Advising Entrepreneurial Students

Case studies (‘pen portraits’) of graduate entrepreneurial careers

These case studies are included in order to give advisers examples of a range of routes into an entrepreneurial career, and the issues faced by the graduates concerned. They also may be useful to students who would like a better understanding of the options and how they work out in practice.

They are based on a rough classification of graduate entrepreneurial careers using two dimensions:

• Reason (motivation) for taking such a career route
  • natural entrepreneur
  • default entrepreneur
  • altrepreneur
• Point of entry (timing of business start-up). 
  • on graduation
  • after taking stock
  • after a period of employment

For more details of these factors, see 'Graduate Entrepreneurial Careers - Case Studies'

Jake: a natural entrepreneur - startup on graduation

Formative experiences in childhood
As a single parent, Jake’s mother had to make some hard choices in developing her legal career, and Jake remembers times when she couldn’t get a babysitter and he would have to accompany her to the police station in the early hours when she was duty solicitor, or hide under the desk at the County Court after she’d smuggled him into court before anyone else arrived. These were formative experiences for Jake, and he talks about them in terms of learning about the need to make sacrifices and take risks to get on.

A successful businesswoman mother
As he grew older, his mother’s law practice flourished and she became more of a businesswoman than a lawyer, a development which had practical benefits in terms of their lifestyle – he recalls going ski-ing for the first time when he was 14, and loving it so much that he demanded to know why they hadn’t done this before. ‘We never had the money before’ was the succinct answer, which served both to put the earlier difficulties in context, and illustrate to Jake that the sacrifices and risk taking had paid off.

I will NOT go to University
In terms of his career, Jake notes as a pivotal moment his decision NOT to go to university. On course for reasonable though not spectacular ‘A’ level grades, his Sixth Form tutor was insistent that he should apply to university. Jake remembers that he ‘didn’t feel clever enough to go to university’ and decided instead to do a HND in Business Computing at his local college.

Jake sees this decision as important in a number of ways. Firstly, because he stood his ground and insisted upon doing what he wanted. Secondly, because the extra year before he eventually went to university gave him time to mature (he was one of the youngest in his year at school). Lastly, because of the lucky accident which gave him his first break into business.

A lucky accident
The ‘lucky accident’ was getting into painting and decorating. A painter and decorator (Bob) who did a lot of work for the family and for his mother’s business had been injured in a fall, and Jake suggested to his mum that he could do some painting Bob had been due to complete in one of her offices, for a small fee! In the end, he made such a bad job of it that his mother asked Bob to come in and give him some tips.

He learnt a lot, and started to do more work under Bob’s supervision over the next six months or so. This turned into something of an apprenticeship, and by the end he had become a competent painter and decorator. This gave him an opportunity to earn enough during his student years to avoid getting into debt, yet at the same time, he could choose to do the work when it suited him, thus avoiding any interference with his studies.

I will go to University after all
Having initially decided against going to university, Jake relented but the ‘gap year’ had paid off here too, as he was able to get a better offer than he would have received if applying straight from school. He chose to take Information Systems, but remembers that one of the appealing features of the course was the freedom to take modules from other fields of study. This fitted in with what he describes as his focus on acquiring skills and knowledge which would help in life.

Business-related module choices
Throughout the course he chose modules he thought would be useful, even if he also thought they would be boring. Good examples are the two finance modules he took, which he found both difficult and dull, but which have served him well in his business. The other aspect which appealed was the idea that the course would enable him to interface between IT specialists and managers, explaining technical matters in a non-technical way, a skill used in a different context in his current business where he has to sell highly technical products to clients with very limited technical knowledge.

He recalls that he ‘stumbled across’ the business enterprise module which was to have such a lasting influence. At the time, the appeal of the module was that it was ‘something different’ – varied, interesting and out of the classroom – rather than that it was about business start-up. Nevertheless, the business he set with four fellow students is, in modified form, the business of which he is now MD – a company providing bespoke software solutions for web-based marketing.

Clear business goals
Within the business, Jake has set some clear goals for a return on his investment (most particularly his investment of time). He finds that work does cut into personal time, especially the ‘extra-curricular’ activities in terms of networking which are crucial for a small firm in his sector – he estimates he attends about 15 dinners, networking events etc. every month. He feels that you can put all this investment in, but you reach a point where the business needs to start paying you back otherwise you’re working for other people’s benefit – not his intention.

