Martin Sullivan had been making and restoring carriage wheels in Somerset and Dorset for 20 years, before what can only be described as his own personal winter of discontent in 1999, when the orders began to dry up.
While the object of his profession didn't need reinventing - the basic design of the carriage wheel remains the same today as it was before the rise of the Roman Empire - his business did. The wheels and carriages he made himself generally lasted 20 years, which is a long time in any profession to wait for maintenance orders.
As a qualified wheelwright, Martin was in a trade that is highly skilled yet not necessarily well paid. Consequently, as debts began to pile up, he almost became ill with the burden of both his business and livelihood dying before his very eyes. But, encouraged by a constant stream of local radio adverts by dot.coms, Sullivan came up with an idea for one of his own.
"By now I realised a total change of direction was required, but I wasn't qualified to do anything else. I was beginning to understand where the internet was going and what it could allow you to do," recalls Sullivan.
This led to the birth of a series of online directories for local businesses, touchofabutton.net. Single-handedly, he builds and hosts mini-websites for businesses with no online presence of their own and which require no more than brochureware to market their goods and services. It also has directories for businesses further afield, covering Somerset and Dorset, with plans to expand to Bristol, Brighton, Croydon, Salisbury, Surrey, Coventry and Birmingham.
"The idea for the website was perhaps born through my own hardship," Sullivan says. "An internet site that helped small business to get a foothold on the net would be of tremendous use. It would offer a few web pages dedicated to that business which would work out far more cost-effective than everyone having their own website and paying huge amounts for web space they are never going to use." Touchofabutton.net also directly submits the listed web pages to all the major search engines including Alta Vista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves, to increase their retrieval ratings.
And for those businesses still without email, touchofabutton.net collates any emails submitted to their mini-websites, converts them into faxes and sends them on to the client. Touchofabutton.net provides all this for a £100 annual subscription.
The site, hosted by a London-based ISP, Freezone, is also a cybershop window for the Martin J Sullivan Wheelwright workshop, in the village of Kington Magna in Dorset. In one move, Sullivan has used the most modern of technologies to ensure the survival of the most ancient of trades, well into the 21st century.
Sullivan was virtually penniless when he set up the business. So he bought himself a Pentium III desktop computer, scanner, printer and digital camera package from Tiny Computers on a buy-now-pay-later basis for £1,600.
He found an office chair in a skip and fashioned a desk from leftover bits of wood in his workshop. However, one major problem prevailed: Sullivan had never switched on a computer before November 1999. And being dyslexic, the manuals were not about to be much use either.
But good fortune literally came out of a random act of kindness, when he picked up a hitchhiker who just so happened to be a professional web designer. He taught the wheelwright all he needed to know about computers and website building using Microsoft FrontPage, taking only what Sullivan could afford as payment. Eight months later, touchofabutton.net was set up at a total cost nudging £2,000.
Touchofabutton.net has managed to dispel two myths about internet businesses, by proving that neither a massive outlay nor a Flash-riddled site is necessarily required to succeed on the web, and that a good business idea will still essentially sell itself. Touchofabutton.net's rudimentary and quaintly amateur design couldn't be any simpler and yet does the job Sullivan set it up to do - to give small local businesses some form of internet presence.
Since last July, Sullivan has built 1,000 one-page websites, featuring information, product pictures, contact details and a map. Customers range from arts and crafts shops to a double-glazing firm. He is about to purchase 2Gb of web space to accommodate the rising demand.
The site generated much interest at the height of the foot and mouth crisis, as marketing budgets shrank while companies tried to stay afloat. "Farmers, organic producers, tourists and B&Bs all called me with their horror stories. So I offered a six-month trial of the service. Now over 80% of my client base has renewed to a full subscription," he claims. "Revenue from the site so far runs into tens of thousands of pounds and I am aiming to get 1,000 renewals by the end of the year."
In a move uncharacteristic of latter-day internet start-ups, Sullivan has turned down three offers of investment. "Only if the business was failing would that be attractive to me," he says. Instead, having just sold his house, he believes some of the proceeds will be enough to develop the business. He valued the site at £125,000 but says he would now not sell it "for less than three quarters of a million".
So far, business is brisk enough to pay off most of his debts and buy back the wheelwright tools he was forced to sell. Sullivan will tentatively return to his original profession this month after an 18-month absence, as orders are starting to filter through from the internet.
He has won £10,000 of business in the last two months, including a commission to restore a carriage once owned by Queen Victoria's friend Lord Lonsdale. He intends to split the site eventually in order to concentrate on being a wheelwright again with some help from the internet. His wife Cathy, currently embarked on a number of computer courses, will take over the running of touchofabutton.net.
In the end, his experience of hardship before the epiphany of his dot.com idea, very much informs his treatment of fellow small business operators.
"I want to turn touchofabutton.net into a major help service - a small business saver. I'd like to make money but I am equally motivated to help businesses."
