When I moved from London to Manchester, I was worried about how it would effect my work. I am a freelance journalist, and most of my contacts are based in London, so I needed to find a way to make a lot of contacts quickly. I was researching on the internet when I came across a great freelance fair which would be a fantastic way to find out about freelance vacancies in the area. I booked my place and went to the fair the following week.
I still find it hard to see myself as a successful entrepreneur, but I suppose that I am! I left school when I was 15 and started working at an electrical shop, and within 5 years I had an electric shop of my own. Since then my empire has expanded to include 20 electrical shops and 5 specialist TV centres. I have worked really hard over the years, but I am still very committed to helping smaller businesses and individuals out rather than going to big businesses. I find that things work better when you have a small team of specialists rather than a massive corporation of people who really don’t know what’s going on! I really believe in taking advantage of the entrepreneur community and finding people who specialise in specific fields.
When you have your own business, you have to be really conscious of what you are spending your money on. We try to do most of our work within our small team, but as accountants there are some things that we just don’t have experience in. We’re all much better with numbers than we are with marketing campaigns! We couldn’t afford to hire an agency to work for us, so we decided to find a freelance marketer who could help us. We heard about a freelance fair where you could meet freelancers who specialise in certain fields. I was really pleased that there was a platform where people could talk about freelance jobs that may be available. As a small business, we like to help out other small enterprises rather than outsourcing to big agencies.
