|
|
|
|
|
|
by tonysickpony
3000 days ago
|
|
|
I like what you said here. Keep a business for 18 year old is a success, and I can only imagine is challenging in many ways, could be boring in few. I have seen greedy consultant companies cutting corners here and there. Caring about backups, security and monitoring is great attitude in my opinion. Keen to hear more story about your venture. |
|
|
I was (1997-2000) a contractor in the IS department for the really large aerospace company in Yeovil, Somerset, UK (it's changed hands a few times). I eventually got to the team doing server management, app delivery etc ie third line. IS was due to be "facilities managed" and two of my colleagues approached me to be the MD of this thing they'd cooked up. The idea was we would go external and resell ourselves as a unit back through the on site supplier of IT/IS services. The supplier chosen by said aerospace company used to have a short name that matched the name of a famous sauce from these shores - it's brown (the sauce) and starts with H.
We rented a small unit down the road (proper rural around here) and had an old PC that ran Win 98 as a file server etc etc. We put in a ISDN BRI link (2x 64Kbs-1) for internets. We had one customer.
We moved on gradually and learned. Our first employee stayed for around eight years and then moved on - still in touch. Employees 2 and 3 (poached off a local travel agency - terrible pay there but we could better the pay despite being a little setup: E2 stayed for 10 years and moved on and sadly played silly buggers with customers - nothing too detrimental but still a bad taste left behind. E3 still with us, complications recently but all good now.
By 2013ish we now have around 15 odd employees. We have moved to a bigger pair of units in the same area that we started from. We now have modern systems involving (small) racks, virtualisation etc.
The norm for most companies is to rent but I wanted to own my premises. My thinking was that we could do more stuff. We looked for a while and ended up buying (story short!) an NHS clinic in Yeovil which is the largest town in the area.
We now have five internet connections - a leased line (100M) and four FTTC (ADSL 80/20) and a pair of pfSense HA routers running on Dell R310s (to be ditched soon - they can't do AES-NI) with a lot of IPSEC VPNs and OpenVPNs and 10ish internal VLANS. We have a proper computer room with proper gear. We also have a lot more customers these days. We are now ISO 9001 and 27001 registered and lots more stuff.
Every day I love going to work. Don't get me wrong - it's still hard. I came into work the other day and found an employee in tears. I sent them home (obviously, I can't say too much here). Two of our employees have moved on and then come back again (one of them was once a lover of one of my business partners). Thanks to our past involvement with a large firm whose name is saucy, we have several customers these days that you will probably have heard of.
One thing that I think we have is that we have three Directors - a Triumvirate if you like. Any two can gang up on one - it works very well.
I'm a very lucky person. I'll never be a millionaire but I'm very comfortable as far as I'm concerned. I'm a shopkeeper and fucking proud of it.
Cheers
Jon