Kevin Egan started his business dreaming of completing freelance work while sitting on the beach with his laptop, but more recently his goals have changed as he has opened new offices and will soon be hiring more staff.

"I left college in 2000 and my first job was with Netscape. They were at the top of the dot-com bubble. That was my first introduction to the web and it was right at the heart it.

“I worked there when Netscape was taken over by AOL. AOL was one of the forefathers of online social networking sites. I was involved in these cutting edge projects and ideas before they became normality," said Mr Egan.

After working in Netscape/AOL Mr Egan worked for some Irish IT companies and found the experience an eye opener. He said, “Really my desire to start a company came during the first time I worked for an Irish software company.

“This was the first time I realised how Irish business was. I felt it was very ad hoc. I realised it was run like a small business with 100 people working for it. It still had the structures of a business with one or two people working for it.”

It was at this time that Mr Egan started to think that perhaps he could create a better working environment for employees and more fairly reward their efforts.

“If you have an environment where people are willing to work for you and willing to make something good, if I reward and appreciate that effort I could build a company that my employees would be proud of and that I could be proud of and that people could get good quality dependable service from.”

Building foundations, building relationships
While working in the Irish IT company Mr Egan started a nixer business fixing PCs. During this time he learned that a fundamental of doing business is building and maintaining relationships with people.

Mr Egan said, “A lot of those relationships I made at that point were my first formal customers when I started my own business. “

Although the business at this stage was a small nixer business the focus was on doing a good job and exceeding expectations.

“My biggest customer now has five websites with me and they were one of my first customers from the nixer job. If the first day you do a job for someone you do it right, then five years later they will still be a customer.”

The importance of a good webpage

In the last few years the web has matured with Web 2.0 into a secure stable platform for doing business. Importantly says Mr Egan it is an environment that people under twenty five are born into and companies that ignore this will lose market share.

“What business has to recognise is that the web is a more stable platform now and a more trusted platform but more importantly it is a platform that people younger than 25 are born into. Business has to start realising that these people are your next generation of customers,” stated Mr Egan.

“I'm not taking about 12 year olds I am talking about 18-25 year olds who have purchasing power and are starting businesses. If your website is not adapting to these people you are not moving forward and you are ignoring what is happening around you.”

Egan Freelance designs email web pages, brochure sites and full e-commerce websites to offer a full range of solutions for their clients.

Mr Egan believes that building websites is not only a technical job but also involves understanding the core values of his customers and presenting these values through their web pages.

He said, “Imagine you owned a high end clothes shop but did not paint your shop you could not expect anybody to spend a lot of money with you. It is exactly the same on the web.

“It is important to portray the ‘why’ you do business in person through your website. For example if you always make your customers a cup of tea and always make sure they are comfortable and they like that type of relationship, then I try to represent it on the web page.

“If they come to your website to find out about you then obviously you cannot make them a cup of tea, then the web designer has to be clever enough to find out about that relationship with your customers and try and translate that into a website,” said Mr Egan.