SNAP SHOT - InsideOut Buildings

Name: Lynn Fotheringham
 
Location: Lancashire
 
Company name: InsideOut Buildings Ltd
 
Your age: 54
 
Most useful item: Office in the garden
 
Home worker tip: Get a dog; you need the exercise and the company when you work at home.
 
Web: www.iobuild.co.uk
 
 
“I was a freelance designer, painting wallpapers and furnishing fabics for the UK printing industry but because Britain didn’t join the euro, I was unable to compete on price with designers from other EU countries. I decided that my next business would not rely on exchange rates and would provide a top quality product and service that my clients couldn’t get anywhere else.
 
So in 2003 I launched InsideOut Buildings to rescue home workers driven mad by working in chaos in the house and move them out into warm dry offices in their gardens, anyone in fact who works from home, lives in a house they love and wants to invest in sympathetically designed office in their garden. We have built offices for everyone from artists and book binders to psychotherapists and plastic surgeons (the plastic surgeon only does his paperwork at home!).
 
I was already working at home and my partner, Gordon Smith, who is an architect, was sick of commuting, but we were running out of living space. We were discussing this with our friend Rob, who really is a rocket scientist, and he suggested building a separate office in the garden. We had a look at a few of the garden buildings that were available on the market and weren’t impressed, so Gordon decided to design and build his own. We then realised that we could do the same for other home workers.
 
We are a virtual business with two directors, two building teams and various ‘remote’ assistants. The directors live in rural north Lancashire, the building teams live in Cardiff and Birmingham, our virtual PA lives in Staffordshire and our telephone reception service is based in north Wales.
 
We rely 99.9% on our natural rankings on the internet. Our website is tremendously well optimised and we rarely use any form of advertising. Our business would not exist without the internet.”