It Starts With the Website
Nobody hires me to be their technology person. They hire me to build a website. What happens next is the actual job.
Nobody has ever hired me to be their technology person. Not once. They hire me to build a website.
And then, a few months later, the questions change.
Can the phone answer itself when we're on a job? Why does the booking system not talk to the accounts software? A supplier wants to sell us a thing for four hundred pounds a month — is it any good? Can you look at this email, I think it might be a scam.
At some point the website stops being the job and becomes the way we met.
The pattern
Here is how it goes, nearly every time.
A business comes to me because their site is embarrassing them. It looks like it was built in 2014, because it was. It takes six seconds to load on a phone. The enquiry form goes to an inbox nobody checks. We fix that. I write the words, build the thing, put it live.
Then the site starts working, and working exposes everything around it.
The enquiries come in, and now they need answering faster than the owner can manage from a van. The bookings come in, and now Saturdays are double-booked because the calendar lives in someone's head. The site ranks, the phone rings more, and the phone is the bottleneck.
So they ask. Not formally. A message on a Tuesday evening: "Random one, but do you know anything about…"
I usually do. And if I don't, I know how to find out, and I know how to tell the difference between a real answer and a sales pitch. That turns out to be the rare part.
Big companies have someone for this
Every company above a certain size has a person whose job is to understand technology on behalf of everyone else. They pick the tools. They tell the directors which shiny thing is worth it and which one isn't. They notice when two systems should be connected and connect them. When something breaks at seven on a Friday, it's their phone that rings, not the owner's.
Companies with five people have nobody. Or they have a nephew.
The nephew is a real position. He set up the email in 2019 and now he's in Leeds and doesn't answer. The owner is the IT department, the marketing department and the person who cuts the hair or lays the floor, and the technology side gets whatever attention is left over, which is none.
That is the gap. Not "small businesses need websites". They do, but that's the door. What they need is the person on the other side of it.
What the job actually looks like
Some weeks it looks like software. Building a booking system because the off-the-shelf one takes a cut of every appointment. Wiring a form to a spreadsheet to a text message so a quote goes out while the customer is still interested.
Some weeks it looks like telling someone not to buy something. Half the "AI platforms" being sold to small businesses right now are a web form with a monthly fee and a new logo. Reading the contract before someone signs it is worth more than any page I could build them.
Increasingly it looks like AI, in the practical sense rather than the conference sense. A phone that is answered every time, by an assistant that knows the opening hours, books the appointment and takes a message when it can't help. Reviews requested automatically the day after a job. Enquiries replied to in minutes instead of the next morning. None of this is science fiction. Most of it is a week's work, and it pays for itself in the first month.
And some weeks it's just being the person who gets the message. "Is this email real?" "The card machine's doing a thing." "Can you look at this before I sign it?" Ten minutes for me. An afternoon of worry saved for them.
Why I don't lead with it
You'd think, given all this, I'd put "technology partner" on the front of the site. I've tried versions of it. It doesn't work, and I think I understand why.
Nobody wakes up wanting a technology partner. They wake up wanting the phone to ring, or wanting to stop losing bookings, or wanting a website they aren't ashamed to put on the van. Those are problems. "Technology partner" is a job title.
So the website stays at the front. It's the thing people can point at and say: I need one of those. It's also a fair test of me. If I can't make a decent website, you shouldn't trust me with your phones.
The relationship comes afterwards, the way it always has: because the site worked, and then a question came up, and I answered it, and then another one did.
The honest version of the pitch
If you run a small business and you're reading this, here's what I'd say to you across a table.
Get the website sorted first. It's the cheapest thing to fix and it changes the most. I'll do that for a monthly fee with nothing upfront, and you can leave whenever you like.
Then, when the next question comes up, whatever it is, ask me. I might build something. I might tell you to buy something. I might tell you it isn't worth doing. All three of those are the job.
Big companies pay a salary for that person. You don't have to. You just have to have met them once, over a website.