Do you own/run a business? Tell us all about it!

SideWinder

SideWinder

SideWinder

Consigliere
Joined
12 Jun 2004
Posts
151,030
Location
SW17
As title! :)

Obviously not asking for company names but more an insight into how it all started? Is it your main income or additional income on the side? How has it grown? Maybe its a family venture and/or with a partner?

I have been pondering the idea of setting up my own business so thought I'd see what others were up to plus a chance to share their experience.

Having my own t-shirt brand appeals to me however need to find my niche...crowded world out there.
 
T-shirts business is saturated IMO.

I don't directly have my own business but I do work with someone who built it from ground up. It's took 2 years to get to this stage.
I see a lot of the stuff that goes on operational side. We are a MSP who do remote support and brings enough in to pay wages and small profits.

It was built from ground up by first having couple clients, getting the remote side sorted i.e remote connection tools, website, FB e.t.c then it was a matter of advertising. There's a stable 30 companies now that we work with both with contracts + ad-hoc per fix rates.

We use Xero for accounts / quotes / sales, OSTicket for the service desk, OneDrive for documentation and important files.
We don't get many tickets but every ticket resolved is profitable. It's all work from home. I have a laptop and a desktop with a voip phone.

Some days I can get 5-10 calls a day, some days no calls at all so I just sit improving the services where possible, server updates e.t.c

0365 setups, config and support.
microsoft teams setup, configure and support.
voip (got our own phone system that can handle about 250 phone connections per second)
We do trunks for onsite phone systems
websites
desktop support (os install, software install)
sever support
business security
cabling (gets outsourced and we just take a cut)
and hardware purchasing, delivery.

We also outfarm anything else that needs to be done if we think it can be done, i.e electric installs e.t.c.

It's why I'm on here all day most days because I just sit with tabs open. I'm allowed before anyone says does my boss know. :cry:
 
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I run a full-service video production company creating TV commercials, digital content and music videos. I co-founded the agency in 2011 with a university friend and it's been my full-time job since (and a couple of years before that), although of course the role and responsibilities have changed in that time! We're now a team of 13 so naturally I do very little fee-earning work, and when I do it's creative/strategy rather than production.

We specialise in video rather than sector, so our work is really varied; we work with brands ranging from University of Bristol to IDLES, The Royal Mint, NHS, Battersea, Toshiba, British Library and Randstad to name a few!

I met my now business partner at film school so the journey is somewhat self-explanatory, although the kicker was graduating in 2008 with very few jobs going, particularly in the creative sectors. That said, I think I was always destined to work for myself (although in what industry is a bit of a fluke I think). I've always had and still have side hustles, most of which come with funny stories. I was banned from PayPal for selling porn and I've received a cease and desist from Mattel, Inc. for example :D.
 
Russinating said:
I was banned from PayPal for selling porn
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It's funny you say that. So was I back when I was younger, think I was about 17-18 at the time. I'll tell you, my story. (True).

I used to go to a market, went with someone to buy knickers to sell and selling photos of ones I found on the net. I used to go into msn chat rooms, I coded a macro bot on windows that would spam the chat rooms (multiple) with website link addresses. I made a website selling x-rated content automatically as well. On my first day I come back to and there was £300 sitting in my PayPal account.

Well.... the rest of the story goes... after few months of doing it automatically (left my pc on while I went to college) PayPal banned me and took money off me, it was about £500 in total but managed to get away with about £900, I assume I was reported. At the time was about to change ISP so ended up with a new IP address.

Re-joined PayPal but never did it again to this day..you would never get away with it now though they do many checks i.e house, phone number, username, ip address e.t.c whereas before there was no checks.
 
I’ll keep it brief to protect the innocent!

In about 2002 (you read that right) a mate an I in our spare time built a SaaS platform for a vertical. I worked 5am to 8am, went to work, then worked 8pm to 12 for about 6 months to finish it. The weird thing about software, especially when it’s the only thing out there is it’s really difficult to price. We weren’t greedy so we wen’t fairly cheap and it was a success. We were ducking out of work during the day to do sales meetings. I’ll never forget (remember 2002) the look on people‘s faces when they’d press a button on a web page and then get an SMS, often they would say “excuse me” and I’d have to point out it was from our platform. So why am I still working in a “normal job”? Well basically we fell out. I tried to buy it but he wouldn’t budge. Greatest regret I have because he then closed it within a year. We had a difference of opinion we couldn’t get over. Anyway it taught me a lot and maybe in some way it’s helped me with a couple of things, namely it rooted out my ex ( :D ) as not being the person for me, and I am doing pretty ok anyway plus have a pub war story.

TLDR, don’t underestimate the hard work or your ability to do it, and do it on your own. Good luck.
 
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Worthy said:
You can't just slow ball that in without going into details, that's just cruel.
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I might it does what it says on the tin doesn't it? I sold digital porn on eBay, my eBay account was banned dozens of times (but back then you could just keep creating new ones). In the end they traced it back to PayPal and blocked that instead which of course was linked to bank accounts et al and so can't just be recreated. Still to do this day I can't use my main email address as part of my PayPal login!
 
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