Tag Archives: self-employed

The merits of having a registered head office address     

Buchanan Street has long been the most prestigious address in central Glasgow. Flanked by the city centre’s two main shopping malls – St Enoch and Buchanan Galleries – and sporting two Subway stations and the city’s jewellery quarter, it’s a half-mile highlights reel. And among its crowning glories is G75 Media’s head office – a second-floor eyrie in an elegant Victorian corner building, looking down Buchanan Street towards St Enoch Square.

I never intended my business to be based in the centre of Glasgow. The company name was inspired by the East Kilbride postcode of my family home, intended to attract local clients and distinguish G75 Media from London-based competitors. However, this registered head office address was sold in 2021 when we moved to Carlisle, prompting a relocation to a Georgian terrace on Bath Street – and then a second move to our current premises in the heart of Glasgow last year.

We’re not really here

The strange thing is that I never visited the office on Bath Street, and I haven’t set foot in the West George Street premises, either. These are the domains of business premises providers – companies who, in exchange for a modest fee, provide entrepreneurs and sole traders with a registered head office address. You might be able to work in one of these venues, or you might not. You may be able to call in and collect post, or you may not. You could share workspace with other creatives, or you could be denied that option.

Regardless of the additional services they offer, these registered head office address providers give microbusinesses, startups and limited companies of modest stature a legal base of operations in circumstances where it may be impractical or inadvisable to use a home address. There are many reasons why this might be the case:

  1. You’ve relocated from one part of the UK to another. G75 Media was founded in Scotland and legally has to have a registered head office address north of the Border for the entirety of its existence, yet I now live in England. Even if I wanted to, I can’t use my current home address as my business one.
  2. You want a stable address while yours is changing. The challenges of postal redirection and mail sent to a former address will be familiar to students, tenants, contract workers, cohabiting couples, divorcees and many others. A dedicated business address represents a beacon of consistency.
  3. You don’t want to publicise your home address. Perhaps there are safeguarding issues around a family member. Maybe you’ve been stalked in the past. Or it could simply be you want to keep the distinctive combination of an unusual surname and your home address off the internet.
  4. You want to delineate work and home. A separate address for paperwork and admin helps to maintain a distance between home life and the business activities which often bleed into your free time anyway. It also means work and personal mail doesn’t get mixed up on the doormat.
  5. You split your time between multiple addresses. If you’re lucky enough to have a holiday home, or unfortunate enough to be birdnesting, you might not always be at one address to receive mail. A registered head office address provider can open, scan and email post to you, wherever you are.

After the ability to put down a permanent base of operations (that’s not your personal home), postal management is often the most valuable element offered by registered head office address providers. Some centres additionally offer virtual assistant services such as inbound call management, while we’ve already touched on the hot desking services some providers offer. Being able to sit in a room full of other freelancers or entrepreneurs could diminish the loneliness many people feel when working for (and by) themselves, and it also presents networking and brainstorming opportunities which are lacking at your local Costa.

If you’re setting up a small business, trying to find the right words for a new venture or struggling under the pressures of running your own company, outsourcing key aspects of your workload could be transformative. And when it comes to content production, marketing or advertising copy, report writing and bid or tender production, G75 Media is ideally placed to help. Get in touch with us to discuss our award-winning copywriting, journalism and editing services.

Common IT issues – and how to fix them yourself

Few things send a chill down the spine of small business owners more than unexpected technical issues. It’s one thing transferring your smartphone profile to a new device, or scheduling software updates for late at night. It’s quite another when your computer suddenly crashes, or fails to boot up properly, or a key software packages declares that your time-honoured password is incorrect. Since most entrepreneurs, sole traders and small business owners rely heavily on digital hardware and technology, even relatively common IT issues can feel like an existential threat to productivity.

