… inspire, engage and inform women showing how bloomin’ marvelous the digital world can be.

As I explained to .NET Magazine when I was contacted by them to comment on my involvement, I’m not comfortable with women only groups and events where they encourage an “us and them” attitude. I don’t think we do ourselves any favours if we simply huddle up in a corner together. However, given that there are fewer women involved in technology, it doesn’t hurt to make sure that those of us who are working in the business are visible. If only so that women thinking of this industry as a career can see role models, see that there are women working right across the industry.

I presented new material on “Launching a Product“. This is something I have been wanting to speak about for a while, and was based on our experiences launching Perch two and a half years ago. I had some nice feedback on Twitter after the event and I hope that the attendees enjoyed it.

The problem with presenting online is it is really difficult to get a feel for if the attendees are enjoying it. Essentially I was presenting to my own computer for an hour, trying not to get distracted by cats wandering around the office car park. None of the clues I pick up when presenting live are there. I’ve done a few online presentations now and the only way to get a feel for how it went is to check Twitter and hope someone says something about my talk!

I had some encouraging feedback on Twitter from this presentation but it led me to wondering how we can improve the feel of an online conference for speakers and attendees. In addition to feedback when presenting onstage, another important place I get feedback after a presentation is in the breaks afterwards. It isn’t about people coming up and telling me they loved it, but rather the questions they come and ask. The ideas they want to discuss. Then I know that the things I have said have hit a chord with a person, and may also pick up something that should be added to the presentation another time.

For attendees an important part of a real world conference experience is discussion with speakers and with each other. The online conferences I have been involved with have generally had a short period of questions after the presentation. Is there a good way to facilitate a more relaxed question and answer session, perhaps using IRC or similar?

With many companies cutting back, employees may find they don’t have the budget to travel to conferences, so I think online conferences are valuable and here to stay. However with so much of the conference experience being the bits between the presentations, I wonder if we can partly create that atmosphere for speakers and attendees albeit in a virtual way.

A few years ago (pre-Twitter!), if you disagreed with some technique, you had to post to your blog or at the very least write a comment on an article. Blog posts of 140 characters telling someone they are an idiot tend not to get much of an audience. So, one would have to actually write up an alternative point of view, a proper argument. Proper arguments are excellent, they are how we are where we are today. Through reasonable debate we hammer out what does and doesn’t work, and in which context. This is really important because we all have different parts of the picture. Someone who has experience of high traffic, high performance sites, working in a team of 50 developers is going to propose different solutions to the person whose experience is in helping small businesses get their first website online. The correct solution for a person on shared hosting who has very little control of the stack, is going to be different to the person with access to their server configuration. We all see solutions from inside the context we work in and all of that experience is important and valid.

So, argument is good. Disagreement should be encouraged. However, what is not good and what should not be encouraged is personal attacks and one-liner snarky remarks on Twitter. Abusive ad hominem attacks do not encourage good argument, they usually serve to simply entrench positions on either side. They leave people afraid to contribute, and then we all lose out because we lose that person’s knowledge and experience. I know from experience that once you get a couple of personal, nasty remarks about something that you have contributed, it is then very hard to be open to the constructive comments and sensible criticism. It’s easy to go into “everyone hates me” mode at that point. Do we want to be an industry where one has to be thick skinned and aggressive to succeed? I hope not.

We should continue to disagree with each other. This is an exciting time for the web. There are so many new techniques being hammered out, we can do so many interesting things and some of those things don’t have a “right way” to do them yet. There will be disagreement, we’ll argue this stuff out together. However let us not do so by silencing the voices of all but the most thick skinned. Let us be kind to one another, and as an industry give no time and attention to those who try to build themselves up by attacking other people.

Rather than just talk for half an hour about myself I tried to base the presentation around advice that I think has been particularly important for me in my business, and give them an honest and realistic account of what it is like to run a business. One of my points was to “work hard” but another was to “look after yourself” – to get enough sleep, exercise and eat properly. You are no use to your business if you try and work all night or don’t take time to get to the gym, go for a run or have a decent walk. Running a business, particularly at the start, is hard work and you should work hard, but balance that with enough time to recharge before you burn out.

