History of How I Started my Tech Business

tom here from lawrence systems i'm going to talk about how i became tom here at lawrence systems so if you want to learn more about me and my company just keep watching his video and i usually have a spiel i put in but i won't but lawrences.com is my company's website and you can hire us for projects and things that we talk about i started this video over a couple times because i'm trying to figure out how to articulate it so i'm going to just try to keep it to a few brief points and if there's enough interest i will make a longer more in-depth video but i'm not really sure what people want to know now when i do a tech video it's rather simple here is the beginning of the project follow these steps to complete this task and this is the outcome so how do you write a firewall rule well we write the rule this way and then the firewall rule works this way that's not how business works at all and i made just at least a couple notes here on like timeline and things like that so i can at least have some conciseness to this video but for those of you wondering how i started my company a little bit of my background first i did not go to college i am only a high school graduate so that's the you know base level school no extra college because when i graduated 1984 i did not come from a family of wealth and maybe there were loans at the time i don't know i didn't understand any of that i wasn't a really good student and i just was happy to be out of school and wanted to work so i actually went to a vocational school for tool and die and i did do some computer classes briefly that they had access to in high school but this was 1992 and i did a pascal class and a cobalt class so on old ibm 1980s ibm xt's because that's what was available at the time back then i started my first tech job in 1995 working for small business then i worked in a corporate area from 1998 till 2003 and then september of 2003 17 years ago now i filed my s corp lawrence technology services now the whole happenstance was the company i used to work for well things weren't going well and it made me angry because the owners had made decisions that was putting the company in jeopardy and they filed for bankruptcy but not going out of business bankruptcy going out of business bankruptcy um happened at a later date for them kind of but they split the company up and sold the transportation company into different uh they referred to him as shipping lanes but basically there was more than one company handling all the freight business i seized the moment and started my company then because i turned those into my first clients and i made a lot of mistakes and even though i was being paid very well back then in my tech job it's really not the same because um it's it was so much different starting the business because i suddenly had to deal with things like payroll and i was the first employee at my company and i had a set of payroll i hired an outside accounting firm i highly recommend that if you don't want to learn taxes they are complicated there's a lot of rules there's balance sheets and profit and loss i've at least talked about profit loss to have a video on that but whether you understand the complexities of the u.s tax code provided you're starting a business here in the u.s the irs really doesn't seem to care um the agencies that are involved in collection of those taxes will collect them and if you don't file things properly without a proper account they will collect them at a rate much higher than you may expect and uh your ignorance of the law is irrelevant to them they will you'll be in a lot of trouble so i do recommend an outside accountant unless you want to do that now i found my company as an escort also not based on my incredible knowledge of tax code but the knowledge of the accounting firm that i hired uh said that was more advantageous than llc i'm not gonna answer the question which one's better do some googling uh to get a basis of what those are and then hire a professional to make a decision on your business if that's a good thing for you or not i will mention briefly though i had another company called suburban computers that lasted from 2005 and 2006 and you're like tom i've never heard you talk about it it's painful i had a partner and so i've always had lawrence technologies and i took a partnership in 2005 and 2006 that uh didn't go well and so it was actually a company called suburban electronics i partnered with someone and their existing company and we built that company back up it actually went very well for the first maybe year and the next six months went downhill rather quickly things kind of fell apart uh me and the partner had a lot of problems uh the shortest answer was the partner embezzled money i never went after him legally because it really wasn't worth my time to do so i'm not a petty person could i have chased him legally wasn't really worth it it's one of those better to separate out from the company and do the next best thing which was start another retail store right down the street because that one was in peril and then staff uh right away wanted to come over and work for me because well part of what the partner had done besides take some money out of the company for personal stuff and try to hide it from me was also not pay the staff and so they didn't have any trouble of who they were going to put their loyalties to was um the person who actually paid them properly and didn't screw around with their pay so um that little messy venture i had was an eye-opener and i decided from there forward at least for the next foreseeable future not to have a partner and so far right now i still don't have any partnerships i am the sole proprietor and 100 shareholder of lawrence technology services here in uh 2020. now pc pickup you may see that around here and i've slowly been phasing it all out but that was that other retail store i started in 2007 and that went all the way until 2017 when we moved from where pc pickup was over in taylor michigan to southgate michigan uh in april 2017 which is the building we're in right now that's when we moved here and that's also when i started really focusing on youtube cause i started doing youtube before then but it wasn't if you go through the history of my channel it's laptop repair videos and things like that i don't know i was trying to figure out what to do on youtube now i always had those corporate clients i was always building them up over time i've got a couple videos on relationship building and things like that which are really important any marketing i did back in 2003 is not really relevant marketing i did for retail in 2007 much less relevant uh social media is more where it's at now in terms of ways to market but still the basis is the same it's about you know relationship