Does your little home office make you feel like a small fish? Here's what the big fish think of you.

Stress comes from all angles for the entrepreneur.

One would think that working from the comfort of home would decrease stress. That's not necessarily so.

While many small-business owners value the freedom and lower cost of a home-based office, they also worry about being "found out"--so much so that it keeps them from marketing to the corporate sector, where there are billions of dollars just waiting to be allocated to outsourcing.

"It's just not professional enough, and they wouldn't take me seriously if they knew," one of my clients told me.

She isn't alone in her concern that big clients seem to want to work with other big fish. Does working from home necessarily mean that you can't compete?

Consider this: Econohomes grossed more than $50 million in revenue last year, and was named the second-fastest growing company in Austin, Texas. That growth was in no small part due to the extent to which Econohomes works with home-based business-owners.

"Ninety percent of our business relies on database that is designed and maintained by an entrepreneur who works out of his basement in San Francisco," says Amy Hasbrouck, Econohomes's vice president of marketing & development. "And all of his team members work from home as well."

That's quite a large responsibility to be outsourced, but Hasbrouck sees distinct benefits in working with home-based contractors.

"I feel like there's a lot more flexibility with independent contractors," Hasbrouck says. "They can plug in and pivot quickly because they are not a part of something that is overly structured and complicated."

Working from home also allows for a more flexible work schedule. But does the fact that you work in the wee-hours, after the kids are in bed influence a hiring manager's choice? You may be tempted to bend the truth to keep your secret safe, but that may backfire on you.

"What is most important to us is that the contractors are up front about how and when they work," says human resources manager August Nielsen. "Recently we were implementing a new HR software and our project manager worked from home. We received emails at really odd times, but we knew his work schedule going in so it didn't surprise or concern us."

Nielsen is responsible for hiring more than 1,000 employees for Veterans United Home Loans, a company named the No. 1 financial-services job creator right here at Inc. "Our company has 1,200 employees in 25 offices in 22 states, operating in all time zones," says Neilsen. "We have to be just as flexible with vendors and contractors to make sure we are working with the best."

Still, there is the inevitable occasional reminder of a contractor's home-office status.

Do the sounds of home create an unprofessional impression for your clients? What if the dog barks or your three-year-old barges into the room during a client call? You may be mortified--but perhaps your concern is unfounded.

"A prospective vendor just did a demo with us from his home-based office," says Nielsen. "During the demo we heard the laundry buzzer go off. Frankly, it was endearing and we have a pretty casual work environment so not a big deal."

But Nielsen warns that some companies might have been turned off by the brief disruption. "Bottom line, working from home isn't going to work for every contractor and the buzzer in the background isn't always appropriate," he says. "But if you know your audience, set expectations, and deliver results it can work."

Hasbrouck is also very forgiving of a little noise in the background. "Are you kidding?" she chides. "I have a room full of sales people who toss around a football right outside my door. A little noise makes me feel right at home."

Do you fret about being "found out" by your larger clients and prospects? Remember this: the fact that you work from home does not necessarily make you appear unprofessional. But the fact that you believe it does certainly could keep you from swimming with the big fish.

Considering a career change to follow your dream and do great things? Five things to do before you take the plunge.

We do a lot of talking these days about becoming an entrepreneur, following your passion, and doing great things. Well, that's easier said than done. There are practical aspects of that equation that can be enormously challenging to overcome.

For one thing, most of us are gainfully employed. It isn't easy to just pick up and leave a career we've invested in, whether it's the right move or not. Then there's the risk factor. We have responsibilities, a mortgage to pay, kids to raise and put through college. It's hard to risk a sure thing for an unknown, especially later in life.

Nevertheless, there's a lot to be said for following your dream. You may not get rich, but you will enrich your life. And at least one school of thought says that you'll be more successful doing what you love doing than anything else. I couldn't agree more.

I took a hard left turn 23 years into my career and, although it's been quite a challenge, it's also been incredibly satisfying and invigorating. There's nothing like jumping headfirst off a high cliff to get the adrenaline flowing and make you feel young again. But before you jump, do these five things; they will help you make the right call.

