How do you manage working alone from home? Now, that is not "manage" in "how do you get by?" sense. It is manage in manager/staff sense. You work at home alone, you are boss of your home based business. So who or what is there to "manage"?

The profitability of any business, sole proprietor or multinational, depends on successful management of a number of omnipresent departments: marketing, finance, human resources, computing, purchasing, and, if appropriate, research and development, and production.

If you are working at home, alone, online, you have all those management responsibilities and functions rolled into one. Your management task is perhaps most difficult of all. You have to manage yourself. If you have never thought about it like that, then I suggest you consider it for a while. To run a successful business, you need to have a grasp of all elements of that business, and how they interlink. That is as true with a home based online business as it is with a large corporation. Managing all those different elements of business, I think you will find, is not as easy as it may sound. Managing yourself is definitely not as easy as it may sound.

Working at home for many can mean an escape from managers above them who may have made their lives a misery, or at least less satisfying, for all of their previous career. But does working at home mean an escape from management altogether? No, it does not. At least, if you want a more profitable home based business, then management will be every bit as important as before. In fact, more important.

You may have your daily functions and business operations down to a science, but in order to continue moving onward and upward, you need to continue developing and learning new skills and gathering knowledge that will keep you current, relevant and stimulated.

The world around us (human development/technology/innovation) is growing and advancing at an alarming speed and in blink of an eye you can be yesterday's news instead of today's headline or tomorrow's superstar if you don't do your part to progress as well.

The industry you are working within may evolve, expand, grow smaller or transform and you need to be ready when that happens. You need to be aware of your industry's position in marketplace and cognizant of where it is heading.

Paying attention to your industry's standing and mindful of future trends will allow you to make decisions that will support strategic action and position you for continued growth and success.

To conduct business with assumption that once change occurs, you will make necessary adaptations could be detrimental to your business, possibly devastating.