Making Home Business Work

HER CHALLENGE: After 25 years in administrative posts at medical centers in Los Angeles and Boston, Thompson was feeling stale. Her $60,000 job at Glendale Adventist Medical Center was becoming routine.

HOW SHE COPED: Thompson quit. She left her retirement money untouched but spent $6,000 of unused vacation and sick-leave pay to buy computers, filing cabinets, a fax machine and a copier to launch her own fund-raising company in January 1994.

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Laura Thompson decided to run her fund-raising and event-planning firm, Thompson & Co., from her Glendale home, saving money on an office lease.

With no children and her husband employed (he would later leave his job to start a different business), Thompson felt she could risk not having a regular paycheck. Still, the decision to leave it behind was not an easy one.

“It was terrifying,” Thompson said. “Everyone questioned you within the organization.”

The first year, she made only half what she had been earning at the medical center, she said. But in 1995, she earned $80,000. Her clients now include the American Red Cross, an Arcadia hospital, the Hollenbeck Youth Center and her former employer, Glendale Adventist Medical Center.

Thompson said the excitement of owning her own business and the need to immerse herself in the work cut short her initial worries. Her volume of business tripled the second year, and she worked incessantly--her office was a too-convenient walk down the hall.

Now she is learning to work smarter, not harder, she said, by contracting out some tasks.