If you’re looking for inspiration when it comes to starting and running a business I suggest you download this PDF, flip to a random page, read and consider…
…by some of the most important thinkers both in and out of business.
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Leo Babauta, creator of zenhabits, has written a fantastic book called The Power of Less which I highly recommend to anyone feeling overwhelmed in their working or home lives.
Central to the book is the idea that you reduce stress and increase productivity by consciously identifying and working on your truly essential projects and to discard everything else. We become stressed and overworked by taking on additional tasks without dropping or finishing other tasks to make space for them. [click to continue…]
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Choosing a name for your business can be one of the most important, and frustrating, of tasks. It’s especially important for internet businesses or businesses where the website is an important part of the marketing effort (in other words, most businesses).
Why? It’s likely that your potential customers will look for you by typing a search phrase into Google, Bing or Yahoo. This results in a list of the websites that are most relevant to the search phrase. Search engines use various ways of working out the relative relevance of each of the matching websites and order the results by relevance, so the more relevant your website appears to be, the higher you will appear. The higher you appear, the more likely it is that customers will find you. This applies both to the “sponsored” listings (Adwords in Google) and the “organic” listings that provide free traffic to your site. [click to continue…]
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There are, broadly speaking, two types of business: Sole Traders and Limited Companies.
Essentially this means that you and the business are one. From the point of view of Revenue and Excise, it is you that owes tax on the income generated by the business – you complete a personal tax return at the end of the year.
You don’t pay yourself via the PAYE system as you would when in employed work. It’s up to you to put aside enough money so that you can pay your tax at the end of the year (beware – put more aside than you expect to need unless you are running a book-keeping system that keeps a running total).
Rather than paying Class 1 National Insurance contributions, you pay Class 2 at a set rate and Class 4 on your profits. If your profits are modest, this is likely to mean you’ll pay lower NI contributions than on the equivalent income in a paid job.
The biggest downside to sole trader status is that the business’s debts are your debts – if someone sues your business and wins, for example, you are personally liable for paying any compensation etc. This one reason is why I never use this company form. [click to continue…]
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If you’re hiring serviced offices then networking will be taken care of for you but if you work from home, you’ll need some way of reliably connecting to the internet from your home office/spare room and accessing extra storage. Having additional storage means you can keep project files on that storage device and then access them from more than one computer in the house or this can be used for backup purposes.
There are a number of storage devices such as this: they’re called Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Which one to pick? Personally, I used Buffalo’s Linkstation products but whatever you choose, I recommend that you select one that supports RAID. This is a technology that allows two hard disks to be kept synchronised moment by moment. What this means in practice is that if one of the hard disks fails, the other one is a complete copy of it and therefore acts as an automatic backup. There’s no setup required beyond telling the device which form of RAID you want (you should select RAID 1 if you want the backup capability).
You’re probably aware that there are traditionally two ways of setting a network up: wired or wireless. Creating a wired network involves running ethernet cable around the house, usually from the ADSL router to each computer and to the NAS device. Wired networks perform the best but they are extremely disruptive to set up at home and it’s awkward to move computers around later.
Wireless networks are the most common form of home network. Once set up they’re fine, although they perform much more slowly than wired networks and you’ll certainly notice this when you connect to another computer or to your NAS device. There are also likely to be places in your house where the wirless reception is poor, making performance even worse. If you work in your shed, for example, you may well only get a very weak signal.
There is a more recent, third option. It’s possible to buy devices that plug into your mains power sockets and use the power cables already laid through your house to transmit the network traffic. Setup is as simple as plugging one of these devices into the mains socket nearest the router and another into the socket nearest each computer. Connect the router, the computer and any NAS device to the plug socket via an ethernet cable and you have an instant network.
Networking through the mains is almost as fast as an ethernet connection, is dead simple to set up and you can reposition the adapters around the house by simply moving them from socket to socket: no further setup required. If you’re working in the shed, simply use your power sockets in there.
I’ve been using the Netgear Powerline range for the past couple of years with absolutely no problems. Other ranges are available but you should be sure to use the same range throughout the house.
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When you start working from a home office, the natural thing to do is to use your existing broadband connection and leave things at that. However, if your business depends on having a connection to the internet (and whose doesn’t?) then you need to have a good quality connection day to day and a back-up plan. [click to continue…]
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