Tthe challenges of taking my business from an individual setup as a sole trader to a limited company responsible for employing full-time, office based staff.

1. From freelancer to agency
by Louise Towler
Louise Towler
E/ louise@indigotree.co.uk
W/ indigotree.co.uk
@indigotreesays
@louisetowler

2. From Louise Towler to Indigo Tree Digital Ltd
1. My background
2. My approach
3. Why change
4. What and who helped
5. How it works now

3. 1. My background (bit of a geek)

4. Working for other people
Oil refinery simulations (FORTRAN + OS/2)
Managing the Customer Support
GIS system for mapping postcodes
Quality System and BS5750
Staff Training
Total Quality Management
Business Process Improvement

5. …career break…

6. 2002: Back from America
+ Family first
+ No overheads, working from home
- Waiting for the work, no sick pay, no holidays
- Customers are demanding (even little ones)

7. 2. My approach
(focus on the customer)
How can I provide great customer service?
Limiting beliefs
No network
No structure

8. 2011: Become an Agency
+ Staff = customer support
+ Resources = do more interesting work for customers
+ Office = more professional when meeting customers
+ Network = not waiting for the phone to ring to get new
customers
+ Limited = financial security and confidence for our
customers
3. Why change
(to improve customer service)

9. 4. What and who helped?
+ Thinking & NLP
+ Business coaching
+ Business plan (vision, targets, structure)
+ Financial plan (metrics, p&l, balance sheet, cashflow)
+ Employing people better at coding than me!

10. We’ve grown up
2016: LT Consulting Solutions becomes Indigo Tree
Not just LT any more…
The business has a value…
Can the business work without me?

11. Our services for customers

12. 5. How it works – process & tools
Customer care
Communication
Project management
Time management
Project documentation
Business processes and templates
Accounts & metrics
Lead management and pipeline

13. More process & tools
Team communication
Website monitoring
Our tools SSL, domain expiry, robots.txt, Google page speed
propagated.io
Security

14. And the technical…
File management
Hosting
Design
Development

15. Our theme ‘Origin’
An object oriented starter theme (framework)
- CLI code generation
- autowiring through dependency injection
- PSR-4 autoloading
- frontend build scripts
Includes a "Fields API" which powers the creation of
custom metaboxes, widgets & settings pages.
Combined with installation scripts & other tools it can
save hours, and in some cases days, off development
times.

16. Our theme ‘Origin’
Adding the slick item carousel component.
It includes base styling out-of-the-box and the readme file has usage
instructions.

17. Building the team
Daily stand-up Monthly team meetings
Annual appraisals Training and conferences
Developer time (2 hours)

18. Company benefits
Non-contributory pension Perkbox
Tea, coffee, biscuits Monthly ‘Costa Friday’
and occasional pizza

19. We are Indigo Tree

20. Louise Towler
E/ louise@indigotree.co.uk
W/ indigotree.co.uk
@indigotreesays
@louisetowler