Julia Bickerstaff

But it does sound like it’s working. For those female entrepreneurs who are starting from home, what are some of the big mistakes they make?

The absolute first mistake people make is to think “I’m good at something, I’m going to make a business out of it” and they actually don’t have a look and see what else is going on. I’ve met, for an instance, lots and lots of women starting cupcake businesses from home and they all lived in the same area and there just simply weren’t enough people who were going to buy cupcakes.

One of the other things particularly for women starting small businesses is around pricing. Sweeping generalisations here but women really, really underprice. There could be a little lack of confidence – they sort of think “oh gosh, well if I can do this, well then anybody could therefore I will lower the price”. I’ve met so many women who say I feel bad charging them so I just did it for free.

There was a lady I know that runs a business called Sara Jane Shoes and she imports shoes for ladies with large feet. When she first started doing it the cost of the shoes was let’s say $40 and she was selling them for $50 and nobody bought them. They were Italian shoes, beautiful leather, but nobody bought them because everybody thought that obviously they couldn’t possibly be genuine Italian shoes because they were so cheap. And she put the price up to something like $300 and her business changed overnight and she was enormously successful. And her thing was that I want people with large feet to afford the shoes but she had the marketing wrong. So I think that price is a very important aspect.

Are there any secrets to actually physically working from home?

I think there are a few things actually. I think you need a separate place to do your work from home and you need to be quite work like about it. I think if your work is all spread around your home life, you can get very distracted and it doesn’t give a good head space.
I have a thing that if I’ve got difficult phone conversations to do, I actually have to put a pair of heels on and make myself a bit professional.

I think it’s important that people that work at home get out and see people because I think they can actually become far too, a little bit wrapped up with themselves. They don’t go out and see enough clients or potential customers. Even if your business, say an internet business, you don’t actually need to see customers, you need to understand your customers. And I see people who spend too much time at home not interacting enough with who their customer base would be and therefore misunderstanding who they’re actually aiming for.

And I think to actually set some hours is good. Say “my hours of work are nine to five” but if I’m working at home, that’s what I’m actually going to do in those hours. I’m not going to do fiddle around and be in the kitchen, I’m actually going to work and I’m going to have other times when I’m at home and I’m not working. To actually sort of compartmentalise it a bit, I think that’s quite important.

And Julia, what’s been the best part of striking out on your own?

Look for me, I’ve had lots and lots of ideas and ways of wanting to do things. To a certain extent I was able to do that within corporate world, but I wanted to do things a little bit quicker, a little bit differently and I wanted to experiment. And for me there’s nothing better than having a go and seeing what happens.

I’ve experimented in the corporate life but it’s harder to fail. When it’s you and you give yourself permission to fail and experiment, you can actually achieve a lot more because you can have a go at things. So that’s been a huge thing, so the freedom to have a go and really create something that might last.