Amber McNaught needed to spend more time at home due to the health problems of her fiancé. So she set her own business using a spare bedroom as an office and has never looked back since.

Name: Amber McNaught
Age: 30
Business: Custom-Copy.com
Type of business: copywriting/website content
Start date: February 2006

When did you first decide you wanted to start your own business?
I'd always entertained vague notions of working for myself one day, but it wasn't until my fiancé, Terry, was diagnosed with kidney failure in January 2004, that I really decided to go for it. As corny as it sounds, that was a real "road to Damascus" moment for us, and it really made me realise that life is far too short for vague notions. We registered our business name, wrote a business plan, and have never looked back.

Tell us about your business
Custom-Copy.com is an online copywriting, ghostwriting and PR firm. We're slightly different in that we have an online store through which clients can purchase fixed-price copywriting packages, and we also sell ebooks, which are written by myself.

Was it your first business idea and where did it come from?
My first business idea was Hot Igloo Productions, which is a website design and copywriting company: we design websites, provide content for them, and promote them through press releases and online marketing. Terry is a website designer, and I'm a writer, and we both wanted to work from home and run a business together: a business which combined our writing and design skills seemed the obvious solution, and that business is still going strong, so we must have done something right!

Was your decision to start a business inspired by any other companies or individuals?
Before I made the decision to strike out on my own, I’d had a number of unsatisfying office jobs, so you could say that the decision was inspired by all of those dull jobs I had to work my way through to gain the skills and experience I needed to start up a business of my own!

What makes you think there’s a market for your business?
When we started our first business, we concentrated solely on offering a website design service. So many of our clients came to us with no idea of how to create content for their sites, and how to promote them effectively, that I very quickly realised that there was a demand for an affordable copywriting and press release service. We also started to receive a large amount of enquiries from people asking us to ghost-write books for them: that wasn't a service which most people would associate with web design, so I slowly became convinced of the need for a separate website concentrating on my own writing services – hence Custom-Copy.com!

Once you’d decided to start a business, what did you do first?
We registered our business name with Companies House and applied for a business bank account. We also knew that our website would be our most important marketing tool, so we began to experiment with the design and contact for that.

What research did you do?
We spent a lot of time investigating the legalities of starting a business, and finding out about tax, etc. Almost all of our research was carried out online, with a couple of calls to the bank and the Inland Revenue. I also spent time checking out the competition, particularly in our local area, and working out where we could fit in, how much we could charge, and what we'd have to do differently in order to make a go of things.

What advice did you seek?
Most of the advice we sought was from people who were already running businesses. Terry's brother owns a successful pub/restaurant in Kent, and my former boss had started his own online newspaper a few years earlier, and we felt that the experiences of people who'd actually been there and done that would be of more use to us than the help on offer from the government agencies. In retrospect, we should probably have taken the time to investigate everything available to us, but we found our first client almost right away, and were so caught up in the momentum of the business that we didn't stop to think about what else may be out there!

Does the government need to provide more help to people trying to start a business?
I think information about entrepreneurship should be made available at high school level. The education system tends to concentrate on training people to become employees and I think it would be helpful if issues surrounding starting a business and becoming self-employed were included in the careers-based teaching in schools.

Talk us through the process of writing your business plan.
As someone who writes for a living, I really enjoyed preparing our business plan, and it helped to clarify our plans and highlight some of the obstacles we'd need to overcome. We didn't have any help, or use special software: again, we researched business plan writing online, and downloaded some sample business plans to work from.

How useful has your business plan been and do you think you’ll stick to it as your business begins to grow?
I have to hold my hands up here and admit that our business plan is currently woefully out of date, as the business we originally started has evolved beyond what we could have imagined at the start. Rewriting it is part of my "to do" list for 2006!