It’s been a while…

My last posting on this blog was way back in February 2009, where I was looking for a hosting provider. I had looked at Daily Razor as they had some really good offers going.

Well, things have been somewhat busy, both in my normal day job and also with setting up WSP Solutions. My team in the office grew bigger and so did the workloads, to the point that I need a team double in size of the one I have now just to keep up.

So what about WSP Solutions? Well, through a connection I had with an external company at work, I got talking to their CEO who was in the process of taking her company down another direction as a training provider. We got talking and had a lot of good ideas. She has the business knowledge and I have the technical knowledge and a partnership was formed to deliver innovative training to both companies and individuals.

We’re in the process now of building a web site that supports all of this and we’re doing it all on minimal budget, which is pleasing as the the only costs at the moment, beyond hosting, is our time.

We decided to go with Daily Razor and I have to say, I am incredibly impressed with the service they offer as such a competitive price. I have two hosting options with them at the moment, ASP.NET and ColdFusion. Our primary site sits on the ASP.NET hosting option but both options allow for the use of multiple technologies on either one; so we can have ASP, ASP.NET, CGI, Perl, Python, PHP and ColdFusion all active on both hosting options – fantastic!

I have had to use their support desk on a couple of occasions, not because something doesn’t work, but usually because I have played around with settings! I am still amazed at how quickly they respond to, and resolve, issues. Nothing greater than one hour so far. They have even gone into my hosting and set the correct options for me.

They support Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, which is good as this is what I know best.

I get all of this for the princely sum of £15 per month, for both hosting options. I can definitely recommend Daily Razor if you are looking for a hosting provider that offers many options for an excellent price.

I will, in the near future, tell you a little more about the new business we’re creating, but there are a few things we need to work on first. We have three major clients that we are working on contracts with and another major UK bank that we have already provided training for.

I’ll be posting a little more regularly now so I hope you’ll join me.

My next investment – hosting

I posted recently about my website, wspsolutions.com. The site is hosted with Redstation, the company with whom I registered the domain name. I have looked at the upgrade options for my site and I don’t think they will cover everything I need. I need to be able to use Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL and MySQL databases. I need PHP, ASP.NET 2.0–3.5, ColdFusion and Java.

There aren’t many hosting companies that will give you all of this, but I did find one based in the States. DailyRazor.com offer this as part of a ColdFusion hosting package (CF Edge), all for the princely sum of $12.95 per month. For that I get 1Gb of Microsoft SQL storage space and unlimited Access and MySQL databases. I get all my programming languages plus AJAX and LINQ support.

They will also use my existing domain and just update their domain name servers. This sounds like an amazing deal to me and it’s very tempting. I would be very keen to hear from other DailyRazor users. Are you happy with the service you’re getting? Are they reliable? Do you think it matters that they are not based in the UK?

You’re comments, as always, are very welcome.

 

Tags: hosting, redstation, dailyrazor, sql+server, mysql, access, php, java, asp.net, coldfusion

Time for a reality check (part 2)

I mentioned in my previous reality check post that there were many questions that the Business Link asks in their are you ready to start up? section of your personal business startup organiser. I’ve covered the day to day and entrepreneurial questions and I now need to look at business skills and market research.

There are some core skills that I, as a business owner, should have and I need to assess myself against them. So lets look at the key business skill areas.

Financial management – what kind of relationship do I have with my bank? Can I manage my credit? Can I plan my cashflow? Well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure. I have been with my bank for over 25 years, since I was 15 and I am on first name terms with most of my local branch. I’ve never looked at cashflow before and I’ve never had credit beyond a credit card. I get the feeling I will be learning on the job for this one. Fortunately the Business Link include information on the basics of cashflow management.

Product development – “The ability to make long-term plans for product development and identify the people, materials and processes required to achieve them.” Hmmm. I don’t plan on having a physical product, more a set of services. “In order to make such plans you will need to know your competition and your customers’ needs”, something I can relate to as far as my service offering is concerned. This is something I will be addressing as I develop the service offering. I will need to understand my competition as well as who my customers are. Once I have identified my customers, I can then work on what their needs are. I think this gets addressed a bit later on, so I’ll put that to one side just for the moment.