Take a long, hard look in the mirror.

What do you see? If it's someone who took the path of least resistance early in life and has been locked on to that trajectory ever since, who would suffer deep regrets if she didn't at least try to find her true path, that's some pretty good motivation, right there.

If, on the other hand, you see someone with a romantic notion of doing his own thing instead of working for the Man, that's probably not going to work out so well. You've really got to figure out what your motivation is. What are your objectives, your priorities? What are you trying to prove and to whom?

Understanding what your true motives and goals are will help you and your family--an important part of the equation, by the way--to assess the risk and make the right decision. It'll also help you avoid waking up down the road and realizing you made a change for all the wrong reasons, like "the grass is always greener."

Don't try to be what you're not.

You're not really trying to change as much as you're trying to find the real you, the path you were meant for. I know that sounds amorphous, but that's just the way it is. You'll know it when you find it. If you're not sure, then keep looking.

I started out as an engineer, but that really wasn't for me. So I got into sales, then marketing. Lo and behold, that was the real me. Everything got easy. And I climbed the corporate ladder like a monkey.

You see, people can change under very specific conditions, but if changing your DNA, so to speak, is a prerequisite for your career shift, I wouldn't do it unless you've got a considerable financial safety net.

Look for problems, not solutions.

Most entrepreneurs are people looking to do something new and different; they search for ideas, for solutions. That's usually the wrong place to start. What you need to find first is a problem that you feel passionate about solving. With any luck, it's one that you're uniquely qualified to solve.

One of the most important questions venture capitalists ask when evaluating an enterprise is: Does it solve a big problem? Does it eliminate a customer pain point? Does it help customers either do something they really want to do but never could, or do something far better, easier, or less expensively than ever before?

Another way to think of it: Don't try to do something great. Not initially. Just try to find a problem you think needs to be solved and do that. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't trying to create a company or do something big when he started Facebook. He just thought it would be cool to be able to rate women's looks online. That was it.

Go where the money is.

I don't care what anyone says: tossing out years of experience in one career to jump to a new one, perhaps even an entrepreneurial endeavor, is extremely risky. Best case, you will take a financial hit. And you have to be prepared for various not-so-best-case scenarios, as well, especially if you've got a family to support.

I'm not saying don't do it, but consider this. Giving up a solid paycheck to start something new on a shoestring budget in a commodity business where you might end up slugging it out with entrenched competitors for single-digit profit margins is for the birds.

Of course, money shouldn't be your primary motivation, but you shouldn't throw caution to the wind, either. Look at fields and industries that have more than a snowball's chance in hell of you making it and making ends meet. Go for growth markets in which venture capital firms are investing, for example.

Find a great team.

There is tremendous power in groups--at least the right groups. The same goes for complementary partnerships. Find a wingman, or be somebody else's wingman. Find a great team to be a part of or create one. Most successful start-ups have more than one founder. Bill Gates had Paul Allen. Google's Larry Page had Sergey Brin. It's true in any field. It took four extraordinary people who seemed anything but extraordinary at the time to make the Beatles.

Warren Bennis co-wrote an amazing book about great groups called Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. Check it out. Even if your group isn't magical, at least you will have others to share the work and the misery with. Remember: When you're doing something new or making a change, support is key. No kidding.

A non-profit aims to help start-ups explore European markets with a new six-week mentorship and exchange program.

With well over 700 million inhabitants, Europe offers start-ups rich pickings for potential customers--but also plenty of headaches.

"Start-ups want to come to Europe," Ines Santos Silva, co-founder of Startup Exchange Programme explained to Inc. in an interview. "But it is very difficult for companies outside Europe or even in Europe to move to another country—we are very different in terms of language, in terms of culture, in terms of the way we do business. We wanted to facilitate that process."

The result of that impulse is Startup Exchange, a non-profit exchange program that plans to bring start-ups to nine European incubators for six weeks this spring. Last year, the organization did a test run with two European start-ups. "Since it worked very well, we wanted to expand," said Santos Silva.

