Why did you set up your business?

[Quitegreat]

A simple question but also the starting point for impactful media grabbing headines, the point where you start to understand the heart and soul of the entrepreneur, tell us your story and see if we can find the headline in your business.

 

[billybob99]

To make money.

 

[Quitegreat]

and what makes that money?

 

[billybob99]

My business.

 

[simon field]

I'm a control freak.

 

[The Byre]

tell us your story and see if we can find the headline in your business.

That sounds like a PR pitch. I used to run a news agency for trade mags, so I got a wealth of those!

When we got a badly written PR sheet (Sony looks to the future!) and if it had some grammatical mistakes in it, I used to send them back - corrected!

'Headline-grabbing!' that sounds very 'yesterday' - there was a time when print was important, but now . . . let's just say 'Less so!'

My latest enterprise will target the under-20s. They don't do 'headlines'.

 

[Mr D]

I'm not an entrepreneur yet. Maybe in another 50 years.
I'm merely a business owner who is trying to grow a business and maybe start some offshoots.

Started in business to build a retirement, that morphed into providing a job for the wife, morphed into part of a much larger project.

And I enjoy retail therapy on a commercial scale. Ok 12 pallets of stock in a week to the house is me going a bit overboard...

 

[Mark T Jones]

Beats the crap out of me!

 

[fisicx]

@Quitegreat
Lets begin with you. Why did you start your business?

And stop using the word entrepreneur.

 

[WebshopMechanic]

I started my business because:

- I hated working for someone else
- I wanted to help business owners to learn to do things themselves
- I got pi55ed off with marketing agencies ripping off businesses and delivering f-all

 

[MOIC]

I was hungry!

 

[Ian J]

Beats the crap out of me!

Are we talking about your girlfriend again?

 

[alan1302]

I was hungry!

So what made you setup a business rather than going to the chip shop?

 

[Ian J]

So what made you setup a business rather than going to the chip shop?

He killed two birds with one stone by setting up a chip shop

His user name here should really be MY OFFICE IN CHIP SHOP

 

[MOIC]

More rice than chips!

 

[UKSBD]

I started my business because people started ringing me asking to buy a product.

It was basically by accident, I had just got my 1st PC and one of the 1st things I started doing was building little websites on the likes of GeoCities, etc..

I was working in the building industry at the time and saw new regulations coming in that everyone was ignoring.

Just for a bit of fun I built a website about it and thought no more of it until one day someone phoned me wanting to buy one.

I had to explain I didn't even sell them and it way just a demo website, the next week someone else called, the week after 2 people called.

Eventually I asked someone how they had found me and they said Google (I didn't even really know what it was at the time) I went and searched for the product and I was number 1.

After that I started learning about Google, got in touch with a manufacturer who sold the product, set up a business selling it and started drop shipping.

As I learned more about Google I built more websites and just went from there.

I still sell the original product, far more competitive now than it used to be though :-(

 

[tony84]

Had a boss who paid me late and short - at the same time telling me he had earned £10k that month. He took the cream on all of the decent leads he gave me and expected me to generate leads from a dusty box in the loft - not quite the leads I was offered joining him.

In the end I thought the only way I would make money was to generate my own leads - which I did.
I then wondered why I was giving him a third to be paid late, short and have a boss.

So 2013 I went it alone and coming up for 6 years later I now have 2 people working with me.

 

[Charles Rice]

Profit, that's it!

 

[TheoNe]

I saw a gap in the market & dived right in!

 

[Ian J]

I saw a gap in the market & dived right in!

A gap in the market for what?

 

[estwig]

I'm a miserable antisocial b*st*ard, with no qualifications of any sort, no formal schooling and authority issues.

I've always been in business.

 

[brownowl]

With you on the that - once I finally decided I was neither a 'team player' nor someone who enjoyed getting up at the crack of dawn (OK, 7am) to sit for an hour in a traffic jam, I decided to start doing the same kind of work from home. I now have no commute, set my own hours, take or leave jobs as I please, and don't have to put up with any office politics or bean-counter managers.

 

[Paul FilmMaker]

I'm completely insane and have masochistic tendancies.

 

[Paul Norman]

I left my corporate career at 36, because I felt I had done everything there was for me to do in that company - I had enjoyed working there, and done very nicely.

I became self employed, during management consultancy, change management, and management training, mostly for big businesses, but also for smaller ones.

After 3 years I had an opportunity to buy half shares in a technology company, so I did. I still have that half share. I also bought shares in a small number of retail businesses - most of those I have subsequently sold.

I am now 56. No one employs someone who is 56. So I shall continue to work in the business I partly own.

 

[Ian J]

I am now 56. No one employs someone who is 56.

That almost mirrors my own story. I was working for a Japanese Bank who shut down the division that I was with and I tried to get back into the factoring industry being interviewed by the sort of people that used to work for me and unsurprisingly none of them were keen to employ someone who might be a promotion rival for them so about the same age as you were I set up a broking business and had non stop phone calls from the very same people that didn't want to employ me begging me to deal with them