For any business, reaching a milestone anniversary is a significant achievement. As a business owner, I have poured my heart and soul into building my company alongside my business partner (and husband!) Neil. Each year that passes represents countless hours of hard work, dedication, and perseverance.
Did you know that over 60% of new businesses fail within the first 3 years?
So this year for our 16th Birthday I thought it about time that I shared our story with you. From our humble beginnings, working from the kitchen table at our home on the Hertfordshire and Essex border right through to where we are now and a look into the future.
In this post I’ll share with you some of the challenges from the very early days.
Leaving the Corporate World
Now, before I get started, I don’t think there is anything wrong in working for another business. When I started out, I had no idea about anything past the theory of running a company and so I learnt a lot about how businesses operate. Like a young sponge I spent time soaking up information about everything I could, learning how different departments operated, how different processes worked and how technology was ultimately changing the way that businesses operated. In fact, I was nicknamed “the font of all knowledge’ because I made it my business to learn as much as I could.
But as a modern blended family (I hate that phrase by the way – family is family as far as I’m concerned) and another child on the way my husband an I came to the realisation that something had to change.
Dropping the kids off at 7:30am and picking them up at 6:30pm. Working weekends, travelling and never really feeling present anywhere made for a stressful life and an unfulfilled one.
So on the cusp of a recession and with a new baby in tow we decided that it was now or never. Handing our notice in at work we looked for an opportunity to do something on our own.
And so TU Internet Marketing LLP was also born, the same year as my son.
It’s Tough out there
In the very beginning it was hard to know what to actually do. OK, I have a business – now what? We used an appointment setting firm to cold call local businesses in the Hertfordshire and Essex area and off Neil would go. Travelling around seeing these businesses and convincing them that yes they did need a website and that yes they do need SEO and that no, not everyone looks in the yellow pages these days.
It was an education piece as we were selling something that was alien to a lot of businesses back then. The good thing for them, was that there was less competition and getting found was much easier. Bigger businesses retained a level of arrogance that they didn’t need to bother with SEO as their customers all knew them and would remain loyal forever.
Other than the sales meetings, until we had an actual client there was a lot of sitting at a desk not knowing what to do. I kid you not, our first 6 months was spent training and learning as much as we could about the industry, going to sales meetings and sitting staring into space wondering if we’d made the right decision.
In fact the first two years were tough, I can understand how many people give in and leave their dreams of owning a business to one side. But we were determined to make this work. And so as some of these businesses put their trust in us and signed on the dotted line, we grafted, but we did it on our terms.
This meant working when the children were at school, in bed or at their various clubs. Many a time I remember being sat with a laptop perched on my knee in the car, or at Grange Paddocks in Bishops Stortford where swimming lessons took place.
Gone were the days of being able to call IT if there was a problem laptop, or to ask accounts to prepare some figures, or anyone to do anything else for that matter. It was all down to us and we spent a lot of time learning how everything worked. I’ve always been the type of person that wanted to understand something before delegating it to someone else, well this time we had no choice!
I don’t wish to go back to those times but I do think back on them fondly. It would have been so easy to just look for a job, we were earning very little money in that first year and it was really scary. I kind of wish I could have told myself what was to come……