Then, I read this post by Michael Arrington. I’ll avoid unpacking all of the nonsense, although I’m not convinced that the company behind Farmville are really “putting a dent in the universe”, and the programmer quoted in the article has already spoken out about his name being used to support Arrington’s argument. What I will say is that this is a horrible, horrible example of how to do business well. Glorifying bad working practices, expecting people to work ridiculously long hours and berating them when they object not only flies in the face of common sense but is an incredibly bad example to set. You can read Amy Hoy’s excellent post on the matter on her blog, Unicorn Free.

If you have a “startup culture” that glorifies long hours and complete dedication to your cause then you are essentially stating that you don’t want any person who has a life, any other interests or (heaven help them) a family working in your company. You rule out a lot of older people, really those over the age of about 25 or so, who have figured out that working all night isn’t something worth bragging about, you rule out anyone with a health issue or disability that makes working long hours difficult and in particular you rule out a lot of women. The dot com culture that I escaped to run my own business in 2001 was very much the same as the startup culture of today. As a woman with a small child, I needed to hot foot it out of the office every day at 5.30pm on the dot or risk annoying my lovely childminder, and not getting to spend a bit of time with my daughter. I quite frequently then worked at home after she went to bed – but then felt bad at work the next day hearing the team talk about how they had been in the office, “most of the night”. It was never said to me openly, but I always felt sidelined in that culture because I couldn’t be part of it as a single mum. There are of course fathers in the same position, either as single dads or as dads who take on the majority share of the childcare. However, due to biology, there is a certain amount of time where the woman is likely to be the one doing the majority childcare and so this kind of culture does effect women more than men.

Why is anyone encouraging this behaviour? I am all for hard work, I am all for putting in the extra hours when they are needed. If you are running your business well however, those late nights should be the exception not the rule. You are doing something wrong if you need to expect yourself or people working for you to work long hours as a matter of course. You will not get the best out of yourself or anyone else if you are exhausted and you will not attract experienced team members if you expect them to give up their entire lives for the company. There are other ways to do business. There are more sustainable ways, with less risk to your health and sanity, to run a company and develop a product. There are ways to bootstrap your products, and at least then if you are putting in the long hours you are doing it for YOU, and not to line the pockets of your funders.

As I explained to the young people on Monday, when I started the company it was just me, and it was a service business. It is very hard to scale a service business as you are swapping hours for money, adding an extra person allowed some level of scaling as the admin work didn’t double so the amount of billable hours we could work between us more than doubled. This allowed us to bootstrap our product, Perch, out of the income from the consultancy business. Perch is completely owned by us, and we’re sure that our customers will be pretty happy to know we aren’t looking to sell the business, that’s not our model. We intend to keep doing what we love – developing Perch, helping our customers and doing a small amount of consultancy and development work for clients – in places where we think we can really make a difference.

There are other ways to do business. I’d like to see the bootstrappers, the tiny service businesses doing great stuff for their clients, the parents combining business with a successful and happy family life, the small companies treating their employees with kindness and compassion held up as great examples – not those who think sleeping under their desk makes them better than the rest of us.

I may well be old-fashioned but it seems that setting up a business with the aim of an exit by way of a sale to a bigger company is unlikely to work out. Investors throw a lot of money at projects because they know that perhaps 1 in 20, 1 in 50 will pay out in a massive way. It’s a lottery – you might win, you’ll probably lose and have nothing to show for it in the end. For the investors it doesn’t matter – they win in the end when one of their 50 lottery tickets turns out to be a winner – however every person in every one of the failed companies loses. From the founders to the employees.

Making a thing and selling copies of it at a profit may not make you a billionaire overnight, however it can make you a nice income, may very well allow you to employ people and provide them with stable employment. You can own 100% of your company, and be truly independent. No investors pushing for an exit, no worries about where the next round of money is coming from. You make your thing, you sell it and with the money you make more things or improve on your thing. It’s slow and steady, but it works.

