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Business Archive



Jul 2, 2023

Don’t make any changes for three months

I once told an interview panel that if I got the job, I wouldn’t do anything for three months. Shockingly they didn’t hire me.

Oct 8, 2022

How I’m keeping my inbox to single figures

I currently have 19 e-mail accounts set up in my mail app. Most accounts are for various businesses that I run because when I set them up, I always create an info@ account as the general account and then if needed a support@ account linked to my help desk software. Just counting the info@ type accounts, I have 17 for business, a personal e-mail account and finally a family e-mail account for anything related to my children, house, bills etc. For years I have struggled to keep the total number of messages in those accounts below 70.

Jul 7, 2022
The difficulty in explaining what I actually do for a living

What do you do?

Years ago my partner and I were attending a college open evening with our two children because our eldest was trying to decide what he wanted to do when he finished school. As part of this, we got chatting to one of the tutors and the topic of what I did for a living came up. Back then I had not really thought about the question; no one had ever asked me before.

Aug 5, 2021
I haven’t answered the phone in eight months and it’s awesome

Why I stopped picking up the phone and why I probably won’t start again

The latest addition to our family was born just before Christmas last year and I haven’t answered a phone call since.

Aug 10, 2020
Reducing work hours from 60+ to around 27

The ideal business

I’m in a bit of a transition phase at the moment. After seven years I’ve been fortunate to achieve a number of things that most people would be happy with. I’ve significantly increased my income from my previous ‘proper job’ and I have managed to reduce the number of hours worked from 60+ to around 27. Not bad! Now I am happy to maintain my income but I would like to further reduce the hours that I work each week so I am trying to move by business from something that requires less day-to-day work and instead relies on more automation and short bursts of activity on my part. As I do this,…

Aug 9, 2020
Working less and enjoying life more

I always wanted a pager

This morning I woke up in my own bed. Nothing terribly exciting or remarkable there however we’ve just got back from a long weekend away on a boat on the Norfolk Broads. My partner is pregnant and is finding sleeping difficult. That combined with the size of the beds on a boat meant that I spent time sleeping anywhere but in the bed. After a few nights sleeping on the floor of a boat, you come to appreciate the finer things in life – like a mattress and decent pillows!

Aug 7, 2020
Buy, improve… profit!

Acquiring a low-end hosting business and making it three times as profitable

One area of my business which I am keen to grow is the hosting side. Hosting is a very easy market to enter as evidenced by the shear number of people doing it. You can set up the business within days and once set up, the profitability can be very high. The difficult part is attracting customers. There are literally thousands of companies offering web hosting, why should anyone pick you?

Jun 11, 2020
Reduce what you offer to earn more and work less

The business pyramid

My first real online business focused on web site design for other small businesses. I spent a great deal of time looking at what other design firms were offering before settling on my own four packages, with increasing price points depending on the number of pages the customer needed on their site. At that point, I had basically no income and like everyone I was hustling, scraping by to earn enough money to survive.

Feb 12, 2020
Failing to prepare…

Storms and viruses

We are in the second day of storm Ciara, a storm that is battering the UK and other parts of Western Europe. There’s flooding in some areas, power cuts and trees being blown over, causing traffic jams around the country. On Saturday morning I spent some time preparing the house before the storm hit later in the day. I checked the outside of the house, located some candles in case of a power cut and tied anything in the garden that could get blown away, down.
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