There comes a time in the lives of many meeting planners when it's time to nest. If you're on the road so much that office work is piling up, you might need to catch up at home. Perhaps you're expecting a baby and contemplating working part-time. Or maybe you're ready to start an independent meeting planning consultancy or events agency.
Of course, you'll need to set aside a few dollars to create your home office, but thanks to the incredibly shrinking costs of technology, not as many as you once needed. A laptop that was $4,000 a few years ago is now less than $2,000. Better yet, Uncle Sam can be your silent partner; many start-up costs can be deducted under Schedule C of your income tax return.
Not long ago, the cornerstone of any home office was the computer. It still is, but only as the gateway to the World Wide Web. A high-speed connection is a must, for accessing your company's virtual private network, for contacting hotels and vendors, and for seducing potential clients. Fortunately, an old-fashioned price war has broken out between the phone and cable companies. This has pushed fees as low as $14.95 a month for SBC-Yahoo DSL (www.sbc.com) with a download speed between 384 Kbps and 1.5 Mbps, adequate for most small-business uses.
Unless you're shopping for a Macintosh, it's hard to even spend as much as $1,000 on a desktop PC. A decent one, like a Pentium-4 Gateway 838GM with 512MB of memory and a 200GB hard drive, recently sold at Office Depot for $800 after rebates—with a 17-inch LCD monitor and low-end printer thrown in. This PC's other useful features for meeting planners include an 8-in-1 card reader so you can easily pop in the cards from a digital camera, and the ability to read and burn CD-ROMs and DVDs.
If your home office is a corner of the kitchen table, or you're anticipating lots of travel, a laptop is the natural choice. But be careful; a 2.7-pound ultralight notebook like the Sony Vaio VGN-TX670P is perfect for travel, but not so for hours of work at a desk, because of its smaller 11.1-inch screen and slightly shrunken keyboard. Conversely, a multimedia monster like the Toshiba Qosmio G25-AV513, with its 17-inch screen, makes a great desktop PC replacement, yet it folds away neatly in case you've got limited space. But it won't fit on an airline tray table, and it's a full 9.4 pounds.
If a laptop will be your only PC, the 5.1-pound Toshiba Satellite M55-S329 with 512 MB of RAM, a roomy 100GB hard drive, and a 14.1-inch screen ($1,350) is a better choice. And sometimes you won't want to carry a computer at all. The size of a pack of chewing gum, SanDisk's 512MB Cruzer Mini USB Flash Drive (under $45) will hold hundreds of photographs or documents and let you carry a huge PowerPoint presentation in your pocket or purse.
To make hard copies, you'll need a printer. Do you want to print lots of high-quality monochrome documents? Even a low-cost laser printer, like HP's 1020 ($180) can print up to 15 pages per minute. Need color occasionally? HP's 2600n is less than $400. Have limited space in your home office? A multifunction printer (MFP) like the Canon Pixma MP780 Photo All-in-One combines printer, scanner, fax, and copier. It has a flatbed for scanning documents and photos, and a 35-page auto-document feeder, all for $300.
What else do you need? A phone system, like the AT&T 5.8GHz phone with digital answering machine ($139), lets you add extensions over time. Software: Microsoft Office and Symantec's AntiVirus (buy the updates); and a contact manager like ACT! Finally, don't forget a surge protector.
SIDEBAR
Extra Bytes: Home Office in a Phone
The Palm Treo 650 phone/PDA ($599) is taking no prisoners as business America's favorite shiny toy. Next-generation Treos will use Microsoft operating systems and get BlackBerry messaging. But the Treo may have to move over for the new Sprint PPC-6700 ($599). At 6.1 ounces it's lighter than the Treo, has as good voice quality as a phone, long battery life, and boasts a camera, Web browser, high-speed networking, a memory card slot, and a sizable slide-out keyboard.