While this post has been sat in my drafts, I discovered that I’m not the only person who is concerned about this. Amy Hoy writes on her blog Unicorn Free,

I’m angry that it’s become an assumption that “success” means getting a big fat investment, not turning a profit. That success means founding your own company in order to determine your own destiny, then happily become an employee again when some megacorp snatches you up.

- The Truth about Success – Brick by Brick

Gary Vaynerchuk also recently posed the question, “Why is raising money celebrated more than making money?”

I don’t think companies funded by venture capital are always a bad thing. If you have a great idea, with a real roadmap to profitability, that needs a chunk of cash up front in order to put plans into action, then it can be really helpful. Many investments also come with valuable business help and input – which can be worth as much as the money for an early stage company with founders who have little business experience. However I am afraid that people with a business idea are heading straight down the investment track without considering if they can be profitable from the outset, bootstrapped by founders who then can own their entire company. When the bubble bursts, a lot of small, potentially excellent companies will go under with it, as they will be unable to survive without further investment which will be in short supply. The bootstrappers will probably survive, as they are growing within their profits and know how to live within their means as a business.

I don’t know a lot about the world of venture capital and investment. I know quite a bit about running a profitable business though, and while I love the fact that running a business is being seen to be a good thing, and something for young people to aspire to, I think we should be careful that we are not setting people up to fail. I’d like to see the bootstrappers celebrated, and seen as role models for young people. I’d like to see more resources and information for people who want to do that, more stories from those of us who have done that and are currently still engaged in the process of growing these businesses in a sustainable way. The big investment stories are far more newsworthy than, “small business launches new product built during evenings and weekends, while founders do other work during the day to pay for it”, however I’d like to read more stories like that. I’d like young people to see that they may have options rather than just assuming they need a big cash injection to pay for all the trappings of business, before they even get started.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is the source of large amount of misinformation and appears to be becoming a nice little earner for companies who will help you to become compliant. If you are only using a hosted Pay Page as described in my last post, card numbers are never entered on your server, and you do not take phone/fax or in-person orders that you process through a physical or virtual terminal then PCI Compliance is a simple process of filling out a form. It takes a few minutes.

You might first become aware of needing to comply with the PCI DSS when your bank sends you a letter telling you that you are non-compliant and so they are going to take an extra percentage of each transaction they process. This letter will point you to a third party company who will help you to become compliant – for a fee.

I object to paying people to fill in forms for me and so when this happened after switching our payments for Perch away from PayPal to a full PSP and merchant account solution, I told the third party that I would be completing the form myself and was given an email address to send it to once I had done that.

Completing the SAQ A

If you are only taking payments via a third party hosted payment page and the PSP is “Level One PCI Compliant” you need to fill in the form called SAQ A.

The role of this form is to declare that you don’t handle any card data but outsource all of that to your PSP, however you need to declare this in the most confusing and unclear way possible. Below I have explained what was accepted for us – I am not an expert in PCI compliance, so use this information at your own risk, and obviously if you are touching cardholder data in any way you need to get advice as to which SAQ you need to complete.

Part 1 and 2a contains some basic company details you need to complete.

Part 2b. Eligibility to complete SAQ A is where the form checks that you are not actually doing anything other than using a PSP. So you should be able to check all of these if you never touch, see or hear credit card information and have no access to it.

Part 3 is where you confirm that you are compliant, so you can tick the compliant checkbox. In Part 3a you need to confirm that PCI DSS Self Assessment Questionnaire was completed according to the instructions therein. The questionnaire this refers to will be at the bottom of the document you are completing if you downloaded the SAQ A Self Assessment Questionnaires rather than just the Attestation of Compliance.