People management – I run a development team and have run interviews and managed disputes. I know I can motivate people and I, like my boss, understand that their is a lot to be said for training and personal development. Anyone else remember the Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing square?

Business planning – I need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of my business plan for this one. Well, I haven’t written it yet so I don’t know. I do know how to run and manage a project though.

Marketing skills – this is the one I know I need to spend more time on. It’s pretty key as I know I need to sell my services. I need a plan for this and I’m pretty sure the Business Link’s write a marketing plan section will help. I know I need to develop selling points for each part of my service offering and for me, that will be the challenge.

Supplier relationship management – I’ve never had to do too much of this as it’s usually managed by our procurement department! I know I get on well with people but I have yet to test it in a real-world supplier relationship.

Sales skills – I think this goes with the marketing side of things. If I get the marketing right, then my ability to sell my services should improve. I need to be able to sell “me” and I am hoping that my project management and consultancy training will help here.

Before I move onto the market research checks, which talks about researching my “target market and your competitors carefully”, I need to nail down my service offering. I know what will go into it, but I think it needs fleshing out a bit, so I will share that with you in the next few posts.

Following that is the financial commitment check in which I’ll need to decide whether I am going to use my own money or seek funding. I’m not seeking funding, so that will be answered pretty quickly.

Until next time…

Tags: business+link, reality+check, entrepreneur, services, product+development, people+management, business+planning, marketing, suppliers, sales

wspsolutions.com

I spent some time thinking about my service offering and how I would market my services. My website needs to be in place although I don’t expect it to have every bit of required content on it to start with.

I have looked around at other web design companies to get some ideas. My own personal preference is to have a clean looking website with limited animations and it must be uncluttered. A good example of what I like and don’t like are the Companies Made Simple website, which is clean, clear and with a good layout compared to the UKCorporator site, which, in my own humble opinion, looks too busy. I wonder if they would let me redo it?

Any web designer worth their salt will have knowledge of how a user views a page and where their eyes go. I don’t like sites that are all style and no substance either. Having whizzy graphics that don’t really do anything just uses up bandwidth. I still find pages that take over 15 seconds to load even on an 8Mb broadband connection.

I am also a firm believer in compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There really is no excuse not to comply here. Why not show your audience that you have bothered to plan your site with accessibility in mind. And while we are on the subject, let’s throw usability into the mix too.

I recently started working on my own website, wspsolutions.com, with a view to putting some ideas together and seeing where I ended up. I have come up with a basic layout although not all the pages have been created yet, just some basic information. I will be adding to it as my service offering grows. You will notice that it lacks anything fancy!

Thinking purely about the layout and design, I would welcome your comments, whether they be good or bad. I know my views will not always be the same as everyone else’s, but I am always open to suggestions on how to improve the “customer experience”. My first questions would be, does the lack of whizzy graphics and animations make it appear less professional? What would you expect to see on a the website of a web development company? Does it need more colour? I think it does…

My website is likely to change over the next few weeks as I will be able to spend a little more time on it, this one took 40 minutes, so consider this Version 1.0. It’s quite possible that it will look nothing like it does now, but that’s design and evolution for you!

Until next time…

Tags: website, compliance, usability, accessibility, broadband, animations

Time for a reality check (part 1)

I finally managed to get back into the Business Link’s East of England website. Despite re-registering it gave me the same error. Invalid password. I use pretty secure passwords and wondered whether I had mistyped it the first time around. I also wondered if the ID I was using was just a temporary one so I delved further into the help pages. It seems that passwords must be between 8 and 12 characters long, mine was 15. I don’t remember seeing this on the registration page, but it may well have been under the popup help page. Not much help there is it? Anyway, I trimmed my password to 12 characters and suffice to say I am back in again.

The Business Link site is full of information to help you throughout each stage of setting up your business and one of the options you can choose is to create a personal start-up organiser. This is saved in your online profile allowing you to return to it as and when you wish to. It’s pretty comprehensive too and asks all of the appropriate questions, one being – are you ready to start up?

