Stepping up

Things are still going quite well: Tom has enough work to pay for his keep, which was the main aim. The thing is: now he's only working just enough to do that and he would kind of like some extra money to spend on other things. I think he needs to step up his efforts a bit, if he's going to achieve that. One drop of about 200 leaflets, door to door, takes a couple of hours and yields enough work to pay his board. It also leaves him with enough time to play bowls, socialise, pursue his 3D modelling hobby (that's graphic design, not posing for the camera!) and to generally relax and enjoy his life.

If he doubled the leaflet deliveries, he'd presumably double his working hours (currently about 12) and double his income, but he'd lose 12 hours for all the other things he likes doing. It's the eternal dilemma, isn't it? Work-life balance. I find it interesting just to see which way he handles this kind of decision.

The other fascinating (and immensely gratifying) thing for me is to watch how the business is changing him as a person. He's calm and confident now when he goes to people's houses, because he's managed to do everything people have asked of him and more. I think he's found the actual work a lot easier than he expected it to be - given that he always underestimates the level of his own skill - and the acquiring of work a lot harder.

But he's getting jobs through word of mouth recommendations now and repeat orders too. That can only be a good thing.

Success

It means something different to everyone, doesn't it? Some people rate their children's success by exam results, trophies, or the wearing of a cap and gown. Others see it in social or financial terms.. The definition of success probably varies according to each individual family - even according to each individual child, at every stage of his or her life.

I'm by no means sure exactly what I think it is. Achieving what you set out to achieve, maybe? Mastering a skill? Honing a talent? Recognising a talent, an attribute or a real interest? The list of factors that might qualify for the term 'success' is probably endless.

BUT, this week I felt that familiar glow of - wow! - pride, I think, when Tom handed me his first ever week's board money. It was £70, which is serious money to frugal Yorkshire folk like us even though it's probably peanuts to everyone else, but this is the amount we've been managing without since he stopped being officially counted as my dependent after his 20th birthday 7 weeks ago, and so it was the amount he wanted to pay.

So, things are picking up. We seem to be averaging about three customers a week now (we'd like five, to be comfortable) but it still varies a lot and some weeks there's nothing, which will probably still be the case for some time to come. We've found that the best form of advertising by far is letterbox leaflet-dropping, which works better even than expensive newspaper ads ( - now stopped. Yes Ken, we should have taken your advice about that!) although is hard on the shoe leather and time consuming. But they do it because it pays off. We seem to be getting about 5-10 immediate customers for every 1000 leaflets delivered, though they'll presumably yield future custom too, from the people who file the information away until such time as it's needed.

And we're not in the Thompson phone directory yet until the new one is published (hmmm, I'm not sure when that is, actually) so I think that will make a difference as well.

Meanwhile... YIPEEE! He paid his board! Huge smiles and celebrations all round.

It wouldn't have happened without autonomous home education, which gave him those endless free hours to source and build and repair all those countless machines. The level of his skill amazes me now, while he thinks nothing of it! Tom's is the cheapest computer repair business in the area because he constantly undervalues his skill, but he just turns up at people's houses and fixes anything, so effortlessly. This might be proud mother speak, but I think he's performing a great service for the community - especially now that times are getting harder and brand new machines aren't so easily obtainable for people.

And what did we do with the money? Well, we're desperate for a new fridge (and the rest!) so we did put a big chunk of it aside to contribute to that. The remainder went on a slap-up celebratory meal, in which everyone ate their favourite food and drank a ginger beer toast to Tom's success. Yes, it is rather like living in a Famous Five novel, sometimes. But I'm not complaining about that :-)

Things to do, always with the 'things to do'.....

This business seems like a never-ending list of tasks sometimes. We're due another meeting tomorrow, so I've got last week's minutes to type up and circulate. Last minute, as usual. We've also got a piece for HE forums to write, which will be a joint effort between Tom and me I think, when I've finished munching Mothers' Day chocolates and reading the newspaper.

Then there are more leaflets to print so the boys can go delivering again tomorrow afternoon, and various other jobs. Accounts! Groan.

This week's lesson has been in 'knowing where to draw the responsibility line' I think, since Tom was mentally beating himself up over something that was actually a customer's fault. He had to disconnect someone's PC and bring it home to work on, there were so many problems with it. Then when it was reinstalled it wouldn't reconnect to the internet because the man had forgotten his logging details. That was not Tom's fault by any stretch of the imagination, but he couldn't stop blaming himself. We're assuming the customer resolved the issue with his ISP.

Like buses

You wait all week for a customer, then two phone in the space of five minutes! Tom went out to the first one last night: a child's laptop which had really had some hammer and was unsurprisingly not working. Tom brought it home with him (I rushed to prepare some receipts for him and he forgot to issue one!) and is pretty confident of being able to fix it. The only issue is cost: we officially charge £20 per hour for Tom's labour, but this job will have taken at least three hours, but the customer made it clear they didn't want to pay more than about £40. I think Tom will just spend the time and then charge the minimum: we can't afford to turn jobs away at the moment.

He's due to go to the other job at 9am today. (That reminds me, I don't know whether he's offering to fit his appointments in around people's work hours. I hope he hasn't got customers taking time off to wait in for him!) It's a Windows issue I gather, which will be easy for him to fix.