Self Assessment Questionnaire A

Despite the fact that we have declared that we do not touch or store any cardholder data, you have to indicate that you have completed a questionnaire which asks what you do with the cardholder data you store. Baffled? I was too. If you need to submit this questionnaire in completed form then go down the form entering N/A in the column headed “Special”. Then keep on scrolling until you find the … Appendix D: Explanation of Non-Applicability and here we can explain, again, that we don’t touch any cardholder data. Under requirement you need a line for 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, 9.9, 9.10 and in the column “reason requirement is not applicable” put something like “Cardholder data is never received or stored by us”, then create a line for 12.8 and write “cardholder data is never shared with service providers”.

You can then happily check the checkboxes under Part 3a, sign and date the form and send it by whatever method your bank or their third party company has requested.

If your situation changes

Remember that it is up to you to maintain compliance. As long as your situation doesn’t change and you continue to only take card payments via a page hosted on a secure PSP, then each year you will just need to fill out this form and you are deemed compliant. If you do start doing anything that involves you processing, handling or storing card numbers then you need to take advice as to which level of the PCI DSS you need to comply with. Having dealt with applications that do store card data in the past I am very happy to continue to outsource that liability to my PSP for my own business.

Let me know your experiences

It is really hard to get any reasonable information and guides to complying with the PCI DSS. The cynic in me says this is because the banks and third party security companies are making money out of this. If you are storing cardholder data then it stands to reason that complying with strict security measures is important, however for those of us who have sensibly opted to pass this responsibility onto a third party I really wish this process wasn’t made to seem more complicated than it is.

So, if you have any experiences or information that might help other people with the SAQ A or see any errors in my information please add a comment. I have written this purely from my experience, I’m sure it can be improved with input from other people who have worked with different banks and PSPs – let’s make sure this information is available so people aren’t paying someone else to fill in a form that essentially says “we don’t touch any cardholder data”.

Please note that this article is based on my experience for our own product and when working with clients. Please add a comment if you have any additional thoughts or recommended suppliers. We are based in the UK so this article is UK specific however the situation is similar in my experience in other countries.

What do you need?

You will need a merchant account with an acquiring bank – this is the thing than enables you or your business to accept credit cards at all. You will also need a way to validate and process card transactions from the internet to that account – Payment Service Provider (PSP) sometimes referred to as a “payment gateway”. As we are talking about a direct replacement for PayPal here, you are looking for a PSP which offers a payment page – this is a page hosted on their servers where your users can enter their card details. There will also be some functionality that allows information to be passed back to your site as to whether the payment was successful (much like PayPal’s IPN).

Many UK banks also offer merchant accounts, however you don’t need to go to them, you can use any bank that offers you good terms. We’ll discuss terms later.

Your merchant account provider will probably also have a PSP that they encourage you to use. You don’t need to use it – the two things can be completely separate which gives you the ability to find the bank which offers you the best terms and the PSP which offers you the best integration.

Example merchant accounts

In the UK the following acquiring banks offer merchant services – this isn’t a full list. You will see that they all promote their own PSP as well as the merchant account, however all of these will work with third party PSPs.

• Barclaycard Merchant Services
• Lloyds TSB cardnet
• Streamline (RBS and Natwest)

Example Payment Service Providers

• PayPoint
• SagePay

If you visit either of the above sites you will see they offer services for people without a merchant account. What this generally means is that they will find the merchant account on your behalf. In my experience this isn’t a bad way to proceed, find the PSP which offers the best integration for your site and get them to negotiate with the acquiring banks to find the one who will offer the best terms. You will still end up with a PSP and merchant account, and will be billed by both, however you don’t need to deal with the acquiring bank yourself and the pressure from them to use their PSP solution!

The practicalities of obtaining a merchant account

You are going to be asked to jump through some hoops to get your merchant account. The bank is going to want to know a lot of information such as details of your company, your trading history and what you will be taking payment for (be that software, subscriptions or events). They will use this information to decide if they can offer you an account and what terms that will be. These terms will include how much the bank takes from each payment they receive and also any “rolling reserve” or delay in transferring payments to your account.

