After another stressful day I'm seriously thinking of working for myself doing IT.

Does anyone here have their own IT company? If so how did you find your customer base?

Yes I do.

In the early days it was local advertising and I built up a small customer base, but to be honest I then moved into contracting so my company exists but doesn't really count.

I had a few customers through word of mouth from people I worked with but then I also moved to contracting. After I while it wasn't worth keeping my company open so I started using an umbrella company.

Must be raking in the profits with the current weather

"An umbrella company is a company that acts as an employer to agency contractors who work under a fixed term contract assignment"

I know

AlanD & oceanicitl - thanks for your replies

How did you get into contracting?

Where do you find out who wants a contractor?

I'm quite well known in the mac world now because I got my CV out to as many IT agencies as possible. When I was looking for work I'd go through jobs on www.jobserve.com every evening and email my CV to as many agencies as possible (even if the role wasn't specifically what I was looking for). I'd save a standard email promoting my skills & availability and just copy it to new email and attach the CV. If anyone was interested they would usually call me back in the morning. I got permanent and contract jobs that way and I'm still approached by agencies now and I've been working at my current place for 5 years.

I would say make sure your technical skill set is listed at the top of your CV. Keep job descriptions to the point and don't go over 2 pages.

Linkedin.com is also used a lot now and I've seen agencies and people promoting jobs. I've even got people from agencies as my contacts as you never know when they might come in useful.

What Caroline said basically. If you pm me an email address I'll send you a spreadsheet of ( mostly active ) agency email addresses.

Also upload your CV to jobserve and let agencies grab it.

Thanks having a look at Jobserve website now

Another stressful day - this time with Blackberries - they ALL seem to have stopped sending / receiving emails today around lunchtime. Usual finger pointing by blackberry and network provider (O2) but still no working email

Let me know if you want me to debug this for you

Not quite so stressful today - just loads of cables everywhere in the server room - we are having 24 new network points put in on Saturday so there's my weekend gone

Saspro came up trumps though for fixing our Blackberry problem - now all I have to do is persuade my bosses to ditch them and get something else - preferably Samsung Galaxy W

PS> Saspro - I'll look for some chocolate samples tomorrow for you.

iPhone FTW!

Looked at them but rejected them due to battery life