1A Instalec are Electrical Engineers and Contractors offering electrical installations, maintenance and repairs as well as specialised services including testing, lighting design, thermal imaging, power analysis and fire safety systems.
“We had manual ledgers. If I was working at home, I always had to carry big books with me. If a customer phoned up and wanted to know how much they owed at a given time, we were flicking through pages. It was a very arduous, time-consuming process,” says Director and Company Secretary, Lesley Jeffs.
She learnt the importance of managing the books when starting up her business and now uses Sage software to help her run it.
“Cash flow - that was our biggest single problem in the first 12 months. The best way to manage our cash flow was, initially, to be organised - to set a reminder so that every month we were checking on who hadn’t paid their bills and chasing them up.
"As we grew and became a bit bigger, we learnt that computerised accounting was a much better way to deal with that side of the business.”
There’s so much to think about in the early days of a business. What do you need to turn your idea into reality? How much will it cost? How much could you make, and where will those customers come from?
Lesley says it’s all down to planning: “The way to stay focused on our business is to have a specific business plan in place. It’s a working document. It changes continually. It reminds us of what it is we set out to achieve.”
“Because we have that business plan there, we know when it is in time that we want to grow. We know what we have to put in place to be able to grow and expand.”
That process of change continues even when your business is up and running, as Lesley knows well: “As we’ve grown, I think we’ve learned many, many new skills, mainly marketing, levels of customer service and ways to put things into practice so that every customer is dealt with in the same way and treated with the same high levels of service.”