With daily headlines showing the effects of the consumer credit squeeze on small, medium and large business, job security, rising prices and falling house prices you may notice that these events dramatically show that there is a flaw in thinking that simply owning your own business is a route to security, financial freedom and early retirement.

When economic factors dominate the market place, if you are in business, then you will have to rethink your marketing strategies. If you are to survive the next few years of the economic downturn you will have to spend some quality time thinking through how you are going to escape the trend that is affecting even large corporate companies such as Next, French Connection and more recently XL Airways.

The economic climate is determining how any company simply must react in order to stop themselves, their employees and their livelihoods becoming a statistic in one of the headlines over the coming months and it is one of the most misunderstood aspects of why owning your own small retail business is seriously overrated.

1.Your rent and rates are due no matter how many customers walked through your door in the last month.

2.You have to keep a full stock of goods to sell in order to keep your order books as full as possible.

3.You will almost always, unless extremely profitable feel that opening up every day is a chore rather than a pleasure.

4.You will have to become an agony aunt to your staff, a bookkeeper for your accountant and bank, a slave to your suppliers and a prisoner to your opening hours.

5.You will learn that nobody really cares whether you take a day off or not in the next 12 months, as long as you are open when they want you to be.

6.You will find out that the bank manager who said yes on day one can change their mind very quickly in a very short space of time.

7.You will become a master of problem solving and end up working in your business rather than on your business 50 weeks of the year with two weeks off for good behaviour if you are lucky.

Thankfully there is a better way, and much less expensive way to become a small business owner and that is to work from home. It is the dream of most people to have their own business and be able to spend more time with their loved ones. In most cases the time and money freedom that people seek, is often replaced with either too much time, but not enough money to enjoy the time they have or having to work so many hours for the small amount of money required for even basic living standards they run out of time.

Working from home and becoming an entrepreneur is the only real route to having time and money freedom. You really do not need to reinvent the wheel, just find an existing business with products that are recession proof and be flexible enough to know that there will be a learning curve at first. In reality you knew nothing about your current job or business when you started so there is no real difference when taking on something new to learn.

When you start to work online from home, you will find a whole new community waiting to welcome you, train you and mentor you to a much more flexible business of your own, plus build a skill set that will literally help you for the rest of your life.