I've been wanted to tell this story for a while, it's basically my Journey from Rags to some riches and then quitting out of it .
Many years ago I spend 2 years running at 'ICT support' business from home. At the time It was what I did in my day job and just seemed a natural move to try and use my skills to earn an additional income.
I bought a domain name and registered as self employed with HMRC and I was good to go. I wanted to offer home ICT support at a good price and with excellent quality of care to the people of North Leeds.
At the time the 'tech guys' and all that stuff were all over the TV and I didn't want to try and tap into the market. I wanted the 'retired from home' market who maybe had got a laptop and needed some training or didn't want to bother with the big boys when it came to getting some repairs.
My advertising budget was not very much so I started by paying 50p a week to advertise with an A4 poster in about 8 newsagent and post office windows. To my surprise a few days later the first phone calls started coming in.
I wanted to price myself where people would be happy to use me despite my lack of history and so charged a criminally low £11 an hour for the first year with the idea being that I could always put the price up after a year and would hopefully have a customer base by then. I didn't have a work room at home and so when I had laptops or desktop PCs to fix our bedroom ended up being the work room (Which my girlfriend was never impressed with lol). As time went on and word of mouth spread I got more and more customers. Retired folk talk and pass round numbers it seems to coffee mornings and other social events and this was doing wonders for me. I also got some regular training appointments that I ran on Saturday mornings in peoples houses taking them through everything from learning how to use the laptop to photography and using digital cameras alongside their new laptop.
Things were going well but I was very busy. Full time job 8-4pm and then in the evenings it was back home and into the car. See when people rang me up I stupidly offered to go and collect their broken laptop and bring it back .. Fix it and then drive back out to return it.. All for only £11 an hour. This was fine when I first started and I targeted who I was advertising to but as the business grew and word of mouth was getting me more and more business I was doing 20/30min drives out to north Yorkshire to pick up laptop and then return it later. Not good sense, so I made it so that the broken hardware had to be bought to my house for me to fix and they can pick it up later.
After a year of doing this I upped my price to £14 an hour and the customers kept coming however I was really struggling as I was working a lot of overtime in my main job as well and on top of that I had customers who wanted the same quick turn around I had always offered them whenever they had problems.
Things reached a head and I just decided that I didn't want to keep spending my evenings fixing ICT equipment and I sadly knocked it on the head and then moved into doing other things to earn money online.
It certainly was a journey and showed me that there is still a market for decent local custom but you just have to have the time to provide it.
Many years ago I spend 2 years running at 'ICT support' business from home. At the time It was what I did in my day job and just seemed a natural move to try and use my skills to earn an additional income.
I bought a domain name and registered as self employed with HMRC and I was good to go. I wanted to offer home ICT support at a good price and with excellent quality of care to the people of North Leeds.
At the time the 'tech guys' and all that stuff were all over the TV and I didn't want to try and tap into the market. I wanted the 'retired from home' market who maybe had got a laptop and needed some training or didn't want to bother with the big boys when it came to getting some repairs.
My advertising budget was not very much so I started by paying 50p a week to advertise with an A4 poster in about 8 newsagent and post office windows. To my surprise a few days later the first phone calls started coming in.
I wanted to price myself where people would be happy to use me despite my lack of history and so charged a criminally low £11 an hour for the first year with the idea being that I could always put the price up after a year and would hopefully have a customer base by then. I didn't have a work room at home and so when I had laptops or desktop PCs to fix our bedroom ended up being the work room (Which my girlfriend was never impressed with lol). As time went on and word of mouth spread I got more and more customers. Retired folk talk and pass round numbers it seems to coffee mornings and other social events and this was doing wonders for me. I also got some regular training appointments that I ran on Saturday mornings in peoples houses taking them through everything from learning how to use the laptop to photography and using digital cameras alongside their new laptop.
Things were going well but I was very busy. Full time job 8-4pm and then in the evenings it was back home and into the car. See when people rang me up I stupidly offered to go and collect their broken laptop and bring it back .. Fix it and then drive back out to return it.. All for only £11 an hour. This was fine when I first started and I targeted who I was advertising to but as the business grew and word of mouth was getting me more and more business I was doing 20/30min drives out to north Yorkshire to pick up laptop and then return it later. Not good sense, so I made it so that the broken hardware had to be bought to my house for me to fix and they can pick it up later.
After a year of doing this I upped my price to £14 an hour and the customers kept coming however I was really struggling as I was working a lot of overtime in my main job as well and on top of that I had customers who wanted the same quick turn around I had always offered them whenever they had problems.
Things reached a head and I just decided that I didn't want to keep spending my evenings fixing ICT equipment and I sadly knocked it on the head and then moved into doing other things to earn money online.
It certainly was a journey and showed me that there is still a market for decent local custom but you just have to have the time to provide it.