Simon Welford escaped the 'rat race' to become his own boss by setting up his own online gallery. He tells Startups.co.uk how he is getting on with his new business, Online Exhibits.
Simon Welford
28
Online Exhibits
Online Art Gallery & Print Shop
January 2004
Having worked for a big corporation for the last 7 years I wanted out of the rat race & wanted to effectively “be the boss”. When you work for someone as large as I did you lose perspective and miss out on the personal touches that make small businesses special.
I first started having plans to work for myself way back in 2001 but it took me a couple of years to decide what I wanted to do and then convince myself I could do it. When redundancy forced me to consider my options I new the time was right to go for it.
Online Exhibits is an online art gallery selling works of art by artists from all over the UK & Europe. Recently we have extended the business and now also offer high quality art prints by the likes of Monet, Dali & Van Gogh, giving our customers a fantastic choice of art products for all budgets.
Having studied art at college I’ve always had a big interest in art and I also paint myself. I really wanted to sell something that I had an interest in so art was always going to be a major contender for a business idea.
My first job after leaving school was for a small telecommunications company called Project Telecom. The owner, Tim Radford started the company in his father’s stables and built the company up during the mobile phone boom of the 1990’s.
Working for Mr Radford was a great experience at seeing how a business could be built up from scratch and made a success, even through a recession. Project Telecom was sold last year to Vodafone for over £150 million, so again you can’t get more inspirational than that.
If I can be one per cent as successful as Tim Radford I will be a happy man.
By looking at the success of others in my field such as britart, I know there is a market for art over the internet. Ebay has also proved that people are happy to buy good quality art online. It’s just a matter of getting them to find your website.
The internet has given people who were intimidated by going to a live auction and bidding for original works of art the opportunity to buy great art without leaving the house.
Research, research, research!! I spent a good few months just looking at websites who do what I wanted to do and getting ideas and tips about design and how an art website should look.
I also spent time using sites such as this to answers all the questions I had regarding, tax, NI contributions etc so that I had everything I needed to know before I started for real.
I mainly used the net, but did speak to a few people like the Inland Revenue & Business Link as well as a few banks to see what kind of deals there were offering new businesses.
I found them all really helpful and they always sent me through any information I requested quickly.
I spoke to a few other people that worked for themselves and asked general advice about what it was like when they started up.
Everyone I spoke to was really positive and said working for themselves was the best move they had ever made. That sealed it for me and made me determined to set up my own business.
The business plan was useful in getting a perspective of what direction I wanted to go and what I wanted to achieve but I find that I don’t refer to it that much now.
I think it depends what business you are starting up. Maybe further down the line I will find that I should have made a better plan but so far I’m managing with the basic plan that I made.
I estimate that it costed around £1500 to get me up and running. Designing the actual site was probably the biggest expense but I used a good contact that I found on the Startups website in Anuschka from Moustique Design who had featured in a Startup profile.
I still use Moustique to this day and recommend them to anyone who is considering building a professional looking website and wants great value for money.
