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The Small and Medium Enterprise Research Centre at Edith Cowan University has produced a fascinating study of Australia’s home-based business sector, based on a survey of 1,604 entrepreneurs.

Perhaps because they often work in isolation, studying this group have never been particularly easy, and this study provides some great insights. For example:

• 55% of home based businesses are run by men.
  
• 70% of home based entrepreneurs rely on their business as their primary source of income, which indicates about a third are part of this emerging group of part-time entrepreneurs.
  
• Owners averaged 38 hours a week on their business, although 30% of men and 14.5% of women are working 50 hours or more.
  
• 60% of business owners said they had increased their turnover and products or services “significantly” in the past two years.
  
• Only 50% had invested in new technology in the past two years.
  
• Just 25% had employed more people.

But easily the most interesting data concerned growth. Only 20% of respondents said they actually wanted to grow “significantly” in the future, while 56% said they wanted to grow “moderately”.

The other 24% said they didn’t want to grow at all or would even like to get smaller.

To those entrepreneurs who love the idea of fast growth, the notion that a quarter of home based business owners don’t actually want to grow sounds crazy.

But when we look a bit further, perhaps it isn’t surprising given one crucial statistic – 80% of respondents said they wished to continue operating their business from home in the future.

And therein lies the problem for these business owners. More sales and more income is great, but what’s equally, or perhaps even more important, is the lifestyle that running a home-based business offers. The balance must be very hard to manage. Grow too little and it’s a constant battle to survive; grow too much and you’ve suddenly moved out of the home-based sector into the small business sector.

For the wider business community, this attitude presents a challenge. We clearly have a vibrant home-based business sector, but how should governments encourage the growth of these firms?

SMERC director Professor Beth Walker says governments must target the money carefully and points out that any small businesses that wanted to grow had tiny turnovers, so even if they doubled their income they would still be unable to support staff or build value in the business.

“When you look at this sector you can see it is really diverse, with some business turnovers in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and others under $25,000. The key for government is to focus support on those home-based businesses that are willing to grow and that will be able to make a genuine economic contribution.”

It’s an interesting argument and a tough problem to address. Whatever your opinion, it’s also a reminder that for some entrepreneurs, growth isn’t everything.