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Hi all,
I've been lurking around here for a week or 2 now since finding MJ's book and I'm really enjoying reading some of the topics here so though it was about time I introduced myself.
I live in the UK and by trade a software engineer. After university, I worked at a Intel as a programmer for a couple of years before I left to run my own business and haven't looked back since. That was about 12 years ago.
While at uni and while working as a software engineer at Intel I started and ran a small web hosting business with a friend and, because we didn't have loads of spare time and because we were software programmers, automated everything we could. Accidentaly we stumbled on our second business when we realised that the software we were creating to automate our web hosting business was potentially much more valuable than our hosting business. So we sold the small hosting company to one of our customers and spent 9 months sat in a back bedroom developing what would become our software product. This went on to become one of the most used automation products used by web hosting companies world-wide and 5 years later we sold the business to a much larger competitor.
That was about 5 years ago and after spending a year or so not doing much I started a new business, a driving school. I wanted to do something completely different to what I'd done before and a driving school was about as far from a software development company as I could find.
To be clear I don't teach people to drive but rather have 100+ self employed instructors who teach our driving courses. I saw a need in an industry where there are around 50 thousand small businesses (driving instructors) all struggling to make a living. They may be good at teaching people to drive but not so much at marketing and running a business. So that's what I do, I find pupils on the web (SEO and Adwords mostly) and organise driving courses for our instructors and charge them an admin fee for our services. My current job is to grow the areas we can teach in and grow from 100 to around 300 instructors in the UK. I also need to start looking at using other traffic sources as pretty much all our work currently comes form adwords which is expensive and I don't like the fact we're so reliant on one source of income.
As well as the driving school I'm now looking for more opportunities to start maybe another business and that's what brought me to MJ's book. I was reading a section today and realised that I briefly started a business about 7 years ago that would have been a perfect fast lane business if I'd kept at it. It was basically a lead generation website passing on leads to driving instructors who paid a monthly fee. I can't remember why I gave up on the idea all those years ago but now wish I'd kept it running - it could have been great by now! So I'm now wondering whether it's too late and whether I should just get started with that idea again.
Anyway, sorry for the really long intro and I look forward to learning from and hopefully one day contributing to some of the discussions here!
Mark
I've been lurking around here for a week or 2 now since finding MJ's book and I'm really enjoying reading some of the topics here so though it was about time I introduced myself.
I live in the UK and by trade a software engineer. After university, I worked at a Intel as a programmer for a couple of years before I left to run my own business and haven't looked back since. That was about 12 years ago.
While at uni and while working as a software engineer at Intel I started and ran a small web hosting business with a friend and, because we didn't have loads of spare time and because we were software programmers, automated everything we could. Accidentaly we stumbled on our second business when we realised that the software we were creating to automate our web hosting business was potentially much more valuable than our hosting business. So we sold the small hosting company to one of our customers and spent 9 months sat in a back bedroom developing what would become our software product. This went on to become one of the most used automation products used by web hosting companies world-wide and 5 years later we sold the business to a much larger competitor.
That was about 5 years ago and after spending a year or so not doing much I started a new business, a driving school. I wanted to do something completely different to what I'd done before and a driving school was about as far from a software development company as I could find.
To be clear I don't teach people to drive but rather have 100+ self employed instructors who teach our driving courses. I saw a need in an industry where there are around 50 thousand small businesses (driving instructors) all struggling to make a living. They may be good at teaching people to drive but not so much at marketing and running a business. So that's what I do, I find pupils on the web (SEO and Adwords mostly) and organise driving courses for our instructors and charge them an admin fee for our services. My current job is to grow the areas we can teach in and grow from 100 to around 300 instructors in the UK. I also need to start looking at using other traffic sources as pretty much all our work currently comes form adwords which is expensive and I don't like the fact we're so reliant on one source of income.
As well as the driving school I'm now looking for more opportunities to start maybe another business and that's what brought me to MJ's book. I was reading a section today and realised that I briefly started a business about 7 years ago that would have been a perfect fast lane business if I'd kept at it. It was basically a lead generation website passing on leads to driving instructors who paid a monthly fee. I can't remember why I gave up on the idea all those years ago but now wish I'd kept it running - it could have been great by now! So I'm now wondering whether it's too late and whether I should just get started with that idea again.
Anyway, sorry for the really long intro and I look forward to learning from and hopefully one day contributing to some of the discussions here!
Mark
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