Miguel Andrade, CEO of VitaSensis, which went to Finland with the program last year, agreed: "Moving (business wise) in Europe is not as easy as in the U.S. We were going to Finland anyway, so finding a program that provides insights and transmits knowledge for a market we planned to go anyway was a perfect match for us."

This year's edition of the program is now accepting applications for the nine slots in cities including Lisbon, Milan, Berlin, and Vienna.

"Basically we provide a soft landing for these companies to come to Europe to one of these hubs for six weeks, to go to another market and start making connections there," explained Santos Silva. Participants will also receive online mentoring from a team of eight start-up veterans including Podio co-founder Kasper Hulthin, Mozilla director Pascal Finette and Luis Franco, VP of international operations at SurveyMonkey.

Start-ups are on their own when it comes to funding their stay (and those who are accepted will need to pay a modest 150 euro administrative fee) but when it comes to sorting out visas, finding a place to live abroad and settling in, "the different incubators working with us will help with their networks. It's going to be very informal," said Santos Silva.

Start-ups for Mexico to Malaysia has already applied and Santos Silva stresses the program is open to companies from anywhere, but she suggests that the experience would be most beneficial to "high-growth start-ups that already have traction in their own market and maybe want to go abroad."

"We are looking for companies mainly focused on physical products because for these start-ups it's more interesting to go to another market and start making connections there, find suppliers, potential partners, potentials clients, but we also take web-based companies that want to go to another country and develop some kind of relationship with the local community," she said.

Applicants are asked where they'd like to go and a final match is made based on input from the local incubators and sector fit. "If you are a fashion start-up it makes perfect sense to go to Milan. If you are a tech start-up, it makes a lot of sense to come to Berlin. So it's based on what the company's doing," said Santos Silva.

Interested? Applications are being accepted until March 9th.

Have you ever used a coding style guide when working with a team? If you haven’t, it’s about time I introduce you to the concept. All well-disciplined teams, regardless of their specialty, have a number of ground rules that keeps them uniform. Every major newspaper and magazine has a style guide. If you’re going to start building a team, you might as well create one before people start getting used to coding all over the place.

A mentor of mine once told me: “Getting a team of developers to cooperate is just like herding a bunch of stray cats.” Coders all have their own personal ways to construct routines and modules. Each of them has a preferred framework, a preferred IDE, and a preferred flavor of doughnut to chew on while working. It’s what makes a coder who he/she is. But you can’t just let ‘em all roam freely. You and anyone you work with have to make some compromises to put a sort of leash around your nasty coding habits.

I’ll give you my bad habits. I coded in C, and I didn’t tab anything. I just swam through, wrote enormous headers with defined routines I would later find myself not using at all, and rarely commented. It was my style, and it worked. The moment someone looked at my code to add something, he said, “Why’d you even bother making this open-source? No one can read half of it!” This isn’t the way to code when you’re collaborating with someone. That’s why you should make a style guide for your team.

Here are a few things you should include in your style guide:

• Comments – Let them know where, when, and how much to comment. Neatly commented work will be easier to navigate.
• Tabbing – Definitely make them tab their code. Every new subroutine (while, if, select, for, etc.) should have its content tabbed even further. Recursive tabbing saves tons of time and makes your team more productive.
• Variable names – Each name should have a prefix. A string for a person’s name should be called “szName” or something like that. This helps the development process by reducing the strain on memory.
• Structure – This is very important. Consider having team members write with a certain “grammar.” In other words, have them include a comfortable amount of white space between routines, and capitalize certain letters in a variable.

When you can read each other’s code with proficiency, you save plenty of time. Communication is also key. Have regular meetings and keep an accurate record of everything everyone adds to the product. Within the meetings, don’t just talk about all the Red Bull you chugged while pulling an all-nighter on the development of a module. Talk about the module itself. If you don’t establish some rules of uniformity, you’ll have a herd of stray cats that can’t finish something on time.

Be careful not to make the guideline too specific, though. Coding is still an art, despite all the computer-related stuff you’re doing. It’s best to let at least a minimal amount of personality seep through the seams!

When United Airlines broke Dave Carroll's guitar, he took to YouTube. Now, Carroll has launched GripeVine and Resolution 1 to fix companies' customer service woes.