Rolling reserves and payment delays

When you hear stories of PayPal hanging onto huge sums of event organisers money, what they are doing is holding a 100% rolling reserve. The rolling reserve is an amount of money the acquiring bank keeps in case of chargebacks – this is where the customer decides they will claim their money back from the credit card company, who then need to claim it via the acquiring bank from you. The problem with PayPal is that they don’t ask for details of what you are doing up front, therefore they suddenly slap on this reserve without warning when they decide that you are doing something risky. It’s the without warning bit that can be crippling to a business. With a proper merchant account they will find out what you are doing up front and, if they feel it is risky, may offer you an account with a rolling reserve in place – so for example if they hold a 20% rolling reserve they will always hold 20% of cash on an ongoing basis. This covers their risk that you go out of business and people start claiming money back.

Another way that banks can cover their risk is to delay transferring payments to your account. When the acquiring bank transfers the money they have taken to your business bank account this is known as settlement – payments from each day being processed as a batch. If you are an established business, have a good credit rating and are not selling anything deemed particularly risky the bank will settle each working day any amounts taken. In practice this means they show up in your business account about 3 days after the person make payment with their card. However the bank may offer you an account with a settlement delay of a few days, even up to a month. Both rolling reserves and delays are not usually permanent and if you accept an account with one of these in the terms, you should be able to negotiate their removal or reduction once you have a trading history and the bank can see you are not getting a lot of chargebacks. Of course this works both ways – if you do get a lot of chargebacks you will probably find the bank imposing one of these on your account.

Things to consider when selecting a PSP

If you are sorting out your merchant account and PSP separately it is worth knowing who you want to use when setting up the merchant account as they will also want to know how you will process the online payments.

As we are going to use Pay Page then you should look at what functionality that gives you. If you have been using the PayPal IPN you will need to check that your systems can be changed to use whatever system the PSP uses for their callbacks. You should be able to get hold of the integration documentation for any PSP you are thinking of using to check that.

You should also look at their reporting, what functionality you get in terms of doing things like refunding payments and whether you can configure the templates of the payment page in any way.

While we didn’t want to fully rely on PayPal with Perch we did know that some of our customers would still want to use PayPal, so we selected a PSP that allowed PayPal as a payment method. There are lots of other features offered by PSPs in terms of services they integrate with so it is worth thinking if any of these might be beneficial to your business.

Costs

There is a general assumption that moving away from PayPal is going to be more expensive. This isn’t necessarily true. However if you are doing a very small number of transactions that may be the case. With your new system instead of just paying a transaction fee per transaction you will have to pay some or all of the following:

• Initial set up fee for the merchant account
• Initial set up fee to the PSP
• Monthly set fee to the PSP
• and/or % of transaction value to the PSP
• % of transaction value to the acquiring bank

So even if the % of transaction values add up to the same or less than PayPal you will also have the monthly and setup fees to take into account. At the point we moved Perch to this setup it made very little difference in terms of cost, however as we process more sales the new setup will work out cheaper in comparison to PayPal.

How it all fits together

Once you are all set up and have replaced the PayPal payment page with your PSPs payment page you can wait for your first transactions. Assuming you don’t have a rolling reserve or a delay on your account you can expect the following.

1. Customer pays via your payment page and you will get emails and notification from your PSP
2. At the end of the day all payments are processed via the acquiring bank as a batch and settled as one combined transaction as a payment to your business account
3. The batch will then appear in your business account 2 or 3 days later
4. Each month you should receive a statement from your acquiring bank with details of all transactions and batches so you can reconcile your accounts with this. The statement will include the amount owed to the bank (a % of each transaction) which usually is then taken from your business account by direct debit
5. Each month you will also get a bill from your PSP with monthly and per transaction charges as per your agreement

Things to avoid

Your PSP will have all kinds of other things to offer. They may allow you to take credit card payments over the phone using a virtual terminal or to integrate via an API meaning that you can keep payments on your site rather than going out to a Pay Page. I would suggest you think very carefully about doing either of these things because they will make your compliance with the PCI DSS that much harder and more expensive on an ongoing basis.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

As this blog post was turning into a bit of an epic, I will cover the PCI DSS in a separate post. The important thing to remember is that you still need to confirm your compliance with the PCI DSS even if you and your server never touch any card numbers. I’ll explain how that works in part two of this post.

