Are you fed up with getting up at the crack of dawn to rush down breakfast (if you ever make it to the kitchen), battle the rush hour traffic only to arrive at your desk flustered and frustrated as you see that your boss has yet again piled your in-tray higher than Mt Everest with tasks that all seem impossibly urgent?

No wonder you’re thinking about giving all that up for a relaxed start with a coffee, a read of your latest entrepreneur magazine and a saunter to your home office or garden to a relaxing self-made timetable that’s all wrapped up before noon…..well, we know the reality isn’t quite like that (at least not in the beginning) but even the thought of grabbing a coffee in the morning before being bombarded with an irrational time-keeper is still the better option!

So setting up your business is an exciting idea and process but it is also a serious one. Amongst the issues that need to be addressed are a few legal considerations and some other issues where you need to make some commonsense approaches to protect yourself and your investment.

In Australia alone, there are around one million businesses operating from the home – it’s an easy and affordable way to start out; some may remain continuing to work from home and others may move on to a small office space but whatever you decide to do, there are certain things that you need to think about carefully when it comes to legal issues.

Depending on your local council or state government, there can be certain restrictions in place on how many people can operate your business from your home if they are not residents; it can cause issues with other residents with parking or a lot of coming and going etc.

If you are leasing your home, you need to inform your landlord that you are operating a business – not all landlords will approve the idea.

You may need certain license depending upon the type of business you intend to run – there may be problems if your business creates a lot of noise pollution for instance.

All businesses must display their business name registration certificate.

Another thing that some business owners working from home can miss is that their home and contents insurance policy may not cover certain aspects of their business such as computers and furniture or even an area of the house that you operate your business from. You may need to take out a separate policy to cover this.

Within our online membership program, we go in-depth into a lot of the legalities such as contracts and agreements, partnership agreements, protecting your intellectual property, business names and registration and more but I hope I’ve shared with you here a little bit more about fulfilling the legal requirements that you