Freelance Advisor and Enterprise Nation founder Emma Jones has returned with a new book which works as an indispensable guide to starting a business in your spare time.

*Working 5 to 9* is the follow up to Emma’s best-selling debut *Spare Room Start Up* and taps in to the modern day phenomenon of people starting businesses at the end of their ‘employed’ working day.

Over 256 pages, Emma’s prose provides a source of inspiration with easy-to-follow practical pointers for those people wishing to realise their dream of starting their own business. She also offers up real-life stories which reveal a hidden commercial landscape where ordinary people are working away with a belief in their own ability to start up, and successfully run, their own businesses.

One of the threads that runs through this book is passion and an unbridled excitement about beginning and developing a new business. The cost of entry into the world of business has continued to fall. This has delivered to millions of people the impetus they needed to begin their new enterprises. Many of the people showcased in this book have much in common as people, but what is astonishing is the diversity of the businesses that Emma has chosen to highlight.

Most of the book is taken up with profiles of 50 home-based businesses that have taken the plunge into the heady world of working 5 to 9. From estate agents by day, but pig farmers by night, to business support adviser by day and magician by night; if you need inspiration for you new home-based business, then this is available in abundance in this book.

>What Emma illustrates is just how anyone can start a 5 to 9 business – as long as they have the passion, commitment and a strong belief in what they’re doing.

However, rather than get too carried away with the romance of starting your own business, Emma helpfully provides information on the practical aspects of enterprise – such as dealing with the various strands of red tape that need to be understood and faced up to. All the essential steps you need to take are distilled in one handy reference. Having read many new business books over the years, I have seen few that are as easily read, and impart essential information about VAT, tax, contracts, business planning and structures than this book.

Many 5 to 9 businesses suffer from a lack of market exposure, with many of these business owners finding that marketing is the most difficult skill to master. Concise yet comprehensive advice is included in this book to not only give you the practical skills to shout about you and your business, but also to help you dispel the fear that often comes when a novice business owner steps into the world of marketing and public relations. Naturally, there is a section which explores the growing need for businesses to embrace social networking as an important part of their marketing mix.

Overall, Working 5 to 9 is packed with help, advice, hints, tips and masses of web links to information you could spend days locating yourself. But this book is more than the sum of its parts. As a resource for small home-based businesses it is essential. For people thinking that there must be more to life than the 9-5 drudge it will become their bible and constant companion as their plans for a new life in business takes shape.

Business and the people that run today’s enterprises are changing. Big business is transforming into micro commerce where anyone with a good idea and a few hours to spare can start and run their own successful business. What many people that want to enter the 5 to 9 community lack is a guide to show them how to achieve their dream. With the arrival of this book, you now have the tools to turn your dreams into reality.

##### Buy the book

£8.99 + postage: [Buy online](http://books.global-investor.com/books/432310.htm)

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By [David Howell](/author/david-howell/)