Tthe challenges of taking my business from an individual setup as a sole trader to a limited company responsible for employing full-time, office based staff.
4. Working for other people
Oil refinery simulations (FORTRAN + OS/2)
Managing the Customer Support
GIS system for mapping postcodes
Quality System and BS5750
Staff Training
Total Quality Management
Business Process Improvement
6. 2002: Back from America
+ Family first
+ No overheads, working from home
- Waiting for the work, no sick pay, no holidays
- Customers are demanding (even little ones)
7. 2. My approach
(focus on the customer)
How can I provide great customer service?
Limiting beliefs
No network
No structure
8. 2011: Become an Agency
+ Staff = customer support
+ Resources = do more interesting work for customers
+ Office = more professional when meeting customers
+ Network = not waiting for the phone to ring to get new
customers
+ Limited = financial security and confidence for our
customers
3. Why change
(to improve customer service)
9. 4. What and who helped?
+ Thinking & NLP
+ Business coaching
+ Business plan (vision, targets, structure)
+ Financial plan (metrics, p&l, balance sheet, cashflow)
+ Employing people better at coding than me!
10. We’ve grown up
2016: LT Consulting Solutions becomes Indigo Tree
Not just LT any more…
The business has a value…
Can the business work without me?
12. 5. How it works – process & tools
Customer care
Communication
Project management
Time management
Project documentation
Business processes and templates
Accounts & metrics
Lead management and pipeline
13. More process & tools
Team communication
Website monitoring
Our tools SSL, domain expiry, robots.txt, Google page speed
propagated.io
Security
15. Our theme ‘Origin’
An object oriented starter theme (framework)
- CLI code generation
- autowiring through dependency injection
- PSR-4 autoloading
- frontend build scripts
Includes a "Fields API" which powers the creation of
custom metaboxes, widgets & settings pages.
Combined with installation scripts & other tools it can
save hours, and in some cases days, off development
times.
16. Our theme ‘Origin’
Adding the slick item carousel component.
It includes base styling out-of-the-box and the readme file has usage
instructions.
17. Building the team
Daily stand-up Monthly team meetings
Annual appraisals Training and conferences
Developer time (2 hours)