At Last, A Real Daytime Job from Home

In 2003, Alice had been praying for two years to find a real day time job working from home. In those days, working from home wasn’t much of a trend, but Alice had met someone who had a real job working from home. She knew it was possible and had her heart set on doing the same. One day Alice’s husband was reading the paper after work and said “Hey Alice, there’s a company here that thinks they’ve got your job! You might want to give them a call.” He read the ad out loud to Alice, “At Last, a Real Daytime Job from Home, TeleReach Corporate.”

Alice: And here I am, 18 years later at my real job from home. If you had worded the ad differently, who knows what would have happened. We might not have found each other. I home schooled our son from second grade on but when he reached high school, he was to the point where he didn’t really need me to teach him anymore so I starting thinking about something to do. I didn’t want to go outside the home to work. Back in those days, I remember we only hired people in Houston but we had clients all over the U.S. We talked about the fact that if we could have clients all over the country, why couldn’t we have appointment setters all over the country? And now we do.

Q: The idea of cold calling is scary to a lot of people. Had you ever done sales or cold calling before? What did you do before TeleReach?

A: I was an IRS auditor and an auditor trainer, so I was used to dealing with businesses and the public. Before TeleReach, I also owned a business that provided bookkeeping and accounting services.

Tracie: Oh, so you were on the other end of being scary. If ever there was a word scarier than cold calling, it’s gotta be IRS audit.

Q: What is it about working from home that you love so much?

A: Part of the answer is about what I love about working from home and part is about what I love about working with TeleReach.

Work that flexes with changes in my life. There’s a certain kind of flexibility with TeleReach that may not be true with all remote work, and that is that the job flexes with changes in my life. In the beginning, I worked part time when I was still home schooling a bit, but later I wanted to work full time and the job and the company had the flexibility for me to switch to full time. When I became a caretaker for my husband when he became disabled, I was able to keep working and work from home and be a caretaker to him while earning an income. When I became a caretaker for my mom, my job was flexible. I’ve held different positions within the company through the years, as an appointment setter, as part of the staff and as part of the management team. When I had surgery, the job was flexible. When my son had surgery, the job was flexible. For every major turn in my life, my different jobs with TeleReach and my different schedules have adjusted to what I needed at the time.

Assignment of accounts. If something happens and I need to be gone during the day, I know that I can make up my hours later in the day by working the west coast. TeleReach works with me to add accounts when I want to work more or change accounts when I need to work different time zones so that I can work early or late.

Company culture. The work culture at TeleReach is so unlike the rest of the business world. Everyone at TeleReach is so supportive. People here really want each other to succeed. We’re always having competitions but not in a cutthroat way. It’s a team effort and a positive environment. A while back I left TeleReach briefly to chase a rainbow in a different industry, but there was no pot of gold. I did not like the work culture there and it was not a good experience.

Q: What are the most important requirements people need in order to be successful in our career working from home? 

A. They will need a great deal of self-discipline and a quiet place to work. A quiet place to work is absolutely necessary to our work on the phone. When my son had some surgeries, we needed to move some things around in the house and I ended up with my office in the living room. There are some advantages to having my office this way but we have dogs so once again, I needed to figure out how to get control of my new office environment and maintain a quiet place to work.

My son helped me find some software that I have on my computer now that cancels out all noise except for the human vocal sounds. We’ve tested out this software with all kinds of noises to make sure it works, running the vacuum cleaner, dogs howling, pots clanging and everything we could think of to test it out. It works so well, you can’t hear a thing and believe me, we were really loud. It works even better than the noise cancelling headsets. I actually use both.

If people want to work from home but don’t have an ideal space such an office with a door, there is a technology solution. The software isn’t free but it is very low cost. Here is a link to the noise cancelling software with a link which has an offer in this link of one month free: https://ref.krisp.ai/u/u01c5c29ef