ONLINE FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS

Interview by Lisa Firth

When Rob Tucker was made redundant, he decided it was finally time to follow his dream and set up his own web design business.And so, four months ago, Angelfish Media was born.
"It’s mainly web design, but we also do IT support and security," says the 36 year old. "It’s very interesting, there are lots of new developments happening all the time."
Rob says of his decision to start his own business rather than seeking another job with an established company; "you’ve got to look for yourself, do smaller things, create smaller businesses."
Although, Rob confesses, the web design business is not without its difficulties. "You have to wear a lot of hats in this business," he admits; "you have to be technical, you have to be the graphic designer, you have to do the accounts, then there’s the business side of things: but most importantly, you have to go out there and actually get yourself some customers. Marketing and sales: that’s very important. There are a lot of good web designers out there who fall down when it comes to marketing."

In spite of this, Rob feels he has solved to some extent the problem of finding customers in the competitive world of web design through what
he calls "niche marketing". "We’re trying to find little pigeon holes in the market that other people haven’t tried," he explains; "we’re looking really for other professionals; accountants, dentists, doctors, vets etc. We’re able to offer them a more complete package than some other web design companies: we optimise our websites so that the search engines can find them easily, we make sure that they’re linked in with directories again so people can find them; we can help them out with marketing as well – lots of companies say "right, we’ve got a website", and that’s it. They’ve paid out quite a bit of money for the site and don’t use it to its fullest advantage. So we help out there. And because we are smaller,
we can respond quicker; somebody was saying "oh, I phoned up my web designers and they came back to me two weeks later", this sort of thing. We hope that we’re a bit more responsive and we give the personal touch that the larger companies can’t provide."

Although at the moment Rob is still working from home, he does not see this as a problem and has no plans to relocate in the near future.
"A lot of big companies started off by working from home; Apple Computers, for example, and Hewlett Packard who started in a garage.
I look at it this way: we don’t have any problems with flooding or people breaking in, I save an hour a day travelling, and we don’t have the overheads either." Nevertheless, although he continues to work from home Rob does plan to expand the company. "We’ve got plans," he says firmly. "We’ve been looking at a number of options, but they’re still a bit confidential and in the works. You’ll have to wait and see."

While he acknowledges that setting up your own business can be an exciting and potentially life-changing experience, Rob warns that it is also a lot of hard work. "You’ll probably do twice as many work hours for yourself than if you were working for somebody else," he stresses. "If you’re thinking of setting up your own business, I’d advise you to do a lot of research, talk to a lot of people; perhaps there’s other people who are doing the same thing or a similar thing. Get as much information as possible before you take that final big step. The Enterprise Exchange can be useful here in just bouncing ideas around, helping you find out the various resources that are out there. Setting up your own business is like jumping in at the deep end: you have to be sure that’s what you want to do, and you can’t do too much preparation."