Enterprise Nation

Ed Molyneux started FreeAgent Central in 2007. He runs the business from his home in Scotland and is living proof of how you can start a home business, build it up in your part-time, and scale for international expansion.

Background

Ed Molyneux began his career as a pilot in the RAF. He left in 2003 to work as a freelance consultant for a major defence company. Spotting a gap in the market for an accountancy service tailored for freelancers, he started freeagentcentral.com with two partners in 2007.

Ed is the Chief Executive and a lovely man to chat to on a Wednesday afternoon.

This is Ed’s story.

When did you start the business and are you working in it full time?
We started early prototyping in 2006, formed the company in 2007, launched the site in October 2007 and a universal version earlier this year. We’ve been pretty busy and achieved quite a bit in a short time! But no, I don’t yet work full time on the business. There are 3 of us; 2 based in Scotland and one of our partners in London – we all have other contracts (that help to pay the bills!) but our aim is to grow FreeAgent Central so we can all focus on it full time.

So it’s been a busy year?
Yes, not only did I start the business in 2007, I also moved my family from Twickenham to Scotland (in to a house that we had built) and we had a new baby. It’s been quite a year!

Can you tell me about your service?
It’s an accountancy service focused on freelancers. With FreeAgenct Central, you can manage clients, track time, create invoice and generate accounts.

How do you support your customers?
We thought long and hard about how we should provide support; as a blog, a forum or a wiki but in the end we opted for a great online product called Satisfaction. 

If you type in a question, it comes up with results of similar questions – and the answers so we’re building a big base of ‘frequently asked questions’ that can be answered via this third party software. If the customer can’t get an answer through this route, then I respond directly to emails within 8 hours.

How are you promoting your service?
It’s tough to market the service to every individual freelancer in the UK so we are approaching accountancy firms who are interested in offering our service to their customers.

We are picking up business through referrals and word of mouth, were disappointed with an experiment in online advertising and are about to spend more on a Google Adwords campaign.  

How will you grow the business?
We want to perfect the model and then ‘build out’ – by that I mean, expand into other countries, rather than add new applications to our service. Our unique selling point is that we provide a service for freelancers that makes things simple so we don’t want to start adding bells and whistles to our product!

But we do want to expand into other English speaking countries that have a similar working style such as the US and Canada.

The beauty of what we’ve created is that it is easily scaleable. With the right model, we just need extra server space to grow. Meaning we can service customers anywhere in the world and I get to stay in my home office!

What’s the thing you most enjoy about working from home?
I like being here for the family. I’m around all the time which I think my kids will appreciate as they grow up. They’re starting to notice it already as my son was asked in the playground “why doesn’t your Dad have a boss?” – long may it be that way!

Ed Molyneux talks to Emma Jones 

• FreeAgentCentral

• Satisfaction