Should You Play The Host With The Most When It Comes To Your WFH Business?

Building a business from home can be rife with tricky decisions that, often, you’ll need to make in moments. As your business grows, one decision that will especially need a quick solution is whether or not to host clients in your home. After all, while the early days of business may see you getting by with a trickle of online sales and long-distance interest, growing any business means expanding your reach to everyone from wholesale buyers to the bigger players in your industry. And, in most cases, those individuals are going to want a little more interaction with you than simply clicking the ‘buy now’ button on your website.

Unfortunately, if you rush into hosting B2B clients, in particular, at your home business address, you risk sending them the wrong message and tarnishing your chances before things even get off the ground. By comparison, asking the following questions before opening your doors is far more likely to result in a professional, well-thought image that goes down a whole lot better. 

Do you have space?

Cramming clients into your home office is rarely your best bet for impressing, especially on big B2B deals where you’re likely to be hosting a whole board. As such, you need to seriously consider whether you have the space for something like a standalone at-home boardroom which will send the best professional image. Ideally, this should be a calm, quiet space with an individual entrance and a real office feel. If you can’t manage that, or if your only viable option is for a boardroom crammed into your dining space, then you might be best off keeping meetings away from home after all. 

Can you keep it professional? 

If clients have to come to the front door of your property and pass through your kid’s playroom, then they’ll probably be a little less inclined to do business with you. After all, this is hardly the professional impression that you want to send, and will be made even worse if your kids can stumble into the meeting at any moment. Instead, consider whether you’d be able to keep at-home meetings solely professional with the help of dedicated business entrances, and enough distance from the house that your kids can’t just stumble in. Otherwise, there’s little chance that an at-home meeting is the best option for your needs. 

Do you know your alternatives?

Things like video conferencing and coworking meeting room hire means that there are plenty of affordable alternatives to hosting clients at home. Keeping these alternatives in mind is therefore vital, and it’s especially worth considering these options alongside the reality of your answers to the other questions listed. If you would struggle to satisfyingly keep your meeting room separated and looking great, then an alternative route could certainly help you to achieve the best of both worlds, and secure better sales as a result. 

Deciding whether to host clients in the heart of your at-home business isn’t easy, but you can at least ensure the right decision by considering questions like these beforehand.