interesting for us this time to do a comparison with the UK.

I’ve taken Emma’s questions and put them in a survey form for here. If you work from home in Ireland if you could take a couple of mins to answer the survey that would be great. It’s just 8 short questions, multi-choice and should take less than 5 minutes to complete (I’d say about 60 secs max !)

Here’s the link http://tinyurl.com/cd6l4s

If you can pass the link on to anyone you know who works from home so we can try and get as many responses as possible that would be great, blog about it, tweet it or email the link and I’ll let you know the results as soon as possible.

Like Emma is in the UK, I’m a huge believer in and advocate of, home-business in Ireland, I don’t see it as the “poor man’s cousin to getting a real job” as is the feeling I get from some I’ve discussed it with ! and I believe particularly in these challenging and enterprising times we are going to see a huge growth in people starting a business from home, whether it’s from the kitchen table or a purpose built garden office the potential is huge and the contribution to the economy not insignificant.

One of my goals for this year is to try and raise the profile of home-business in Ireland and also to try and quantify a bit more what’s actually going on out there. I have a few things in the pipeline that will hopefully help with this :), but in the meantime if you could fill in the survey above and pass it on to anyone you know that it’s relevant for I’d be grateful. This particular survey is purely for predictions for 2009 and is not about getting a better picture of what’s happening in the home-business world in Ireland.. that one’s coming !

talk to you soon

Darina