Starting Out – Bad Luck Comes In Threes

Hello Technibble! My name is James and I am the new business writer for the site. I have always had a passion for trying new ideas and taking risks, I hope to share with you my enthusiasm for IT and pass on practical ways you can grow your business. I have been running my own IT business for over three years now and in the past I have dabbled in everything from international imports to hand made wheat bags.

I have found that the most important lesson in business that it is O.K. to fail, in fact it can actually be a good thing – it all depends on how you react to this failure. To illustrate my point I would like to share with you a series of unfortunate events which happened to me about six months after I started my computer business.


I started my IT business on a shoestring budget after finishing high school, in order to get my first customers I asked my friends and family to help me letterbox the neighbourhood with flyers we printed on A4 pieces of paper. The whole setup was very low budget and low tech, but that worked for the kind of service I was offering at the time – down to earth one on one PC services for home and business. Luckily for me people responded well to my marketing efforts and the calls started to come in as did the money. One day I received a phone call from a man called Bill (the name has been changed of course!) he wanted someone he could call and give him general I.T. advice from time to time for his business. Over the course of the year my involvement with Bill business became more and more significant and I began to trust him enough to provide the business an account which could be paid monthly instead of the usual upfront arrangement.

One day I received a call from Bill saying that they had just gotten in a new employee and they needed a new laptop ASAP. Wanting to make my customer happy I provided this service and set him up with a laptop on the same day, all on his account. The problem came at the end of the month when I did not receive any money from either Bill or the business. At first I was not immediately suspicious; I had known Bill for about a year at this point and had been to his place of business on multiple occasions. After waiting another day for the money I gave Bill a call and received no answer, fearing the worst I dialled on a separate number and he answered immediately, I began to politely question him about the account and he hung up in my face!

At this point I knew I had been scammed so I went to onto Google and called a local collection agency. When I began to describe what had happened I mentioned the name Bill, the person on the phone pulled me up and said, oh no you don’t mean Bill Blogs do you? – he was so well known by that company that I didn’t even have to give them the rest of the story, they just asked that I forward my invoice to them and expect to never see the money again.

I was absolutely devastated, I had built my business model on building personal relationships with customers, and it had come back to bite me. Aside from the large financial and time loss my personal motivation and enthusiasm for the job declined significantly. Vindication, of sorts, came a few weeks later when I saw my old customer on A Current Affair (ACA) – one of our public information/news programs. According to the story he was a full time con artist and had scammed people out of tens of thousands of dollars over many years.

Still fuming from my humiliation I tried to make back the money I had lost by finding a cheaper supplier of computer hardware. For about a week I searched the net looking through verified supplier websites hoping to find a company which supplied the products I wished to sell. Eventually I found a company which was about 10 per cent cheaper than the one I was currently using, had all the professional documents, a professional website and a legitimate customer base. Unfortunately for me once I made my purchase ( to play it safe one laptop and a hard drive ) the website, my customer service rep, and my money all disappeared without a trace never to be seen again.

They say bad things happen in threes and this story is no exception, about a week later I was contacted by a family friend who said he had found a customer for me. I spoke to this person on the phone and he told me he wanted two laptops but due to the setup of his business could only pay me in cheque. I told this man of my recent difficulties and explained to him that I could not take a cheque. About an hour later my family friend gave me a call and said he could personally vouch for the cheque and that I had nothing to worry about. Sadly my family friend was mistaken and I was left holding the bill as the cheque bounced. Luckily for me I was able to get the hardware back however due to the volatility in prices I still suffered a significant loss on the transaction.

For those of you who are in a similar situation I urge you to persevere, while I did lose money and a significant portion of my ego I am grateful that I learnt these lessons when I did. Despite the monetary losses sustained from Bill throughout our relationship he did introduce me to many other clients, some of which are not only good friends but also account for significant portion of my income. My search for suppliers also had a happy ending, my research turned up a number of local businesses who provided a better level of service (such as RA follow-up) allowing me to spend more time focused on my customers. Not every business will have the same run of bad luck as I did, but whatever the situation it is important to remember that just because things didn’t go exactly the way you planned it is important to try and get as much out of it as you can. If I had walked away at that point I would probably have never gotten over what Bill did and I would have been too afraid to try new things in the future, but by hanging in there I made more than my money back and learnt invaluable lessons for the future.

 
Written by James Gilbert