My second talk of the week was on Wednesday 19th with Simon Wilkes, who went to the University of Central Lancashire from the years 1994-1997 where he studied journalism. He now runs his own business which he started two months ago, ‘SJ Wilkes Media Ltd’, and brands the business as ‘Digital Media Content Specialists’.
Simon is a Sports Journalist and worked for the first ever football website, Team Talk, from 2001-2014, which is a company bought by Sky Sports 6 years ago. There was 1900 people in Leeds alone working for Sky until the company decided to move itself to London. He was given the option of moving to the capital or being made redundant, and as he had built a family life for himself here in Leeds he decided to leave the job and start up his own company here.
When Simon was talking us through everything he has done so far with his business I couldn’t believe he’d only had it running for two months. There’s been so much work put in already, it sounded like a very busy schedule for him! I was also surprised at some of the costs he had mentioned. Although there are some high expenses, it only cost him £180 to set up a Ltd company, which was done through an accountant, and his website costs £10 a month through Vistaprint, which he said is a similar format to WordPress.
After attending this talk, I still don’t think setting up my own company is something I’m interested in doing, I think I’d find it too stressful! I found it really interesting though and he said that although you need to define your strong point, most jobs now bleed into others and so he talked about the importance of having multiple skill sets in the industry.
Simon’s website: http://www.sjwilkesmedialtd.co.uk/
Lizzie Parsons 