No regrets
Two years on, Jake has no regrets about deciding to start up a business straight from university, though he does think he would have done some things differently knowing what he now knows. The major thing he would have done differently was to get some work experience in the sector – “Even working in a call centre would be valuable experience, because it shows you how a commercial sales environment works”.

Jake recalls the first time he was invited to produce a quote for a potential customer he realised he had no idea how to do this or even what a quote looked like. He feels that, even in a very junior position, you can gain valuable experience which will help you avoid major mistakes: especially if the experience is within the sector you hope to trade in.

Sharma: a natural entrepreneur - startup after taking stock

A good education
Sharma’s family came to the UK from Uganda in the early 1970s. Her father had been a lawyer, but could not practice in the UK, and at the time Sharma was born the family were running a small electrical goods shop in a provincial town. The importance of education was drummed into her from an early age, she excelled at school and went to university to study Pharmacy.

Some of her relatives worked in the NHS, and this was seen as a good career route for her. Sharma had other ideas, and imagined herself running a chain of chemists. However, as she progressed with the course, she became less enthusiastic about the profession.

Work in a bistro
She worked part-time in a local bistro and told her friends she found that more interesting than her studies. She was not particularly enamoured with work as a waitress, and had limited culinary skills. What she found fascinating was the business side – she loved to listen to the owners talk about how the trade worked, their plans for expansion, how you could work out what would make a good location for a new restaurant etc: ‘they were real entrepreneurs, I think they could have run any business, but they understood the restaurant trade backwards and I learned and learned and learned’.

Almost dropped out to run a business
When the owners planned to expand by buying the premises next door, one of the owners told Sharma they’d decided to appoint a restaurant manager. He joked ‘we’d offer it to you, but you’re going off to be a drug pusher’. Sharma remembers that she asked him ‘are you serious?’ and he looked at her (‘I’m sure I must have had the weirdest gleam in my eye’) and said ‘I don’t know…are you?’ Amazed but delighted that she might be interested, the owners gave Sharma the weekend off to think about it.

‘It took me all weekend, but I managed to talk myself out of it: I was halfway through my final year, I really didn’t feel like I could ditch all of that work’. Sharma decided to stop working at the bistro, feeling that she needed to focus on her studies, and also worried that being there when the new restaurant manager arrived might make her regret her decision.

A year out
She completed her degree, but her already limited enthusiasm for a career as a Pharmacist had by now completely disappeared. She decided to take a year out, and opted to spend it in France. ‘When I tell people I run restaurants, they always assume they must be curry houses, but French cuisine is what I really know’. Looking back, Sharma remembers that she convinced herself and her family that this was a ‘proper’ year out after a long, intense course, but since she spent the year touring France working in good restaurants, with hindsight she sees it as ‘a year’s research for my business plan’.

Back to bistros
On coming back to the UK, the first thing she did was go back to the bistro. The owners were delighted to see her, but rather taken aback by the proposal she had developed – to run a franchise of their restaurant in a nearby town. Sharma could see a gap in the market for such a restaurant in that town, but she also understood the difficulties in starting a restaurant from scratch. Depardieu’s had developed a good name, they had well-established links with good, reliable suppliers and a reputation locally as one of the better employers within the trade. Providing the new restaurant wasn’t too far away, she could build on all that, but she was clear that she didn’t want to do it as restaurant manager, as an employee – the investment of time and effort in setting up a new restaurant would be considerable and she wanted to see a return on that investment.

A difficult start-up
Despite taking the franchise route, the start-up was far from problem free. In the first winter she discovered why the picturesque market square premises had been so reasonably priced when the river flooded its banks and her fellow traders told her this happened every few years. The ‘wonderful’ chef she’d met in Rouen and coaxed over to the UK turned out to have a serious gambling problem and ran off with all their takings after the opening night. However, Sharma persevered, and with some of her former colleagues mucking in, the new restaurant quickly began to establish its own reputation.

A potential partnership
She is now considering a proposal from the owners of the original Depardieu’s to create a three-way partnership, putting in a restaurant manager in to run her restaurant (Cyrano’s) and leaving the three of them time to establish a third restaurant.

Michael: a natural entrepreneur - startup after a period of employment

A model employee
Michael Dawson graduated in Mechanical Engineering, and went to work for a major multi-national firm, Contel. His early experience was on major projects, and his entrepreneurial flair was spotted early – he was good at gaining repeat business, but also at generating new business by identifying additional customers needs which could be fulfilled. He jokes that his catch phrase became ‘we could do that for you’.