building and things like that now we started getting rid of all the retail stuff around the end of 2018 we made a lot of changes and in 2019 we phased out retail services all together so i have slowly because of the way google lets me rename things it's been a little bit challenging to get rid of the full pc pickup name because i registered my youtube channel with the pc pickup launch system so depending on when you're watching this is whether or not i've got all the changes in place to get rid of the pc pickup and call me lawrence systems only and that brings me like i said all the way to present day and how this company operates so currently we've got a group of on payroll regular staff and we have contractors we use and we have quite a few contractors let me dive into that topic in another video and like i said i want to throw this out there to kind of give the brief history of my company and where we're at um in terms of the way we market it over the years it's one of those dynamic things i can't just give you an easy answer for but you know we did change with the times back i remember buying paper ads when i had suburban computers newspapers were still relevant they're much less relevant today in their form of like physical paper that they were back then but you know whatever advertising means is you're gonna do is you know gonna have to change and evolve with the times uh we got heavy into social media and public speaking was a really big part of always how i built my b2b work and that was what led to youtube because well youtube is the answer of how do i scale public speaking well public speaking or even teaching people about technology two passions i have because i spoke at things like open source conferences and stuff like that how do you get in front of more than 30 or 40 people that can squeeze into a room you put it on youtube and that's kind of where we're at today right now we decided towards sometime i think it's beginning of 2019 or end of 2018 i didn't write these dates down specifically but i thought i can reference roughly when i just quit spending any money in advertising was then because 100 of our inbound leads are currently youtube that comes up a lot and i bring that up because a lot of people say well i want to start a tech company and the most common question anytime i talk about a wiring job or wi-fi project or some of these on-site videos i do is how did you get the client how'd you get the client people thinking that there's some magic list of things where you can get these clients that's not the case it is the probably you know you may have some really good technical skills but probably your biggest challenge is going to be landing those clients unless you're lucky enough to have a family member who can refer you business a friend who can refer you business that's a lot of times when you see people or you've asked that question and scratch to your head how does that person even have a business sometimes you dive into their history you'll go oh yeah their whole family you know handed them this or they share a last name with a large company in the area the owners of that company like oh that's how they landed some of those clients but that's an important part to think about and i don't want to sugarcoat it that is something you know really really hard and i've brought this up many times i'm not overselling or ever tried to oversell entrepreneurship because i think there's too many people trying to really sell you a book sell you you too can be an entrepreneur just follow these steps and procedures and it's way more fuzzy than that that's what makes these videos a little bit harder uh to do and people ask me a lot of business videos and my honesty makes them a little bit more challenging because i i can tell you what i did but that doesn't equate to exactly like you should just do the same thing i mean i'm going to say there's some pretty solid advice i give in terms of get an accountant because that's probably good advice now if someone says how do you find a good accountant oh i don't know i got lucky i like my accountant he's really good well he now it was his mom's company who started it and then he took it over so the transition of power um from her over 17 years towards him running it has gone really well but that outcome is not the same because i know someone who just was asking me about a good accountant because they had such a challenge with their accounting firm and problems of them not filing their taxes properly uh it's the same problem with finding a good tech company you can tell people you're a good tech company but people are always a little skeptical of it and these are reason why any of these service based companies uh it's hard proving yourself it's hard getting out there but you know i wanna at least tell this history out there if there's something specific you want me to expand upon i'm more than happy to do it i'll leave a link though to a couple of videos that don't expand upon a couple things like how do you hire someone and you know process procedure workflows or relationship building i think i have a couple videos on that i'll leave them linked below i have my whole business list video and i'll put a few of them like i said down below to talk about that i can give you general ideas that i hope help you along the way but it's not like a tech video or a firewall video where there's a specific task and outcome which makes these little bit harder to do but i'm always watching the comments and you know i have my forums so i'll leave some comments and i'll try to get back with every one of more things on this particular topic maybe that you might find interesting but yeah this is 17 years in business which is kind of a lot to think about because i have now very much worked for myself far longer than i've worked for anyone else i mean 17 years doesn't feel like 17 years sometimes and i i know i've heard people say that i never understood that and i don't know how to add context if you're just starting today go going what does 17 years later feel like it doesn't it feels like i've always done this but i still remember having a job at some point but i don't know if i could ever go back to having a job that's probably one thing i can see is the thought when people have you know made offers over the years to buy my company i'm like what would i do if i had a job i don't know but i'll uh anyways leave comments below i'll get back with people and let me know what sounds interesting and i appreciate it thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to lawrences.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurensystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 23,399

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: E33fOpZKaZ8

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020