There is one thing I hear almost every time I meet somebody for the first time, and almost always with the same slightly embarrassed look: “but I am small, I do not know if you would be interested”.

I am interested. In fact it is the work I like most, and I would like to explain why, because it is not politeness for its own sake: it is a preference with practical reasons behind it.

With a small business you talk to the person who decides

When you work for a large organisation, you spend the first two months working out who has the final word. You make a proposal, somebody takes it to somebody else, it comes back changed by a person you have never met. The time that takes is not working time: it is waiting time, and the client pays for it.

In a shop, in a practice, in a firm of six people, the person who decides is the person in front of you. You say something, they answer yes or no, and the next day it is done. For the same budget, a small business gets far more than it expected, simply because nobody is burning hours in meetings.

The right project is often smaller than you imagine

It often happens that somebody arrives with an enormous idea, because they have looked at a competitor’s site ten times bigger than theirs, or because somebody told them they “need the app”. Then we look at how they actually work, and it turns out what they need is a five-page site that answers the phone for them, with the information people always ask for and a simple way of getting in touch.

That is the right project. It costs a quarter as much, it takes three weeks instead of five months, and it brings in more customers than the enormous idea, because it exists. The first thing I do is not a quote: it is working out whether what you are asking me for is what you actually need, and whether it is sustainable for your business. If I think you would be spending your money badly I tell you, including when it would suit me to keep quiet.

Nobody has ever taken offence. What does often happen is that we agree to do half now and the rest in six months, once the first part has started to pay for itself.

Being local is not a romantic detail

I am based in Abruzzo, on the Adriatic coast of central Italy. Along this coast and in the towns inland I can be there in half an hour or a little more, and further afield when we agree on a day.

I do not say that to fill the page with place names. I say it because it changes the way the work goes:

• The first meeting is in person, not a video call where you cannot quite tell who you have in front of you. In my view that is the moment when it gets decided whether a job happens or not, and not because I am good at selling, but because we understand each other sooner that way.
• When something breaks, I can come. It happens rarely, but it happens, and knowing there is a person twenty minutes away rather than a support form is a difference you feel.
• I see the place. If I am building the website of a restaurant by the sea, it helps to have been there. If it is a firm out in the countryside, it helps to know what the road to get there is like, because that ends up in the directions on the site.

I also work remotely, across Italy and abroad, and it works very well: a good share of the bigger projects I have done started from a video call. But when I can choose, I choose to be there.

Small does not mean done carelessly

This is the part I care about most. I build the five-page site of a garage with the same approach I use for a platform serving nineteen restaurants: pages that load fast, text written so that Google understands what you do, a form that works on a phone too, and everything explained to you so that you can update it yourself without calling me.

That last part is the one almost nobody promises. A site that needs me every time an opening time changes is a badly built site. Half an hour together at the computer at handover, and from then on you change the opening time yourself.

How we would start

We start with a conversation, which costs nothing and commits you to nothing. You tell me what you do and what is missing, I tell you whether there is anything worth doing, what it might cost and how long it would take. If the answer is “you do not need anything for now”, I tell you that just the same.

Payment, if we do go ahead, comes in three stages: one when the quote is accepted, one halfway through, one when it goes live. That way neither of us is exposed, and you see the work grow before you have paid for all of it.

If you have a business and you have read this far, write to me. At worst I will save you an unnecessary expense.