A new niche?
He identified a particular niche market within construction in which companies were presently having to manage and coordinate a range of suppliers, because no one supplier could deliver all the services. Michael argued that Contel had the competencies to deliver more of the services than its competitors, and could sub-contract in those areas where it lacked expertise.

He drew up a detailed business plan, which was rejected. Worse, it generated no interest – as he puts it, ‘it wasn’t like I lost the argument, I couldn’t ever get anyone interested enough to argue!’ After fuming for several months, during which time he went back over his business plan repeatedly, Michael finally realised that he was so committed to the idea that he was prepared to set himself up in business to deliver it.

Breaking away from employment
Persuading some colleagues who had also grown dissatisfied with Contel’s cautious approach to join, they spent the next six months looking for venture capital with which to launch the venture. With a sound business model and team’s extensive management experience, the business side of things quickly flourished, but Michael recalls they had a steep learning curve on the finance side of things – not budgets and accounts, but raising capital, dealing with investors, understanding how to interact with financial institutions etc.

Five years on, the company has grown considerably and is entering a new phase of development, with the possibility of a share floatation.

Alicia: An entrepreneur by default - startup on graduation

A disillusioned student
Alicia’s first degree had been in psychology, a subject she chose aged 17 under the influence of the TV series Cracker. By the end of the first year, she realised that she didn’t want to be a forensic psychologist, but wasn’t sure what she did want to do. She was studying at a university not far from home, and was keen to stay within the region, and this had quite an influence on her thinking.

In her final year, her uncertainty about what she might do career-wise led her to skip the milkround entirely, and when she graduated in the summer with a 2.1, she had no clear plans at all. A psychology degree seemed to be relevant for quite a range of careers, many largely unrelated to psychology, and the sheer range of choices overfaced her.

Careers advice
A useful discussion with a careers adviser made her realise that she still hankered after the idea of working as a psychologist, though she wasn’t sure which field. With the summer slowly fizzling out, she made an impulsive decision to apply for an MSc in Occupational Psychology. She enjoyed the course, and was initially pleased with her decision, but when she began to look around for job opportunities, she was shocked to discover that there were very few opportunities locally.

She sent a few frantic e-mails to Occupational Psychology firms and individual Occupational Psychologists, and got the same advice – join a big firm, get some experience, then you can branch out.

Business advice
The one exception was a very sympathetic reply from an Occupational Psychologist running a ‘one man band’ consultancy at the other end of the country. He told her that he’d had the same problem (i.e. qualifying in a region with few opportunities, but also not wanting to leave that region) and so had taken the unusual step of going self-employed from the word go. ‘Be good, be cheaper than the competition, and find yourself a niche quickly’. He also suggested she needed to network with the business, as there can be a lot of freelance work when firms win contracts and need additional help to deliver.

Business start-up
For her first year, Alicia mixed temping in clerical roles with this kind of freelance work, plus a few days of work she managed to obtain for herself. She began to notice an increasing emphasis on coaching, and decided that this could be her niche, reasoning that since it was a fairly new activity, her inexperience would be much less of a barrier. She had done a project on the ergonomics of website design for her MSc, and she put the skills she’d acquired to work developed a website which emphasised the coaching. ‘Anyone can be a coach, but a background in psychology seems to impress would-be clients’.

A niche discovered
Alicia suggests that much of her success has been down to a happy coincidence – ‘the gap in the market was for coaching, and it turns out I’m rather good at it!’ Word of mouth recommendations were crucial in developing the business, and her diary started to fill up. At one stage she was so busy that she was having to think about turning down work, but she felt this was risky, so instead decided to quote for new business with what she imagined were unreasonable fees: ‘if they don’t use you because they think the price is too high, they might still come back, whereas if you turn down the work, they probably won’t offer again’. She found that though this tactic often had the desired effect, it often resulted in clients accepting the quoted fees ‘without batting an eyelid’.

Lessons in pricing
‘I never studied Business or Economics, so the idea that price is what the market will bear was news to me!’ As the business has developed, Alicia has occasionally had reason to take on freelance consultants herself, which she sees as a sign of success. She has reached the stage where she needs to think carefully about where she goes next: ‘I really like being a one-woman band, I don’t want to manage staff and stuff like that, but I’m not sure I can avoid it’.

Craig: an entrepreneur by default – startup after taking stock

A reluctant party animal businessman
Craig describes himself as a ‘reluctant businessman’. His first degree was a 2.2 in Art History, which he obtained after ‘three years of partying’. As a student, after doing the rounds of typical student venues, Craig began to think about organising his own parties and after taking the plunge with an end of exams party in the second year, he began to develop a small but quite profitable business, building up a good network of suppliers and contacts, and a few reliable people who could be called on to help him run the events.