For those of you that already run your own businesses it will come as no surprise that this first section talks about commitment. For most of us running a business will be a full time thing. For me it’s a bit different. I already work full time as I need the continued security of a salary. I am under no illusions that my business will generate too much work that I can give up my day job. If it did, I would be over the moon, but I would also start employing people and continue with my current employer.

This makes it a little easier for me to answer the questions posed by the Business Link in their day to day reality checks.

Personal sacrifice – yes, this applies to us all. I know that I am going to have to work harder and put in the extra hours to get my business up and running. I already put in far too many hours for my job and I plan to divert this to my own business rather than someone else’s.

Financial insecurity would be a major worry if I didn’t have my full time job. With the commitments and responsibilities I have it would be irresponsible of me to just give up and go out on my own. Their may be a time in the future where this can happen but it certainly isn’t now. There is far too much risk in the current economic climate.

Loss of company perks is an interesting one. I have a company car allowance and a very good pension. I also get sick pay and of course, paid holiday. I think that running your own business and being in control (to a certain extent) of your own destiny outweighs these perks. You can still have a private pension and a company car. The people I know who run their own businesses are very hard working and although they take holidays, it is usually just two weeks at some point in the year. I get six weeks now. I can’t remember the last time they were off sick either. I think that because most of us know we are going to get paid regardless, we are less likely to make the extra effort to get in if we’re not feeling 100%. It’s too easy an option to just stay at home, so for some, the lack of sick pay may be a serious loss!

Pressure on close relationships is certainly an issue here. I am married and have five children ranging from 2 to 17. Balancing work and personal life is never easy. There are many evenings when I don’t get to see my 2 year old son as he has already gone to bed. My wife is supportive of what I am trying to do as she understands the end result, so I suppose I am lucky here. Our time is at the weekends and I would rather put in the extra effort during the week that lose that.

Isolation isn’t really a problem for me. I have a lot of friends who I can get advice from if the going gets tough and they’ll tell it how it is. Working on my own and being responsible for the success or failure of my business is something that will drive me. If I get results then I know it will spur me on. If I get setbacks then I know it will bug me until I get it right. I also know that sharing my journey through this blog will also be a driver, because I feel like I have a sense of responsibility in seeing it through, otherwise it will be like an unfinished book.

The Business Link also talk about the entrepreneurial quality check. Successful business people will have some of the following key qualities;

Self-confidence – I am quite sure I don’t lack confidence in myself. As I have gotten older and have begun to understand what my limitations are and to work within them. More recently I have taken on additional challenges, such as studying for and passing my consultancy and project management exams. Maybe before I wouldn’t have done them and it’s my own increase in confidence that has allowed me to do so.

Self-determination runs nicely alongside self-confidence. I am now at the stage where I really believe I can work this through. My only reservations is in getting others to invest in me, but I learnt how to do that in the consultancy training

Being a self-starter – something I do in my day to day job so I don’t have too many worries here. Driving through solutions to problems and delivering benefit to our business is one of my prime roles and if I didn’t do it properly, or well, I am sure they wouldn’t pay me.

Judgement – do I have the ability to listen to others while still keeping my own objectives in mind? I think so. I run a development team and while my knowledge is greater purely through experience I have learnt to always listen. My team quite often come up with some pure nuggets of gold and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t listen to their suggestions.

Commitment – I work too many hours. Need I say more.

Perseverance – I absolutely hate things not working the way I expect them to. I think this can sometimes be a weakness in that I don’t always know when to give up on something and it is here that I have to rely on others to tell me to look for other solutions. I have good problem solving skills and enjoy working things through.

Initiative – I am fortunate to have a boss that trusts my judgement and empowers me enough to make the right decisions. I have a lot of experience in my employers business and I know how things get done better than most so I am allowed to use my initiative to get things done…even if it isn’t the proper way to do it

There is still other sections to cover in the are you ready to start up? section but I am going to leave that for the next post, otherwise this is going to be rather long and you’re probably already bored! You may think that this is starting to sound like a CV again, but for me it’s more me answering these questions for myself and writing it down here. Again, I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has used the Business Link startup organiser. Did it work for you? Was it beneficial?

