Working for home is one of the joys of freelancing, but sooner or later, as the work flows in, you’ll have to decide whether a more conventional office space might be a little more conducive to getting the work done. Here’s what you need to know.
When you’re starting a business, especially if you’re going freelance, you don’t need to rent office space. You really, really don’t.
(In fact, watch the movie Office Space, to remind yourself why working in cubicle land can be a soul-sucking nightmare.)
Until you do.
At least, this has been my experience. I’ve gone from the wearing-no-pants freedom that comes from working from home, to the dead seriousness of signing a two-year lease and potentially having to convert the boardroom into a bedroom if we can’t afford the rent.
And everything in between, including working out of coffee shops and a shared office space. I guess I’m in a pretty good position to help you sift through the pros and cons of each and help you find a work space that suits you.
Home office
Just over five years ago, when I started working for myself as a freelance writer, I spent R2,000 on a LaserJet printer and I bought a second-hand desk from a little old lady who advertised it on Gumtree. Everything went swimmingly until I started landing more corporate work. I would have to hide in the cupboard where we stored our winter jackets to hold a muffled phone interview with a busy CEO while my kids banged on the door.
Pros: it’s cheap to set up and you can claim all kinds of home-related services (rent, ADSL) as office expenses. You can set your own hours, cook dinner while you work, and enjoy the vast empty spaces of the mall at 10am while everyone else is pulling a 9-5 at the office. You can also spend more time with your loved ones – even if your loved ones are your five cats.
Cons: your more corporate clients don’t find it very professional (hello sweatpants), you have to lay out cash to buy equipment like printers, sometimes it’s so lonely you start talking to your plants, and oh, the distractions! You can also kiss work/life balance goodbye.
Coffeeshop
After a while I had too much overflow work and joined forces with a fellow freelancer. With partnerships, come bigger clients and more meetings. Before partnering up, I would work from a coffeeshop near my house once or twice a week for a few hours, but now this started becoming a regular thing. We’d meet each other for breakfast to catch up on jobs we were working on, or meet with clients, and then stay at the table and put in a few hours of work at the “coffice” afterwards.
Pros: free Wi-Fi and faux colleagues (hello beardy guy I see every Tuesday), plenty of eatables and you can choose a different office every day of the week. Plus, if you keep insisting clients meet you at fancy restaurants, they’ll think you’re some kind of creative mogul.
Cons: the tables are usually miniscule, it’s impossible to take phone calls, and your waitress side-eyes you if you don’t order something ever 45 minutes – which gets expensive.
Co-working spaces
Eventually our team of two became a team of three, and it was getting expensive swiping the business card to pay for breakfast croissants at a coffee shop. We found a lovely co-working space that was central and used it as our home base.
Pros: It’s lovely to have tools like Slack and Skype, but sometimes it’s more useful to thrash things out in-person (plus, you also often end up collaborating with other creative types who share your co-workspace); there’s access to printers, a receptionist, and a boardroom, so you look super professional; there’s usually great coffee, and some kind of daily snack scribbled on a blackboard in the kitchen.
Cons: the daily rates get expensive, and if you want to pay a lower rate you’ll probably have to sign a contact. Never sign a contract. Sometimes you’ll have to share your space with a Loudmouth Larry or a Sniffy Susan, but because you’re essentially strangers, you can’t do anything except “Harrumph!” and hope they take the hint.
Rented office
We realised that for a wee bit more than we were paying at our co-working space, we could rent an office. I’ll never forget what it felt like the day they put our logo on the door to our tiny loft, just big enough to fit four desks in. I’ll also never forget that in our first month my partner and I only took a salary of R5,000 each because, good grief, there were deposits, and buying desks and chairs and coffee mugs and printer paper and all that jazz.
Pros: clients seem to find it reassuring that you have an office, collaboration is definitely improved, and it creates a divide between home life and work life.
Cons: overheads, contracts, arguments about what radio station to listen to in the office.
Even though our company runs out of a rented office space – and we’ve since gotten even bigger premises – we’re all about flexible working hours. Our team works 9.30am to 3.30pm, and puts in an extra two hours at home, at a time that suits them.
Choosing the right workspace is as much about your budget and plans for your business (maybe you want to stay small), as it it about your working style. And if you work better wearing pants or not.
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