Other aspirations
He was ‘quite chuffed’ by the success of the venture, but it never occurred to him to keep it going beyond graduation – his career aspirations were to work in ‘the art world’. ‘It took me quite a while to concede that this wasn’t panning out’. He took casual work to pay the rent, avoiding anything that might suggest a long-term commitment, and applied for various jobs, sent off his CV to every potential employer he could think of, pestered anyone who might be likely to have a connection, however tenuous that might give him his first break. His networking produced no leads, but he would occasionally get ‘annoying’ responses along the lines of ‘sorry, nothing doing…but Bryan/Angela/Tracy tells me you used to organise parties, are you still doing that?’ He remembers that he was always torn as to how to respond – he didn’t want to give the impression this was what he did, on the other hand a well-run party or event could be an ideal opportunity to network…

Back to parties - a proper business
In the end, he decided the opportunity to network was worth the risk of being perceived as a party organiser, plus the money would come in handy. Within just a few months, he was making enough money from the parties to pack in the casual work. ‘It was probably two or three years before I came to view this as my career: someone introduced me as “This is Craig, he has his own business organising parties and corporate events” and I was just about to correct her when what she’d said ran through my head again and I thought, “hmmm, actually I can live with that!”’

Rob: An entrepreneur by default – start-up after a period of employment

Redundancy ... and a surprise call
Rob has two stories he tells about his work, depending on his mood. Either ‘I’m a project manager for Northall’ or ‘I work for my own company, it employs me and my wife’. Both are true. Rob’s career also has this strange double-life – he has sat at the same desk for the last 15 years, yet during this time he’s worked for six different organisations. ‘Basically, I took redundancy in 1990 and we decided to have a nice holiday before I started worrying about the job hunting , and when I got back there was a message on the answerphone from work saying would I get in touch urgently’.

To his considerable surprise, his former employer wanted Rob to come back and do his old job, ASAP. ‘What happened around that time was that the company was trying to shed loads of staff – I mean, thousands. In the end there were more people gone than were left. Pretty much anyone who volunteered could go, on a generous package, and I decided that I’d take the money and take my chances on the jobs market rather than clinging on and hoping I’d be one of the ‘lucky ones’ who survived and had to work three times as hard in what was left of the company!’

Self-employment
In the haste to shed staff, the company often discovered that it had let go people whose skills and expertise were crucial. Such staff were often taken back on within weeks, but because of the tax rules, could not be directly re-employed and so worked instead for an employment agency. ‘It was surreal’, Rob remembers, ‘you’d talk terms with your old boss, who run it past HR who would then tell the employment agency about the contract, and they’d write to you: so you were technically employed by people you’d never met’ Within a relatively short time, there were hundreds of staff like Rob, creating a very unusual labour market.

The cushion of the redundancy payment meant that they were in a pretty strong bargaining position, and since the new packages had limited benefits (no pension, for example) that basic salaries were often very high. ‘A bloke in the same office told me he’d hired an accountant, so I went to the same guy and to my amazement he advised me to go self-employed’. Self-employment allowed him to write off a range of expenses again earnings, thus reducing his tax bill. He started off thinking of it as a tax dodge, but now he says: ‘The funny thing is, I really am running a business – I don’t think in career terms anymore, I think in terms of markets and opportunities, I see which projects seem likely to give me new skills and knowledge, which seem likely to lead on to other projects and which seem to be a one-off.

I used to worry about the lack of security, but now I think that actually the only security for anyone is from having skills and knowledge that someone wants to buy. If the market crashes, the company would stop using me and the guys they employed would get made redundant – same difference really!’

Kyle: an altrepreneur– startup on graduation

Student debts
Kyle graduated £10k in debt and with no ambition beyond clearing his debts and scraping enough money together to be able to travel for a while. His family encouraged him to find a job in order to be able to get his finances back on an even keel, but he was reluctant to go down this route – as he saw it, it would take years to pay off his debts that way, and he wanted a way to be able to make a substantial sum pretty much in one go and go travelling.

SAGA archeological tours
He had no idea what he could do, and for a while this seemed like a pipe dream, until a visit to the dentist found him reading a SAGA magazine article on guided archaeological tours around the Greek islands. With a first degree in Classics, and having spent every summer in Greece over the previous few years (albeit in party mode!) Kyle decided he could be an ideal guide. The existing packages were based, he felt, upon an assumption that people interested in such holidays would be very well to do and demand luxury.