It was the customer service screwup heard around the world. In 2009, Canadian musician Dave Carroll became an overnight YouTube star with a music video called "United Breaks Guitars." It told the story of how United Airlines refused to compensate Carroll after baggage handlers smashed his $3,500 guitar. In four days, the video received one million hits.

Last year, Carroll parlayed his YouTube fame into a start-up called Gripevine, a website that lets customers air complaints about businesses. Now, Carroll hopes to finally start earning revenue by helping businesses appease unhappy customers before they become social-media stars. Resolution 1, his new customer service platform, monitors feedback on social media and other sites. The tool also tracks the performance of customer reps and analyzes complaint volume by region. Prices start at $10 a month per company.

Carroll says launching a business has made him realize how hard it is to keep customers happy. "I can totally understand how feedback can get out of hand for a big operation like an airline," he says. "Hopefully, this tool will make everyone's lives easier."

Journaling isn't just for angsty teenagers. A work diary can help entrepreneurs pinpoint problems and improve their professional performance.

Journaling may conjure connotations of angsty teenagers pouring their emotional ups and downs out while locked in their bedrooms, but keeping a daily diary is actually a tool used by many of the world's most successful people.

From Oprah Winfrey to General George S. Patton and artist Andy Warhol, many high achievers use their journals to reveal areas of their careers in need of amplification or improvement. Should you join them?

Yes, suggests Madeline Stilley recently on Business Insider. In the post, Stilley shares her experiences with a journaling assignment she was given in graduate school. The professor asked the students to take a few minutes each day to reflect on the following questions in writing:

• What events stand out in my mind from the workday, and how did they affect my inner work life?
• What progress did I make today, and how did it affect my inner work life?
• What nourishes and catalysts supported me and my work today? How can I sustain them tomorrow?
• What one thing can I do to make progress on my important work tomorrow?
• What setbacks did I have today, and how did they affect my inner work life? What can I learn from them?
• What toxins and inhibitors affected me and my work today? How can I weaken or avoid them tomorrow?

The journal may have started as a class requirement, but Stilley reports it soon became a useful career tool that helps her identify problems, notice patterns, and brainstorm solutions.

"During the last five to ten minutes of every work day, I would begin to reflect, and without fail, a few key events would stand out that I wanted to iron out on paper," she writes. "This tool assisted me in pinpointing communication errors, enhancing relationships with colleagues, and learning to be a better listener. After the term ended, I found myself opening up the Word document every afternoon to reflect because I thoroughly enjoyed the activity. I found that it improved my awareness and decision-making."

She's not alone, according to Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, co-authors of The Progress Principle. On the HBR Blog Network, they have argued that professional journaling is an effective tool for self-reflection, helping professionals improve their focus, patience, planning, and personal growth. "We asked over 200 knowledge workers to send us a daily diary report every day throughout," they report.

"Keeping regular work diaries, which took no more than ten minutes a day, gave many of our research participants a new perspective on themselves as professionals and what they needed to improve," they conclude.

Would keeping a work journal be a good use of 10 minutes of your busy day?

The founder of LocalVox offers a few choice words of wisdom for ambitious self-starters hunting for a mentor.

Start-up founders and employees have raw talent, but need real mentorship to thrive. Trevor Sumner offers his best career wisdom to would-be entrepreneurs.

Before processing any opinion from an "expert," you have to be cognizant of the biases that "expert" might have. So let me state mine outright: I am not a career coach, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I graduated Princeton in 1998 in an age where you seemingly had to be an idiot not to get caught up in the Internet craze. We were all going to be millionaires, you see.

But in the false promise of our irrational exuberance, I found where I did belong: start-ups. I have always worked for start-ups, eventually founding my own company, LocalVox. But they're not for everyone--they are exciting, challenging, dynamic, interesting and emotional. They breed tremendous bonds among team members.

Perhaps more than anything else, they are driven by great and often young people looking to build a career and able to take a risk early on. These are often people with tremendous raw talent in need of mentorship and career advice.