I have agreed to build a website for someone – do I need to register as freelance?

Whether you are officially starting a business as your fulltime occupation or are taking on a few freelance projects in addition to your day job or studies, you need to tell the tax man (HMRC) that you are earning money on a self-employed basis. By doing this you let them know that you need to complete a tax return at the end of the year. You can register online on the HMRC website.

You will also become liable to pay Class 2 and Class 4 National Insurance contributions depending on the amount of profit you make in your business or freelance work. Class 2 contributions are currently charged at a flat rate of £2.50 per week which generally you will pay by direct debit. You will be liable to pay these from the time you register as self-employed unless your earnings fall below the lower limit and you have applied for small earnings exemption (see below). If you don’t set up a direct debit you will be sent a bill for these every 6 months. Class 4 contributions are based on your profits – so these are worked out as part of your tax return at the end of the financial year.

There is a useful guide to the basics available from Freelance Advisor.

I will only earn a small amount of money from this – should I still register?

You still need to register, however if you know that your earnings will be low you can register to be excepted from class 2 contributions. You must register, otherwise you will be billed for them. So if, for example, you know you are only going to take on a couple of freelance logo design jobs while you are a student you could safely register for the exception.

I’m a student do I need to pay tax?

Yes. If your income from all your employment and self-employment goes over your personal allowance. So if you have a summer or part time job, and do freelance work, all of this will be taken into account when you do your tax return. You will pay tax on the amount that goes over your personal allowance.

What records do I need to keep?

Keeping records is the most important thing you can do. If you have organised records then even if you struggle with your tax return someone will be able to help you out. You need to keep details of any money you earn through your freelance work – so if you send invoices this is easy. Just keep a copy of all invoices sent. You should also keep details of any money you spend that directly relates to the business. For example, if you buy fonts, stock photography, sub-contract some work to someone. This can all be deducted from the profit that you make on a job. You only pay tax and NI on profit, so you want to make sure that you are recording things that legitimately reduce your profit.

There are lots of online bookkeeping applications which make keeping records easy. I love Xero, and I also hear good things about Free Agent. You can do your invoicing, record expenses and keep tabs on profit and loss right from within these applications.

I would also suggest having a separate bank account for the business and transferring money as drawings to your own account. This just helps keep things simple and easy to reconcile.

What about VAT?

You don’t have to register for VAT until your sales (not profit) reaches £73,000 in a 12 month period. However you can register voluntarily. Once you are VAT registered you need to charge VAT on all of your invoices, and submit a VAT return detailing how much VAT you have collected – you then pay this amount. However before paying your VAT you deduct any VAT you have paid. This means that VAT makes your invoices more expensive, but this only matters if you are dealing with people who are not VAT registered.

So, if you provide services to businesses who are VAT registered, registering for VAT yourself will not make a lot of difference to them, and you can then claim back the VAT on anything you buy for your business. If you provide services to end users, who are not VAT registered then all your invoices are 20% more expensive once you have registered and they cannot claim this back.

Registering for VAT will also greatly increase the amount of admin you have to deal with – so you should factor this in to your decision to register voluntarily.

Do I need to register as a company? What is the difference between a limited company and just doing freelance work?

Once you have registered with HMRC as self-employed you become what is known as a sole trader. Some freelancers and small business incorporate as a Limited company. This makes a difference in terms of how your profits are taxed. You can make some savings on tax as a Limited company but it comes at a cost of more admin – and probably an accountants fee. Therefore generally, for a small amount of freelance income, you should stay as a sole trader as your tax is kept simple. If you are considering becoming a Limited company you will need to advice of an accountant to make sure that you are paying tax in the correct way.

Do I need an accountant?