Following his hunch
His hunch was that there might be a market for people unable to afford quite such high prices, people who would be willing to accept mid-range hotels, flights etc. After carefully pricing a possible tour, Kyle approached his parents as ‘typical customers’ to ask for their views. To his delight, not only did they agree with his analysis, they suggested that they approach their friends to see if they would be interested. As a result, his first tour was taking his parents and six of their friends round the Aegean for two weeks – not quite in line with his plans for a post-graduation jaunt!

On this first trip, after expenses he cleared £250, not quite the ‘instant debt clearance’ he had hoped for. However, he had learnt a great deal, made a number of useful contacts and had a clear business model. Since then, he has organised a dozen more tours. He says there are lots of challenges. He can’t compete with tour companies in terms of advertising, and relies on word of mouth recommendations to bring in a lot of the business. His ‘natural’ region is Greece and its islands, but the holiday season here is relatively short, and so he is constantly looking for ways to expand locations to be able to trade on a year round basis – he recently took a group to Rome.

A portfolio of activities
He also works for others more than he expected – a mix of temping back in the UK, tour guide work for holiday companies, even bar work in resorts. The biggest plus is that he has the travel opportunities he wanted – his business model, mentioned above, always involves ‘waving them goodbye at the airport after the tour and then staying on for just a few more days as a proper holiday’.

Jayne: an altrepreneur – startup after taking stock

Leaving work for an MBA
When Jayne left a highly-paid job to do a full-time MBA, she had a very clear career plan in mind. She’d been advised by a few recruitment agencies that her career progression would be enhanced by an MBA, but her employer had refused to support her studying part-time. She’d therefore decided to take the plunge, get the MBA full-time in a year, then get back to work, hopefully at a higher level. She left work on the Friday and started the course on the Monday, and her plan was to start applying for jobs straight after Christmas, hoping to line something up ready to go as soon as the course finished. She had a sneaking suspicion her former employer would take her back – she’d heard from colleagues that her manager had been roundly criticised for letting her go.

A gradual change of pace
Although she found the MBA course interesting, she was initially dissatisfied. Eighteen hours of teaching a week seemed a breeze compared to the 60-hour week she’d been working for the previous five years, but she missed the sense of urgency and structure. A few of her fellow students seemed to have the same feeling, but most had gone into ‘student mode’ and there were a few rows during group work, sparked by their annoyance at Jayne still operating in ‘manager’ mode. To her astonishment however, by the end of semester 1 she had also ‘gone native’, as she puts it. Although she’d ditched the business suit within the first week, she’d continued to dress quite smartly for much of the semester – now she was in jeans: ‘I’d mainly socialised with people from work, and we didn’t even wear jeans at the weekend!’

A reluctance to return to employment
Jayne initially viewed this as a nice change of pace, a break from years of high pressure work (‘like a belated gap year’) but as the year wore on she began to notice how reluctant she was to apply for jobs (‘When it got to June and I realised I still hadn’t applied for a single job, it got me thinking!’) She began to talk about staying on and doing a PhD, but the MBA director was not encouraging, suggesting that she might find the PhD process frustrating ‘because I’d be forced to search for valid, well-supported answers instead of plausible, workable solutions’.

Jayne clearly remembers his parting shot, “you might be enjoying the student life Jayne, but you’re still a manager at heart”. This turned out to be very helpful, as it started Jayne thinking about what she wanted and also what it was about her old career that she no longer wanted. She talked this over with a careers adviser. ‘He suggested that one option might be to “stop competing”: he pointed out that a lot of the extra hours and pressure I talked about seemed to come from me wanting to impress so I could get on’. Jayne was initially horrified by the idea, but she began to realise that there was something to it.

Back to chemical roots?
‘That’s what set me thinking about retracing my steps: I’d been very ‘onwards and upwards’ and it occurred to me that I’d actually been happier earlier in my career, before I realised that I had the potential to really climb the ladder’. Her first degree had been in Chemistry, and for the first few years she worked in laboratories providing analytical services. Her management skills were discovered by accident – the lab manager went on long-term sick, and she was asked to cover, and made a conspicuously better fist of it.

She was persuaded to join the company’s 18-month graduate management training scheme, with a promise that she would be fast tracked after its completion and the company was better than its word – she was promoted three times within the first two years and was seen as a rising star. ‘Yet after all that, I was now starting to think the unthinkable – was I really prepared to go back to lab work in order to dump the long-hours and stress?’