Until next time…

Tags: business+link, reality+check, commitment, initiative, judgement, perseverance, confidence, determination, security, perks, relationships, isolation

Companies Made Simple

I just wanted to let you know that I received a comment on my post The first investment from Katie Perry at Companies Made Simple yesterday thanking me for my feedback about their site. You can ready Katie’s comments if you wish, but I see this as another reason to choose them when I formally set up my company. They are actually bothered to find out what their customers think and are looking to improve the customer experience. If you know anything about Lean you will see that this is pretty key to working successfully and building good relationships – listening to the voice of the customer and delivering continuous improvement. It’s also good business sense.

So thank you Katie and Companies Made Simple. I will be in touch soon.

Tags: companies+made+simple

The first investment

Apart from my own time and effort, so far I haven’t spent any large amounts of money on my business. My sole purchase so far is for the domain name wspsolutions.com and that was just £9.95. I had already upgraded my computer last year, although I think I may be able to offset the cost of this against my tax, but I’ll need to check that.

If I do decide to go ahead and formally set up my business with Companies House then there is a lot of paperwork involved. I could do this myself but this doesn’t seem to be the best use of my time. Fortunately, I have an alternative.

If you enter UK company formation into Google, you will see over half a million results returned. I should imagine less than 1% of these results would actually be useful though. When looking at Google responses, I normally pick one of the sponsored links and the top general link and then compare them. At this time, Companies Made Simple is one of the sponsored links, so I’ll look at them first.

Companies Made Simple offer various services for company formations, ranging from their Bronze service for £24.99 to their Platinum services for £119.99. All services offer company formations within 3 hours, a startup pack, Google Adwords Voucher, Fast Track Banking and Electronic Company Documents. As you move through the range of products you get additional services, such as a printed certificate, use of a registered office and the preparation of your annual returns. The top Platinum product includes a company seal, company register and the filing of your annual returns. If you break down the cost of the individual services within the Platinum offering, it works out to about £300. £119.99 seems a pretty good deal to me.

They also offer a lot of links to additional useful information and the site is pretty well set out. For me, Companies Made Simple is definitely an option. The top general link was UK Corporator.

UK Corporator’s site is quite busy and it took me a while to actually work out what they were offering and how much it would cost. It screamed £89.95 but then in slightly smaller print it mentioned the extra £20 you had to pay to Companies House as a government charge. UK Corporator uses a step by step question and answer process. It started with some general stuff and then moved on to more questions that I wasn’t entirely sure of the answers. The page included plenty of help text, but I still wasn’t sure. It took me about 10 minutes to complete the forms and the total cost for this service is £89.95. It is a standard offering based on user input and once you have the information you need, it is pretty straight forward. Everything you get seems to be in electronic format.

So where does it leave me? UK Corporator didn’t seem to offer things like a company seal, a company register or the preparation and filing of annual returns, but maybe that was the point. All they do is set the company up, nothing more, nothing less.

I must admit, I preferred the offering from Companies Made Simple. I know the process for gathering my information will be the same and I’ll need to know the same answers, but they just seem a little more slick. For the extra £30 or so, it seems like a better deal. The use of their registered offices was also quite attractive. It appeared that their bronze services offering for £24.95 was the same as the £89.95 offering from UK Corporator, but without delving into more details I couldn’t say for sure.

When I decide to formally set up the business, I will use Companies Made Simple. They offer more for a good price and their site is clean and simple to understand. I have enough on my mind with this without having to work out how a website is set up. With all the things that need doing, I need simple right now!

I would be extremely interested in hearing from anyone who has used the above web sites, or even any others, and would love to know what you thought of them. I have quite a bit to do still before I feel that I am in the position to go down that route so your comments would be more than welcome.

I have now registered with the Business Link in the East of England and they have a huge amount of stuff to look through. They can build a task list for you by asking you questions about your business. I only have one small problem though. I can’t log back in again and for some reason it won’t let me reset my password. When I do get in again I will create my task list and share it here, along with my progress in completing it. You never know, someone might find it useful.