If you are simply sending a few invoices and claiming some small expenses against those earnings then you should be able to complete your tax return yourself without the need for an accountant. Tax returns can now be completed online and HMRC will calculate how much tax you owe. So all you need to do is complete the form accurately from your records. This isn’t hard – the important thing is having all the records to hand.

An accountant becomes more useful if you are running a business as your fulltime job and have a large number of invoices and expenses to sort out – and especially if you are VAT registered, a Limited company, or employ people. An accountant will know what you may and may not claim against, and be able to let you know of any changing legislation that effects you and your business so is a worthwhile investment. I still do all the bookkeeping for edgeofmyseat.com however the accountant does our end of year return, making sure I’ve not done anything silly, and also lets me know if anything changes that I need to be aware of.

How do I pay my tax?

The deadline for filing your tax return is 31st of January. You can file it any time after the end of the tax year at the beginning of April, you will then know how much you need to pay. You need to pay this amount by the 31st January. So it is worthwhile doing your return as soon as possible as you then know how much you will need to pay. If you know that you are earning over your personal allowance you should put aside in a savings account enough money to pay your tax bill.

It is worth filing your return early as you may also be asked to make a payment on account – money towards the next years bill. This can come as a shock if you were not expecting it, so filing early will give you time to have the money available. If you are earning enough to be asked to make payments on account, you will make a payment on account on 31st January, then one 31st of July and the final payment the next January will make up the full amount of your bill – when you will also make a payment on account for the next year.

Wrapping up

Registering as self employed and keeping accounts can seem a bit daunting however it really is quite straightforward once you know where to look. My top tips are to keep good records, put money aside for your bill, ask about anything you are not sure of and file your tax return as soon after the end of the tax year as possible. If you have any other tips please post them in the comments.

I don’t understand something.. You build custom content management systems but your website is on wordpress??

Then going on to suggest I should be using Perch (our mini-CMS product) instead.

“wouldn’t it look better for your company if your blog was based on perch? Just a suggestion.”

It’s a reasonable point, why do I not use our in-house PHP framework or Perch here? One reason is that this blog is very old and predates by several years both of these things. However when – as has happened recently – a client comes to me with a proposal for a heavily blog based site, I often suggest WordPress over our in-house solutions because it’s an excellent tool if you need a site based around a blog, or where the blog is the main feature.

As a web development company we have tools we like to work with. We developed our own PHP framework because we were unhappy with the options available to us, and we can develop sites very rapidly with that as it is customized heavily towards the type of work we tend to do – very large, content rich sites with requirements for additional applications built in. The idea for Perch initially came from a very different in-house need – to have something we could use for very small sites that sometimes turned up. It ultimately turned into a product in its own right. Perch grew out of the realization that not every site needed a big CMS installation.

Sometimes projects come to us that are not a great fit for either of these tools. Sometimes the client is really pushing to use our framework – because they have used it before. However, as the experts we would be absolutely wrong to recommend the client used something for the project that wasn’t ideally suited for it. Even if it was the tool that we are happiest using. As professional web developers and consultants we have a whole toolbox full of tools, we don’t just reach for our favourite hammer.

The Law of the Instrument can be seen in every web discussion forum, on sites such as Forrst and on Twitter. Ask for a CMS, blog or framework recommendation and you’ll see people immediately leap in to declare their hammer the best, without any knowledge of the requirements at hand – sometimes even when the requirements really rule out that tool from the outset. As sellers of a CMS product ourselves we sometimes benefit from this – however we’re the first to jump in and point out if our software isn’t the best fit, as we don’t want an unhappy customer who bought the wrong tool for the job.

If you are developing websites, make sure you have more than a hammer in your toolbox. Take a look at what else is available, try it out on your own projects, and be sure that you are not forcing everything into the same shape due to only ever working with one tool. If you develop products then you should absolutely be eating your own dogfood and using those products – but only if they are appropriate for the task in hand.

If you define yourself as a mumpreneur, why do you do that? It seems to be implying limits for your business from the outset. Limits on how serious you are as a businessperson, how large your company will be, the hours you might work. I know many men who manage to run businesses while still doing a large share or all of the childcare for young children, they are not labeling themselves dadpreneurs. They are men who run businesses and are also dads. Their children may well define the hours they work and what they can do at the moment but they don’t seem to need to label it in the way women often do.

