No one likes to make mistakes, especially in business, but if you don’t make mistakes you can’t grow. As an entrepreneur who has chucked the corporate life, the commute and the comfort of knowing I’d have a paycheck at the end of the week, I’ve made plenty of mistakes.

During my start-up days, I made some financial mistakes along with a few stupid, bonehead moves that I’ve ingrained in my brain never to do again. I’m not finished making mistakes because I’m not finished growing my business. The difference between my start-up days and today is that now my mistakes are much smaller and less expensive to fix.

In her article “10 Mistakes That Start-Up Entrepreneurs Make,” Rosalind Resnick shares a strong list of things you should avoid doing when you’re starting a company. A few of my favorite suggestions are:

• Going it alone. It’s difficult to build a scalable business if you’re the only person involved. The solution: Make sure there’s enough margin in your pricing to enable you to bring in other people.

• Asking too many people for advice. It’s always good to get input from experts…but getting too many people’s opinions can delay your decision so long that your company never gets out of the starting gate. The answer: Assemble a solid advisory board that you can tap on a regular basis but run the day-to-day yourself.
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Last week, at a party, I mentioned that Twitter has been invaluable to my business.  A few of my friends said (as they rolled their eyes) that it doesn’t matter if someone’s on their way to the gym or late to get a haircut.
They don’t get it. Others don’t either, unless they use Twitter often.
Twitter [...]

For the past month I’ve been working with a company that’s sending its sales staff home to work. The company has finally realized that through technology including videoconferencing and e-mail, their staff can be just as productive in their individual home offices as they are under the corporate thumb.
There’s only one problem: the sales manager [...]

I admire couples who can work from home together and not strangle each other by the end of the day. It’s not that I’m unreasonable, bitchy or territorial (at least not all of the time), but there’s no way I could stand to share an office with a spouse. Period.
Part of the reason is that [...]

For several months I’ve nagged asked my friend Steve to write about how he decided to go from a corporate job to working from home. The wait for his article was worth it.

Guest post by Steve Anderson

Working from home was a dream long before it became a reality, and that’s because I needed [...]