I'm having a hard time figuring out what this person could possibly mean. You say don't want to hear about cottage industry, but that is the only real scenario for the ancient world that makes any sense here, and even then, most industries are wholly unsuited for a "home" situation up in the 8th floor of an insula, especially given that most industries depend in some way on fire, require good light, require some amount of water, and are in some way noisy, smelly, or polluting.

Digging through the word salad, it seems like he might be alluding to the Roman elite practice of salutatio. A Roman patronus received callers in the mornings, and a caller could be anyone who was in some way obligated to the patron. Roman society was built upon hierarchies of obligation. A visitor would come into the patron's house, first thing in the morning (prima luce), into the atrium, and await his turn to meet with the patron. He might have a request, or he might just be there to pay his respects. If you have seen "The Godfather," in the beginning we have the distant ancestor of the salutatio, when visitors come to Don Corleone to pay respects or ask for help. Those who are obligated to the patron, for whatever reason and in whatever capacity, are called "clients" in Latin. The term is strongly associated with business in the modern world, but "clients" were simply participants in the variety of hierarchal social obligations in the Roman period. Meeting with these clients was the "job" of the patron, more or less, and the meetings ranged from very trivial to very important. In the morning also the patron, at home in his office, might deal with other aspects of his "job": receiving reports from his manager(s) on his agricultural properties, meeting with his banker(s), sending out runners to collect rents, et cetera. But a Roman aristocrat did not spend all day in his house. The real "job" was being out and about, to the forum, seeing and being seen. A prominent Roman aristocrat traveled out in public with a retinue of clients, and in fact a large part of a client's role was to be a participant in the posse. The bigger the attending crowd, the more important the patron. The most prominent Romans had lower-ranking senators in their train. Their identity was very much tied to being out and about, and although the salutatio was a home-based activity, it was only a small part of the day. Most of the "job" was done in the forum, in the shaded porticoes, on the temple steps, at the circus, or while soaking in the caldarium hot tub at the baths.

For more recently on the salutatio, see Hartnett's interesting paper "The Power of Nuisances on the Roman Street" in Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (Oxford, 2011).