ALSO ON SMALL BUSINESS
| • Pick the Right Credit Card for Your Business |
| • Olive Garden's Special Celebrity |
| • Strategies for Reining In Energy Costs |
| RUNNING A BUSINESS | ||
Keeping the House Clean Amid All of the Soap
The Business: Deal Farm Soap Co., a soap-making business in Boxford, Mass.
The Owner: Renee Deal, 34.
The Story: Ms. Deal's home-based business is unusual in that she manufactures and sells it from her home.
She told Working From Home how she started and runs a manufacturing business at her residence:
For five years I have been making handmade natural goat-milk soap in my basement shop. I have the capacity to produce 300 bars per batch, and make multiple batches each month. I also manufacture milk bath, hand salve, lip balm and other products. There are many benefits and challenges to running this type of home-based business.
One benefit is that I am able to stay at home with my two-year-old son. This is wonderful personally, but a definite challenge in running a business. I rely on family members to come to my home and play with my son so I can make soap. Soap making is a lengthy and dangerous process, so children cannot be present during it. I also work nights after my son is asleep.
Another benefit is that I am in charge of my own success. The growth of the business is a direct result of my own efforts. However, having to wear all the hats is incredibly demanding. Manufacturing products as well as marketing and distributing them can be an enormous undertaking. It would be much easier to sell products that someone else made, but it would be far less gratifying for me.
Having a home factory requires space for manufacturing the product as well as storing inventory. Room for preparing packaging, packing orders for shipping, and doing office related work is a must. Merging this type of business with your home life takes planning, or it will consume your house. When I started Deal Farm Soap Co., my dining room was overrun with soap. But I quickly got organized and built a basement shop for manufacturing and storage. I also prepare orders for shipment in the basement. Still, occasionally the business overflows into our living space, but this just goes with the territory.
My soap-making shop takes up a little more than a quarter of our 14-by-14-foot basement. In this space I have a large workbench, a shipping scale that I also use for weighing ingredients, an area to store 50-pound buckets of oils, three rolling bakers racks for drying the soap, lots of trays, a large stainless-steel pot on wheels, a commercial hotplate to melt the vegetable oils, soap molds, a soap cutter, and lots of other little odds and ends.
Shipping orders is one of the areas where I have to be careful not to take over the house. I find it incredibly convenient to assemble orders on the dining-room table. Usually I pack and ship them all in the same day. But, when I am swamped, I sometimes leave boxed-up orders on the table, so I can deal with the shipping paperwork the next day. Those are the days we eat dinner in the kitchen.
The scent of essential oils often drifts upstairs. Fortunately this is a wonderful aroma. Guests usually remark about how great it smells when they enter our home. Unfortunately I often can't smell it since I'm so used to it.
Otherwise, people would never know about my basement factory unless I told them. We live in a historic district where no signage is permitted. When friends find out what I do for work, they always want to see the operation. Neighbors often are surprised to hear what's going on in the charming little house next door.
|
|
 |
||
|
| ||
