I am always amazed by the volume of workers who are now moving toward the Internet to pay the bills and make money. I have a group of similar e-commerce firms which as a group give me a bigger monthly income than it was possible to earn by taking conventional employment. The number of hours I work are roughly the same but I don’t have take the train any longer, giving me more leisure time. Things are much better for me now in terms of my family life and my bank balance.

Operating a handful of businesses is fulfilling, but I have had to work out methods of being more organised and refining my working practices. To record the details of my valued customers and the financial elements of my companies, I use a selection of tools – you need superior small business management software to be efficient and let you focus acquiring and taking care of customers. I purchased a Quickbooks login and a NetSuite login. I can get to these web applications from from my home or when I am travelling and they make it really simple for me to track all of the businesses events as they happen.

With my NetSuite login I am able to monitor all of the selling activities on my web stores and observe the effectiveness of the Google Adwords marketing activities that serve up new clients to my shopping carts. I no longer use Microsoft Office which substituted with a Google Account with all of the applications I need, like electronic mail, word processing and spreadsheets. I can log into these systems from wherever I might be.

I have significantly improved my skills, I have found a huge volume of free and amazing value for money online education which I have quickly studied. One of the most significant lessons I have taken onboard is how to spot and outsource tedious tasks, to companies who can do this efficiently and cheaper. I can exactly identify the moment at which I broke through my earnings target to my uncovering of the advantages of sub contracting some of the work absorbing most of my time, to me increasing my money in to beyond that of my income whilst in full time employment.

In Part 2, I cover the detail about how I work.