IT Consultant Amritpal Gill

Hello, I'm Amritpal, I'm an IT Consultant. I sort of treat that as me both being a roaming mercenary for hire for tech things, but also running a consultancy to provide sort of managed services for direct clients. Freelancing is really fun. It's a massive area for growth as an individual. I started freelancing when I was 19, and I'm a lot better at my job because of that. I know years later, I'm 27 now, but, it really does force you to grow as a person. 

How did you get into freelancing?

So, I did a gap year apprenticeship, which I loved. And, so I worked at Herbison Freehills, which is an amazing law firm, where I learnt a lot of general skills. Then I tried to study Archeology in Sweden, which obviously didn't end well. So I came back to London and I was out of work for like six months, which is really hard. I got a contract and I just started contracting because that was the work that I could get, and I was trying to find my way a bit. 

I was an umbrella contractor. And then I eventually set up a limited company because a recruiter told me that would be the more appropriate thing to do. Hats off to these guys, they were really nice. Everyone else in that project was really senior to me. I was the most junior person, but they paid me the same rates.

So I set up a business and I was like, oh, wow, this is actually really cool. I now have the ability to do all these things. And I thought, why not stick with it? I've kind of gone full circle. I'm taking just a degree now for fun!

Is it possible to set up a business for £100?

It is possible! The company's house fees to be £13, now it's £50 which is only your first half of £100. Banking, you can do for free. So I'm a big fan of Metal.
So they are a NatWest Bank, I liked the ads and I looked into them. They've got a partnership with Freeagent. So Freeagent is a really powerful, fully featured accounting system. A lot of accountants for freelancers use Freeagent. But also, you know, you can give it to more than one person. So if you have more than one person as a freelance team, easy.

For things like emails, video conferencing, hosting, I mean, that's also really cheap. If you haven't previously owned a domain, say like a co.uk or whatever, you can get that for a quid for your first year. That's a typical deal that most hosting providers do.

If you want a website, then, you can go with, company like HippoServe and it's like £3 a month for the first six months. And WordPress, which is really good because you can move that round really easily. 

For video calls, a lot of people just use the free version or Google Meets. It's totally free. So no, you don't need a lot of money to start a business. It's very easy to do under £100, so long as you are thoughtful about where you spend your money.

Is it neccessary to have a website, email and social media to grow a business?

If you really just don't want a website and you're happy working from a Gmail or something, to be honest, it's pretty professional as a platform. You can also use LinkedIn, depending on what you're doing. TikTok, Instagram have shops and stores. And so as their own sort of platform, you can use that. I think it's useful to have your own shop, your own space, because your website is your shop front. 

It's okay to have high exposure if you know that's where your target market are. Instagram, TikTok and other social medias are really, good for finding a wider audience. However, I have worked with one customer who had no website, no social media or anything, and it was 100% referral. So it is possible and can be successful.

Why did you start your own events?

I started my event which is a pub meetup. So I walk ten minutes up the road and pop into the pub and have a pint. It's a once a month thing, not every night, and the, the reason we started this was because I was looking for networking events for our target market, where I live in East London.

There just wasn't anything like that available. So I thought, why don't we try and do something? And we were initially going to go from, say, restaurant to restaurant and could have it as a bit more highbrow. But I went to my local gastropub and thought, this is quite nice. 

It was actually somebody else's idea that I've stolen. I'm really glad that my team suggested this to me because we've been running it for 18 months now. And we're not running one in December because no one really wants to go out. But, we've been running it pretty consistently for a year and a half, and it's just a nice place to go.