Ultimately, I believe you will excel at what you are driven by--your passions. When the gas tank is empty and it is 1 in the morning, you need to want to be there, wherever that may be. You need to make others want to be there too. So you better love what you do. A lot. So above all else, as an important litmus test, never take a job or start a company you are not excited to tell your friends about--period.

Here are three pieces of advice I've learned to take to heart:

1. It's about people.

Although it feels like every job is the crucial next step in your career, in hindsight, it's often just one of many. That's not to say you should take it lightly, just that every gig is part of a much longer journey. It's important to be at least a little over your head in any new role. Don't worry, you'll grow into it. If you are not in over your head, over-perform and look up the organization for a better fit and start positioning yourself now.

One of the most valuable ways to accelerate your learning is to find a great mentor. Nothing substitutes for having a seasoned guide to help you understand and navigate issues above your pay grade, give you context for what you are doing and be thoughtful about what skills you need to acquire.

If you can't find a mentor where you work, find someone outside of the organization. You will find asking for help to be surprisingly effective. Be open, honest and thankful and listen for the nuggets of wisdom that will change your life.

Unfortunately, the converse of the mentorship rule also holds true: a bad boss or mentor trumps all. Be careful of bozos, psychos and those who don't really care about you. There are more of them than anyone would like, and it's too easy to pick up bad habits or, worse, accept a bad situation. Don't get trapped by inertia.

Lastly, remember that what you bring to the table in any job is more than just skills. No (wo)man is an island. You can only scale to a party of one, and the connections you bring are just as, if not more valuable than your skills. If you can connect to an ecosystem of people to better answer questions, learn best practices and drive partnerships, you are much more valuable than your skillset alone.

2. Act like an owner--become a founder.

There is a vast difference between being a part of an initiative and driving it. Are you driving forward or waiting for instructions? Are you proactive or reactive? Don't wait to be "caught" when mistakes are made. It builds much more trust to be the first to explain when mistakes are made and how to correct them.

Understand what drives the business and why what you are doing is important in that overall context. Think about what could be exponentially better for the company. Experiment. Throw around ideas. Ask. Listen.

Every business is looking for leaders. Leaders try to find creative solutions, challenge the current thinking and find ways to innovate. So should you, on your own initiative.

Being an owner also means being a positive teammate. Avoid negativity when communicating horizontally and below. Lead by example and do whatever it takes to get the job done. Over the long term, strive to become a founder--the ultimate driver. It's the richest, most challenging and most rewarding thing you can do.

3. Be really smart with your money.

Being a founder or following a career that you are passionate about may involve risk, and you need a certain amount of freedom to take it on. This is not career advice per se, but it is important to manage your spending. Your freedom is a simple equation:

(Dollars in the bank) / (Expenses per month)

And it's harder to move the numerator than the denominator. So keep your costs low, save your pennies. Stay resilient. Don't make a bad decision and end up in a passionless career because of the money. Find happiness in what you do by having the freedom to make the right choice for you over the long term.

These sage pieces of advice were collected from multiple mentors; others were lessons from challenging environments. Hopefully they lead you on a path of happiness, fulfillment and a career full of rewarding memories and accomplishments.

Trevor Sumner is the founder of LocalVox, a rapidly growing start-up in New York City that provides a software platform to help local businesses market themselves online. @TrevorSumner @LocalVox

A quick reader’s guide:Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug

Perhaps the best guide to web usability ever written, Don’t Make Me Think is a must read if you build anything that anyone anywhere ever has to interact with. Since its original publication in 2000, Krug’s book has been adopted as the holy word by user experience designers. The premises are surprisingly simple — for instance, you obviously don’t want to make your users have to think about how to interact with your software. But they can be applied at differing levels of difficulty. I was introduced to this book by experts who still keep it on their bookshelves, when I was just beginning to think about user experience.

It’s a very short read — even the second edition, with its three extra chapters, is easy to get through. Don’t Make Me Think is designed to be a very user-friendly book. It’s worth reading all the way through, at least once, but it’s a book that’s meant to be used, even more than it’s meant to be read. When you’re working on a large project, Krug’s book can act as a checklist that you should follow to turn out the best possible product.

