In what feels like a different lifetime,  I used to be the General Manager of Jimmy’s Nightclub in Harrogate (long since gone).

I built my first website for the club around 1997 when we were still on 14.4k modems, if you are not old enough to remember having to take up the land line to dial into the internet then ask your parents how many times they got into trouble for monopolising the phone line for hours and, how annoying the dial-up sound was!!! 

My first website consisted of a rotating gif of the club logo and some text; I cringe just thinking about it now.

From around 1999 I took on a couple of freelance clients who were customers at the club and that is how building websites became my hobby outside of running a nightclub.

Fast forward to 2003 and my nightclub career came to a major crossroad. Move to Skegness and take on a club 3 times the size or stay in Harrogate where my kids were settled in school and my wife had her career but leave the nightclub industry?

Not much of a choice and it didn’t take long to decide that leaving was the best option but what to do next???

I researched being a driving instructor but that was short lived as I am a terrible passenger so the natural choice was to make my hobby into a freelance business.

I joined BNI, technically, two weeks before I had officially left the club but I was on garden leave. Joining BNI was definitely one of the best moves I made, even though I had no idea what I was doing really. The support, confidence and work BNI gave me at the time has continued for 19 years now and now the vast majority of my work is a result of being in BNI.

If you have read this far, I commend you, as I am not a writer and this is probably not the most interesting thing you will read today. So, I will fast forward through to today, where I still feel like my job is my hobby and my passion, appreciative of the steep learning curve I went through in those early days, to fulfil the jobs I said, “yes” to, knowing full well I had no idea how to create! Definitely glad some clever people invented broadband, multi-screen computer systems (life-saver) and the love and pleasure I get, when delivering a project to a client and exceeding their expectations.