I started my company as a single mother, with a daughter who was only in pre-school in the mornings. I supported myself and my daughter financially from day 1. I made no secret of the fact I was a mother although many of my clients would probably have be surprised at how much of their work I completed late at night once my daughter was in bed. However my status as a mother or as a woman has not defined my business. Equally relevant are my personal values, the things I think important and the other facets of my life. My only recently overcome fear of public speaking has probably been more relevant than anything else in the opportunities I have and haven’t taken up as a business owner.

The thing is, even if your reality at this moment is that you are a mother of small children who need you, this will change. Your reality today is that you can only work between 9am and 3pm and a bit in the evening, your reality is worrying about schools and not going to meetings with milk stains on your shirt, this will change. In the blink of an eye it will change and you’ll have self-sufficient teenagers whose main concern is if you will pick them up from a friend’s house on Saturday morning. Will you want to be defined as having some sort of mummy business when your kids are big enough to take care of themselves? Will you be able to change that label you assigned to yourself and your business then?

Shaping business or work around family or anything else is a great idea. Making choices – such as that you are going to try and always be there after school for your children – is excellent. Labeling oneself, especially in a way that implies limits, does not seem such a great idea as especially where family life is concerned things change very quickly and we change too.

StartUp Britain is designed to make it easier for new companies and innovations to flourish and encourage people who aspire to start new businesses to work for themselves.

So, how are they going to do this? Apparently by giving us a list of links to other websites, including Australian “design competition” site 99designs because, as we all know, branding is simply about creating a logo. There is no context to these links, clicking on any one of the 4 “Top Tips” just takes you straight out to another site. Have these sites paid for their inclusion here? Or are we to believe that 99designs is precisely where the business owners behind StartUp Britain will be heading to brand their next venture?

What value does this offer? It may be that for some types of business a cheap and cheerful logo from 99designs will do just fine. However for many it will be money completely wasted and may be harmful to a fledgling brand. Why is this site not giving realistic advice and why is it not supporting UK design and branding agencies? Is there a place in StartUp Britain for them?

I’ve picked on the 99designs issue because it is indicative of the lack of substance behind this venture. We are told there is lots more “coming soon” but why launch this initiative with such fanfare with nothing to show for it than a list of links and a few special offers provided by businesses who generally provide those offers to new customers anyway?

I know about starting a business on a shoestring. When I set up edgeofmyseat.com I had £1,500 to my name, provided by way of a grant and loan from The Prince’s Trust, however the business support I received from The Prince’s Trust was more valuable than any monetary help they could have given me. When you are assisted by the Trust to start a business, they don’t just hand you some money and let you get on with it. For three years I had regular meetings with my business mentor. I was expected to have up to date accounts, cashflow forecasts, to be able to demonstrate how my business was developing. In return I was helped to get a business bank account, given practical advice on budgeting, on using contractors, writing contracts and so on. Practical, down to earth advice. It isn’t sexy or exciting but it’s the dull stuff that ensures a business can survive and be profitable.

I started edgeofmyseat.com as the dot com bubble was bursting, in a landscape of disillusioned and unemployed web designers and developers who had been sold a dream backed by venture capital, and the money had run out. I can see a lot of the thrill of the dot com days in the excitement of the new wave of internet start-ups. I’d like to see all those great ideas given business advice and help that has substance, that tempers the excitement of launching a business with the need to understand how it will become profitable. I’d love to see the UK become somewhere that businesses can flourish and do well, but I think that the team behind StartUp Britain have some way to go to convince me that their plan is anything more than a token gesture towards business owners.

Update: Since writing this I have seen some other excellent posts on the subject. From PostDesk, Why “#StartUpBritain” is nothing more than a government backed link farm and more on the 99Designs issue from Elliot Jay Stocks in a post entitled Clueless.