Development: Why does HTML think “chucknorris” is a color?
If you set the background color of a document to “chucknorris” in HTML, the result is a red background. There are plenty of other strings that also produce color, but clearly, Chuck Norris takes precedence.

Funding: Is app-era pricing making software better, or worse?
There are days when app pricing seems like a race to the bottom: when mobile apps are priced at 99 cents, it’s hard go much lower. But considering the cost of creating new features for apps, it seems like the expense of adding a new feature must be more than the value a developer will earn back — which begs the question of whether this pricing model makes for better or worse software?

Operations: Are you out of sync with your values?
Building a company requires building a culture, preferably one that matches up with exactly what you care about. This article from Michael Bungay Stanier discusses what values make sense with your company culture.

Marketing: Better for whom?
Jason Cohen’s most recent post will make you look at the products you build with new eyes. If you’ve ever looked at what already exists in the market and you’ve decided that you can do better, Cohen’s question is crucial. Just who are you building a better product for?

Beyond Tech: And read all over
Jamelle Bouie’s article first appeared in The Magazine, but since its publication there and on Bouie’s site, it’s gotten a lot of attention. Bouie points out the lack of diversity in tech writing, pointing to the very real issues of having access to the networks that help people find jobs in this area, as well as education and other trends that should be addressed. The article has sparked extensive discussion, as well as disagreements from a lot of tech bloggers. Personally, I find the article hard to disagree with.

Our most popular link this week: What it takes to get in “trending startups” on AngelList

How is a business like an apple tree? Sharpen your pruning shears and find out.

Back in July, I wrote about our efforts to bring more focus and discipline to 37signals by parting ways with some of our older products. We were so committed to eliminating nonessential offerings that we decided to sell a service that was generating $17,000 a month in profit. "We're a small company with a small team," I wrote, "and we have to use our resources wisely."

Today, we're about to launch two products. Both of them are significant departures from the way we usually do things. And we have a bunch more ideas in the pipeline.

Whatever happened to that newfound emphasis on focus? Was that a mistake? Did I change my mind?

Let me explain--by telling you about my apple trees.

I live in Chicago but own some property up in Wisconsin. There's an old stone farmhouse, a couple of barns, some majestic oaks, rolling prairie, a river, and a few apple trees.

I've been trying to learn how to properly prune them. The trees are handsome and healthy, but if you don't pay attention, they can grow unwieldy and succumb to a variety of ailments. There are any number of reasons to prune a tree. You might do it to make it look prettier. Or you might trim one area in order to favor other limbs. It could be to cut away disease or to prevent a new disease from taking root. It could be to get the tree to generate more fruit.

So I'm regularly taking a saw or shears to my apple trees. Sometimes, when I'm done, I step back and am not necessarily pleased with what I see. In fact, a freshly pruned apple tree can be a sad sight, looking thinner and weaker than it did before you started. But that's an illusion.

In almost every case, cutting things back is a way of favoring what is left. You help the tree flourish by picking the winners. What's more, pruning opens up new opportunities for your tree. Light gets in where it couldn't before. Air circulates better. And new growth appears. If you did the pruning right, you've given your tree a stronger foundation for the future.

Now, back to my business. A few months after cutting back our product line, something unexpected happened: We sprouted some new ideas. During a discussion about one of our products, a couple of ideas suddenly emerged for new ones. I can't go into specifics just yet, but one is a variation on an existing product, and the other is entirely new, something we've never offered. We're finishing them up right now and are pretty excited.

I am convinced that these ideas never would have emerged had we shied away from cutting some of our old items. Or, to put it in more arboreal terms--as a business, you won't grow strong new limbs if you don't prune the old ones.

In fact, I believe that a healthy company is like a healthy tree: Well-developed roots (your vision), a strong trunk (your people), and vibrant leaves (your products) work together to convert the sun (revenue) into energy (profits).

Hokey? Perhaps. But I often find inspiration in nature. Besides, it's high time we entrepreneurs stop using those hackneyed sports and military metaphors. But that's a topic for another day.