So, here we go: only a couple of weeks left before I am officially made redundant, and there’s still a lot left to be doing.

Obviously, regular readers (or at least those who visit my blog via the actual site, rather than the feed-reader types) will know that I’m looking to go into business for myself, and that’s why the home page of this site has become The Pickards Information Services rather than simply the home of the blog that it used to be.

There’s a lot to consider when setting up your own business: what sort of company do you want to set up? Are you going to be working as a sole trader, as a partnership, or as a limited company? (It’s probably a bit early to consider getting listed on the stock exchange!) Then there’s questions relating to your income — will the business work?

There’s no real way of knowing, and that’s the tricky part. However, what you can do is try and ensure that you’ve planned things out as much as you can in order to minimise the stuff that you don’t know about. And that’s where it’s worth picking up the advice that is available.

I spoke to my local council, having found a page on their website advising how to go about getting started, and made an appointment to meet one of their advisers. If you’re thinking of starting your own business, I’d thoroughly recommend that you consider doing something like this.

What they can do is to help you with stuff like letting you know what grants are available for starting up a new business (generally not a lot, and can generally only be used in certain particular ways, but something is of course better than nothing). They can help you produce things like a business plan, to help you work out what your startup costs are going to be, to plan what sort of income you’re going to need from the business in order to make it work — how many ‘sales’ or whatever you’ll need.

Obviously in my case, it’s not quite that simple. I’m offering a wide range of different and high quality services (*shameless plug*) around information services — relating to accessibility, site audits, site designs, training, consultancy and so on — and obviously what I’ll want to charge for a particular task will depend on what is involved and how much time it is likely to take: it is self-evidently not a case of one size fits all. But producing a business plan will still help you to do this.

They might also be able to find you training courses in your area which may be useful to yourself — stuff like ‘Setting Up A Small Business’ and ‘Advice on Self Assessment’. These may even be free. They’ll be able to tell you how much income your business needs to be making before you need to be registered for VAT; the timescales within which you need to tell HMRC that you’ve gone self-employed. In short, if they are anything like the person I was dealing with, they would be absolutely bloody helpful.

In fact, so much so that I made a point of noting that I wanted to say on my blog how helpful they had been. Although if they wanted an absolute gold star, might I suggest that they provide a cup of coffee to the people they meet with. But given that this is the only complaint I can come up with — not only was the initial meeting particularly helpful, but so has been the follow-up support over email — then I think they could probably make a pretty good case for deserving a gold star anyway.

And then I went to see Business Link North East, who weren’t quite as helpful. This is perhaps being unfair on them: the main problem was that there was an awful amount of overlap between the two– if I had gone to Business Link first, I would quite probably have been saying that the Council hadn’t given me much in the way of new information.

For example, Business Link could provide me with information on the training courses they offer — which were precisely the ones the Council had told me about the week before. They had told me that it would be useful to develop a business plan — which the Council had helped with the week before. However, I did learn some new stuff: for example, you are not considered to be trading apparently until you start to receive an income. You can carry out preparatory work, and even actually begin work, but you’re not trading until the money comes in.

This seemed odd to me, so please don’t take my word for it — ask an appropriate someone in officialdom — but is certainly something worth knowing if it is actually the case…

And one of the reasons that I would advise checking this sort of information is that I know some of the information they provide isn’t strictly accurate. For example, in their section on website design, they say:

…you can check your website’s accessibility using free HTML validation services…Business Link: Accessibility Issues

Unfortunately, this is plainly bollocks. It is bad advice. With a HTML validator, you can determine whether or not your HTML validates. This has little to do with accessibility, other than a rough indication that well-written standards compliant sites are more likely to have been written by someone who knows what they are doing. But it is perfectly possible to have a standards compliant site which is a major accessibility fail.

And, on the advice of the person I met at business link, I used their email form to tell them so. Which is probably unlikely to win me any friends, although I did mention it to them nicely, before suggesting that if they wanted any consultation on accessibility or a site audit, I could of course provide just the very thing…

But by far the least useful thing so far has been the job centre. I am going to be made redundant: I have an official letter which gives the date and so on. Unfortunately, the job centre won’t even start dealing with me, or even give me an appointment for an interview to talk about what I need to do for being self-employed or anything else until I am definitively out of work. Who, exactly, does this help? Wouldn’t you think that if they could help people get back to work or start their own business quicker that both the individual punters and the taxpayer as a whole would be better off?

So please, if anyone works for the job centre, and can explain the rationale behind this (do bear in mind I have a letter confirming my redundancy), then I’d be delighted to be informed. There may indeed be a perfectly sensible reason for this — but I just can’t see it at the moment.

So, if you’re thinking of starting your own business, talk to your local council and business link; there’s a certain amount of overlap and whoever you see second will probably spend at least half of their time covering stuff the first did, but you’ll still get something useful out of it. Secondly, don’t bother even trying to get in touch with your local Job Centre until you’re officially unemployed: they won’t want to help otherwise.

And thirdly, do bear in mind that if you’re starting your own business, it is increasingly important to develop an online presence so people can find your contact details and information about your services and prices even outside your normal office hours. And here I would recommend that you contact me to see what TPis can help you with…