A gap in the market.
She started to look around for possible work, and was surprised to discover there was a significant shortage of chemists with her skills. She managed to persuade the head of the university’s Chemistry Department to let her spend some time back in the lab getting up to speed, in exchange for some useful contacts for students placements at her old company. He was fascinated by her career story, and would often drop into the lab to chat. He had lots of contacts in the chemical industry locally, and gave her lots of useful snippets of information about shortage areas, proposed developments, government funding, etc.

A move into partnership.
Jayne began to realise that there was a definite gap in the market for a business offering analytical services. Following a lead from the head of department, she contacted the owner of a small laboratory who was contemplating retirement. Although the buildings were somewhat run down, the equipment was very up to date, and he and Jayne agreed a deal to go into partnership, with the plan that Jayne would buy him out within a few years. By forming her own company, she was able to attract support as a start-up business, but working in partnership with an established company ‘helped me get started and avoid making a lot of mistakes’. The business has developed over the last two years, and Jayne is currently looking to finance a buy-out of the other partner and a move to new premises.

Paul: an altrepreneur – start-up after a period of employment

Commuting
Paul’s decision to go into business for himself was triggered by a chance conversation with his cousin at a family get-together. She was amazed to hear Paul tell someone that his journey to work could often take up to two hours, and asked him whether the commuting got him down. Paul remembers that he replied quite breezily ‘No, I don’t mind it’ but looking around at the incredulous faces, suddenly thought to himself ‘What I am saying? I hate it!’

‘It’s strange really, I’d been doing that sort of commute for years and most people I knew did the same, and somehow I just never noticed how much it was getting me down!’ Paul remembers telling his wife about the conversation in the car on the way home, and being surprised that this wasn’t news to her – ‘you always complain about it, but you never even try to do anything about it’. ‘I sulked for the rest of the way home’ he recalls.

A gradual realisation of an alternative
The more Paul thought about it, the more he realised she was right – he had always told people the same story ‘we can’t afford to live in London, but that’s where the work is so you just have to commute…’. When he finally stopped sulking, he put this point to his wife, who admitted that this was true. ‘The only way out of it would be to work for yourself’, she replied. ‘If this was a sitcom, I’d have left work the next day’, Paul jokes, but in fact it took him almost a year to make the leap. For several months he talked about the idea to loads of people – ‘I think deep down I was looking for someone to talk me out of it’ he remembers – and found not only were many supportive, some were also keen to work for him! ‘It was a big influence on my decision, many of these people worked for me as their manager in a large organisation with good job security, and what they were effectively telling me was that they had more faith in me than I had: they believed I could set up and run my own business successfully, and that they’d be willing to give up their currents jobs to come and work for me’.

A hard-nosed business decision
The firm Paul worked for provided, among others things, management and contract staff for IT projects. Paul had noticed that, despite the firm’s central London location, many of its clients were actually based near to his home. However, since the firm was structured around industry sector rather than geographical location, he had never been able to take advantage of this to reduce his commuting. He realised that a small firm would need to seek to get many clients within its immediate location, which would mean having the expertise to service clients from a range of industry sectors. This led Paul to make ‘my first truly hard-nosed business decision’: despite their enthusiasm, he realised he couldn’t take members of his team with him, because their experience added nothing to his own – what he needed were IT specialists familiar with different client groups.

A part-time start - moonlighting
‘So I cooled the talk about starting the business and suggested I’d gone off the idea. A month or so later I started the business, at first it was basically just a website – I had nothing to offer, I just wanted to see if I could generate interest. I stayed working for the firm, which was a bit risky – there’d have been war on if they found out. The first approach I got was for a really small contract, hardly worth bothering with but easy enough to do in my ‘spare time’ and I thought “well, it’s a first entry on the ‘Clients include…’ page!”. I actually learned quite a bit from doing it, I realised there were things that you could do with the back up of a big company that were just impossible without those economies of scale. The next contract was the key one – too big to do part-time, so it was crunch time: am I doing this or not? Luckily it was from a sector familiar to me, so I knew I could run it myself.’

Establishing the business
Paul quit his job to run the business full-time. After the first two contracts, the business immediately hit a dry spell, and Paul wondered whether he’d done the right thing. A few smaller contracts started to trickle in, then a large contract. Three years on, the business is well-established (‘nothing amazing, but viable and growing’) and Paul is looking forward to his cousin’s upcoming wedding where he can tell everyone how he now works just 3 minutes drive from home!