For those of you who do not know this, I’ve been working from home for a little over the last two years. No morning rush-hour traffic, no evening rush-hour traffic – no traffic at all. It was magical. Well, I guess some good things must come to an end and so on October 15th, 2009 Help Now received keys for our new corporate office.

Yay traffic.

Working from home was great. On mornings where I knew I didn’t have an appointment I could lay in bed almost until work officially started at 8:30am. All I needed to do was get up, let the puppy’s outside and grab something to drink. Plus my daily commute consisted of walking down a few flights of stairs – it was perfect. Oddly enough though, working from home actually caused me to work more. While there were the few and far between “sleep-ins”, typically I would be at my computer working as soon as Megan left for work which was typically around 8am. Unless we had something to do in the evening I would work until at least 5:30pm every night. Plus since my work office was just a few feet from our family room I always had work on my mind. Don’t get me wrong, someone once told me that my hobby is my work ((Thank you Jeremy)) although at times it was painful not to be able to escape work for just an hour.

Regardless, as I mentioned above that has all come to an end. Buddy and I realized that trying to grow a company really cannot happen when all of your employees are working remotely. While we had weekly meeting via the phone, it became very difficult to manage people properly without having that face-to-face connection that an office provides.

We actually aren’t working from the office yet. Well, Buddy and I are although everyone else doesn’t start until this Monday. We needed to run all of the ethernet and coax cabling, purchase and install the appliances, assist with the furniture being delivered and setup – oh the list goes on and on. Alarm company, locksmith, HVAC guy, blah blah blah. All in all though it is very exciting; while Help Now has been in business for over 10 years to me it feels that its finally becoming a real company and for some reason I feel the future is going to be very bright!

My daily commute has been 30 minutes in the morning and just about 30 minutes in the evening. But I’ve been leaving the house no later than 7:15am in the morning and leaving between 5:30pm and 5:45pm at night. I’ve found that spending that extra time at work reduces my drive into work. That not only keeps me from going crazy just sitting on that stupid road ((speaking of which, when is Route 100 going to become four lanes?)), it also allows me to spend just additional time getting more work done meaning I shouldn’t have to work from home as much!

In a few weeks I’ll be perfectly settled in to my new routine and hopefully things will be working out just fine, which I believe will be the case!

On a side note, it’s Wednesday night at 8pm and I’m sitting at the office waiting for the furniture toucher-upper guy to finish up. He’s been here since about 4:30pm and thinks he’ll be done around 9pm, although at his pace I’m not sure. The good news is that Buddy ((His late night was the night before and he didn’t get out of here until after 10pm!)) decided to swing by and drop off a six-pack of Dos Equis Amber. Nice!