Having set up my business in a house with a Midband internet connection (a pitiful 256Kbps), I’ve experienced a fair few technical challenges over the years. I’ve watched a phone engineer burn through three diamond-tipped drill bits trying to fit a phone socket into a home office. I’ve raced to copy key files off a formerly trusty desktop PC before it repeatedly overheated and shut down. I’ve had a laptop die after my dearly beloved poured a glass of Ribena over it, a broadband connection go offline for an entire afternoon, and repeated connection problems with Microsoft Teams before a key client meeting which literally reduced me to tears of frustration. I have hated Teams ever since.

Simple solutions to common IT issues

Perhaps surprisingly, there are often relatively easy ways to resolve common IT issues. These don’t require a computing qualification (which I have) or the ability to write program code (which I also have). Below, I’ve added a few practical suggestions for anyone who can just about work a USB-C cable but doesn’t know their RAM from their ROM or their HTTP from their HTML. And if these tips prove to be of value to you, whoever you are, you’re very welcome. If you ever need an award-winning writer, I hope G75 Media will be your first port of call.

  1. Just because a computer won’t connect to the internet doesn’t mean the broadband is down. Test the connection on a second device in case your laptop or desktop computer has developed a specific issue, such as a software update that’s disabled its wireless connectivity, or a hardware failure.
  2. If two or more devices are offline, find your router and reboot it. Wait a few minutes and try connecting again. If you’re still having problems, use your phone’s 4G or 5G to check what any flashing router lights mean. Also visit your ISP’s website, in case they’re reporting local outages.
  3. If you’ve enabled automatic file saving (such as Microsoft OneDrive’s autosave functionality), a sudden software crash doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost any data. Keep calm and carry on while the software or computer reboots; your data should be waiting. And don’t panic even if it isn’t…
  4. Some software packages incorporate version control where you can access recently saved versions of a particular file. This isn’t always obvious – in Word, you typically need to search for it. Restore the last saved version and, while it’s fresh in your memory, add in any obvious lost changes.
  5. Being unable to access a software package can be incredibly frustrating. Try updating the software, rebooting your chosen device or accessing it another way (via an app instead of a website, or vice versa). Resetting your password may enable you to log in, as might logging in as a guest.
  6. If hardware isn’t responsive and there’s valuable data on-screen, take a photograph with your smartphone. This will enable you to replicate whatever is captured – a carefully worded email, for instance. Turn off your camera flash to avoid part of the screen being obscured by reflective light.
  7. Overheating is one of the most common IT issues. Clean dust vents, ensuring a device has a free flow of fresh air. You could even position a fan beside cooling vents to maximise airflow. This might only help temporarily, but in that time, you may be able to rescue files or complete time-critical tasks.
  8. If WiFi is being flaky, there are workarounds. If a machine has an Ethernet port (a squarish socket), use a cable to physically plug it into the router. If that’s not possible, Powerline adaptors carry wired network data through home plug sockets. Turn off wireless alarms, baby monitors, microwaves and kettles to minimise interference.
  9. If a device (like a wireless printer) is suddenly failing to connect, or appears to be offline, it’s probably lost its WiFi connection. Try restarting the device in question, re-entering the WiFi password, and running any in-built troubleshooter utilities to reconnect it to your local network.
  10. If you’re forced to work offline, productivity doesn’t have to cease entirely. Save documents on your device’s hard drive, check emails on your phone, conduct paper research, ring people instead of emailing them, and so forth. Any work you can do is better than doing nothing at all.

Having grown up around computers and been an early adopter of the internet, I am now a highly experienced technology writer. The topics might change (in-demand subjects among my clients currently include quantum computing, generative AI and data centres) but the underlying principles of IT remain the same. Basically, computers are wilfully hostile and will take any opportunity to let you down at the most inopportune moments.

However, when common IT issues are resolved, computers enable us all to run our businesses – and in G75 Media’s case, to provide award-winning copywriting, journalism and business writing. Get in touch with us to discuss bid writing, marketing copy, report production or anything else requiring a keyboard, reliable software and a stable internet connection…