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Work from Home - How I did it and you can too!
Bonnie Hicks
DataPlus
I am 54 years old, I have two happily-married grown sons, and I own DataPlus ( http://www.dataplus-svc.com/ http://www.dataplus-svc.com/"> http://www.dataplus-svc.com/ > ). DataPlus is a small but successful data processing company located in Georgia and I actually from time to time hire contractors to work at home typing. We have been in business for over 20 years and I would like to share my story with you.
It seems like yesterday that I was in the same position as many of you young mothers. I wanted to give my kids the best of a mom but saw the need to contribute to the household income. My husband, I and our one year old son had moved to Georgia from New York. We were hopeful that we could make a life, earn a decent living, and buy a home. We were poor as a church mouse. If we could have caught the mouse we would have eaten him. Though I hated to leave my baby, I had to find work out of the house at that time. It wasn't ideal but we did our best.
By the time my second son was born I was bound and determined not to leave my boys again. I posted notes on bulletin boards at local colleges to type school papers, ran ads in the paper for typing, delivered telephone books, and anything else I could think of. I remember typing into the wee hours of the morning when the kids were asleep and the house was quiet. I made far less than I should have for the work I did but it was worth it to be home for the kids. I picked up a job typing insurance claims for a doctor that ran several clinics. We bought a state of the art PC that had no hard drive, 64K of RAM and a 5 " floppy. It came with WordStar and DataStar, one of the first database applications, and I started learning to make custom screens and look up tables to make my work go quicker. Unfortunately the doctor was cheating on his Medicaid bills and got closed down and the job ended but it opened a new work world to me. I continued to learn programming, moving on to dBase, Basic, MS Access, Visual Basic, SQL and others. When the kids were in school I took some training and got certified as a Novel Network Engineer.
Along the way I got a couple of breaks. The first was being awarded a job keying all of the Burger King Kids Club applications. We set up the garage with desks and my PC. The work showed up in giant plastic bags, thousands and thousands of applications. Somebody had been overcome with the volume and given up. I hired my oldest son and his buddy from across the street to open and sort mail. We ran ads and started hiring and training home workers to key in the custom screens that I designed. We caught up but the job lasted another 12 years. Some of those same girls are still working with me today. Though that was the first job, it got us going and there have been many good customers since.
The moral of the story is: don't give up, keep your eyes open for opportunities, work hard, and learn everything pertinent you can. Maybe you'll be telling your story to young moms in a couple of years!
Article submitted Friday, June 20, 2008
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