I'm supposed to drive Tom around to these jobs, but have a sick child at home at the moment, who doesn't want me to leave her, so he had to cadge a lift with a friend last night and will be walking this morning. He has finally conceded that passing his driving test is quite a high priority now, and that he will apply for his provisional licence. Phew!

Going public, in every sense

The boys have decided they need to do more social networking in order to generate some more business. It's kind of ironic, because I had that kind of busy childhood, all my parents and step parents being great social networkers, but I wanted to protect my children from it and allow them some peace and freedom instead. Now, they're seeking out their grandparents and asking for invitations to things. The older generation will be delighted.

Despite spending money and effort on newspaper advertising and leaflet-bombing (well, money on leaflet printing and shoe leather on mass delivery) the only proper paying work we've had has come from those kinds of social networking contacts, so I can see their thinking. It will just be a sad day for me when I'm rushing to get someone's dinner on the table because they've got to dash out to bellringing, or bowling, or hiking or something. My grandparents didn't do so much of that, so maybe it all skips a generation.

We've been working on the website as ever, though there's still more to do. I've been shamelessly linking to it on my home ed blog and other places, in the hope of pushing it up the search engines and we are now in 4th and 5th place where it counts, so thanks to anyone who clicked.

The other decision is to open this blog up to public readership. Tom wanted me to keep it private for the first few weeks, so only a few friends have been reading.

He's soon to appear in the local newspaper: I wrote this piece, which they've said they'll use. We're just waiting for their photographers.

IT ‘whiz kid’ means business

New local businessman, Tom Kilner, has been building computers since he was ten years old. “We had one family PC that we all had to queue up to use,” says Tom, “And my brother and I were desperate to have our own, so we started thinking about how to build them.” But the hardware wasn’t cheap in those days, so instead of playing games they used their precious online time to source parts from the then fledgling ebay Internet marketplace and to download build instructions.

“Things weren’t as straightforward then as they are now,” Tom explains. “Ten years ago, Google was a brand new thing that hardly anyone had heard of. We did all our searching with the old search engines: Yahoo and Altavista, and the information was much harder to find - although there was less of it, so it was quicker to plough through to get to what we needed.”

Luckily, they found what they needed and, bit by bit in the post, they received the parts to build their new machines. “That was an experience,” Tom admits. “We really didn’t have a clue what we were doing and we just had a page of instructions printed out, which weren’t all that easy to follow.”

But they were successful in the end and soon the Kilner dining table housed three computers instead of one. “I think our mother despaired of us ever being able to sit down to a meal again!” Tom laughs.

The brothers’ next idea was, several years before it became common practice, to link the three machines together with network cable. “The cabling part was quite simple,” remembers Tom. “But programming the three machines to speak to one another was not: we were still on Windows 98 of course, which didn’t include any simple networking software, so we had to work all that out from scratch ourselves as well.”

After much trial and error they had their own basic networked system, but still only three computers between six family members who wanted to use them. The next stage was inevitable: the boys carried on sourcing cheap parts, building more systems and extending the network until there was a PC in every room, all connected to each other and to the Internet. “My mother finally got her dining table back – and then Microsoft released Windows XP, which contained all the necessary networking protocols. Still,” Tom adds, “I’m glad we had to learn everything the hard way. It gave us a much better understanding of how it all really works.”

Friends and family soon started making good use of Tom’s computer building and repairing skills, so when the time came to choose a career path the way forward was obvious, and Kilner Computers was born. “Solving people’s IT problems matters more to me than money, and I know these are difficult times so I’m keeping costs low for my customers,” finishes Tom. It sounds like he’s used to doing things that way.

It's a bit cheesy, but then so is the local newspaper.

We're still having weekly meetings every Monday - we had our 9th one today. It's a good habit to get into, and I'm keeping the minutes and all accounts and receipts etc. All we're really short of is more custom!

Twenty days in

We've had quite a few enquiries and one paying job. We've learned that we need to keep working on the website, because every time we think about it, we spot something else that needs tweaking.

We've got an editorial nearly ready to go into the local newspaper, and some more photos to upload. We're still having meetings every week.

This morning I came back from the supermarket to find a strange man in the dining room: a customer! I must remember to keep the dining room cleaner than it was this morning..! Tom spent a little time looking at the man's broken PC but couldn't charge him for the work as it was unfixable: a 'fried' motherboard.

There is a long list of things to do actually: this blog, the website, the leaflets, the editorial, the photos, the accounts. I still have some receipts to chase up from the pockets of his jeans. Tom may be a computer genius but tidiness is not his forté, bless.

Today's the day

We officially start trading today.

We've got three lines in the local newspaper's 'classifieds' section; the business cards are out; the website is [just about] up, the mobile phone is switched on, and Tom has had a bath ;-)

I've spoken to DWP and found out that I am allowed to keep any money Tom gives me for his board, which is a bonus.

I wrote some blub for the website about how Tom has come to learn so much about computers, but he doesn't want to use it. And we took some arty shots of him fixing one, but he doesn't want to use those either - infuriating!










I also suggested that he should invite the local rag to do a piece on him, along the lines of 'dyslexic home educator starts own business' or something, but he won't do that either!

Says he wants to just keep a low profile. Unfathomable!

I think I'll just keep my mouth shut from now on. Do the driving and the accounts. Know my place.