Until next time…

Tags: companies+house, register, companies+made+simple, uk+corporator, google, formations, company+seal, company+register, annual+returns, registered+office, banking, business+link

To be, or not to be…limited or sole?

Now that I have decided on a name for my business, the next step is to decide on how to trade. I took a look at the The Business Link’s pages on basic Legal Structures. I think I have two potential options, Sole Trader or a Limited Liability Company.

The Sole Trader seems to be the easiest way forward is it doesn’t require registration with Companies House. There isn’t a requirement to pay corporation tax (although profits are taxed as income) and you don’t require company directors. As a sole trader, I would get all the profits but I would have to register as self-employed. Not sure how that would work as I am already employed! I’ll look further into that and let you know what I find out.

The biggest downside, in my view, is that you are totally liable for any debts run up by your business. This means that my property would be at risk if problems did occur. I don’t expect problems to occur but it would be irresponsible of me not to prepare a detailed risk plan.

So, my other choice is the Limited Liability Company. As the Business Link site says, these exist in their own right and the company finances would be separate from mine. Hence the term limited liability. Registration with companies house is required and there must be at least one director. There is a requirement to file accounts and an annual return. The whole process is more complicated than the sole trader, but there are two benefits that would swing it for me. Firstly the limited liability protects my home and savings if financial problems occurred and secondly, the fact that my company is registered means I can use WSP Solutions Limited. I am quite sure limited companies are taken more seriously than sole traders. This shouldn’t be the case, but selling services is also about perception.

In my own mind, a limited liability company is the way forward for me. The next step is to set the company up, but, at what point should I do this? There are many services online that will set up a company for you and arrange all of the paperwork etc, but do I actually need to do this just yet. I keep thinking that as soon as I officially set the company up, I then have to start managing account etc, but have yet to have any clients. I know many banks will give small business startups free banking for the first 12 months but I don’t want to set that up until I have money to pay into an account, otherwise I not making the most of the free banking offer. Am I over-complicating this?

I would welcome any comments you may have on whether to set up now or not. In my next post I am going to look at the services available to help me set up my company.

Tags: companies+house, sole+trader, limited+company, liability

What’s in a name?

Where to start? At the beginning I suppose.

I have been working in the IT industry for over 20 years and I have developed software on mainframes, PC’s and now the web. This isn’t a CV, just letting you know where I am coming from. I have developed web applications for the last 10 years or so and I enjoy the work I do. I have always had thoughts about working for myself but it’s only now that I can actually say it’s feasible.

I decided to pursue the work I enjoy, which is web development, collaboration and content management. These will form the core of my business although I may offer other services in the future.

Having decided on what I want to to, the next step was deciding on a name for the business. This wasn’t as easy as you might think. I wanted the word “Solutions” in there. I would have been happy with using my initials but upon checking the domain names I had found that had already been taken. Suffice to say I had a few evenings working through combinations of letters and the odd strange word. Latin words for ‘quick’, ‘agile’, ‘reliable’ and all the other decent words were taken. I was struggling at the first, smallest hurdle. I went to lunch with a good friend at the office and we still struggled, despite coming up with some amusing variations! Thanks K

I also develop on the Microsoft SharePoint platform and will offer that as a service and whilst staring at the screen I thought of the ’solution’ files used by SharePoint. WSP files. It hadn’t been taken.

WSP Solutions it is then. I registered the domain names and looked back at that small but troublesome hurdle. Step one complete.

I had already checked Companies House and it was free also, so if I decide to become a limited company I can sort that out. Let’s be honest, the web address was more important, especially for a web development company!

I have yet to decide on setting up a formal company, but I’ll come back to that. For now, I am just happy that I have finally got a name for my business.

In my next post, I’ll look at deciding on going for a limited company or work as a sole trader. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, add a comment and let me know.

Until next time…

Tags: sharepoint, web+development, solutions, companies+house, business, startup

Welcome

Well hello there and thank you for dropping by. Welcome to my blog, ‘The Unknown Road’, where you can follow me as I try and set up my own business.

I welcome your comments and thoughts on my posts and any advice you can give.