Running "Jonco IT & Security Ltd" so far

In March 2025 I founded my company, Jonco IT & Security Ltd, and the company has been trading since April. In this post I'm going to talk about my experience so far. If you're thinking of setting up your own company, then this post might be useful to you.

My company is registered in England and Wales, so the comments I make here will be based on the regulations and laws that apply to those jurisdictions. Be aware that this post does not constitute legal or financial advice - I'm merely sharing my experience.

How did I get here?

I've said a few times how I've felt like I'm at a career crossroads, and that feeling kept coming and going. In February 2025 I left my employer after my original employer had been bought out, and I'd essentially been demoted from the security lead for a company down to someone that answered security questionnaires. We'd paid off our mortgage earlier in the year, and had some savings, so my wife and I agreed now was the right time to give this a go.

Why a limited company?

Broadly speaking, for a business of my size there's two options: sole-trader and limited company. There's pros ✅ and cons ⬇️ to both, and I summarise some below:

Sole-trader

✅ All money in the business is property of the sole-trader
✅ Additional regulation like IR35 doesn't apply
✅ Less complicated to set up than a limited company
⬇️ If you mess up, your home is in scope (i.e. a client could sue you, forcing you to sell your home)
⬇️ Not all expenses count as tax deductible
⬇️ There are fewer tax-free incentives
⬇️ Some clients won't work with businesses unless they are limited companies
⬇️ You have to do a tax return at the end of the financial year

Limited company

✅ Easier to add employees
✅ A large number of expenses are tax deductible
✅ If you mess up, your home is less likely at risk - the client can sue the company, but the company doesn't own your home. Note that it is possible for a client to sue directors in addition to the company
✅ Can be more tax efficient (e.g. dividends have a lower rate of tax than income tax)
⬇️ IR35 applies to companies where there is a sole director that provides the services - personal service companies. If the work is considered "inside IR35" that can massively impact your earnings
⬇️ More complex to create (directors, shares, etc.)
⬇️ Has to be registered with Companies House, which incurs extra costs (registration, confirmation statements, submitting accounts, etc.)
⬇️ You (still) have to do a tax return at the end of the financial year

This is not an exhaustive list! In my case, knowing the type of clients I was targetting, and wanting reduced risk to the family home, I picked the limited company route. You'll still want insurance in both cases.

Planning

Before I committed to working for myself, I put together a plan listing the services I would provide and initial costs that I could predict. These rough details would have applied to both sole-trading and being a limited company.

My initial budget predicted that, excluding salary, I'd need just shy of £4,000 a year in order to run my limited company. I checked that I had that in personal savings (I did) because that was another consideration before starting on this journey. If my business failed / had to close after a year I wanted to impact the family budget as little as possible, and needed to make sure I could pay any contracts (mobile phone, etc.) that I'd signed up for.

Service wise I'm pretty flexible, which is a blessing and a curse. When I'm asked "what is it that you do?" the answer of "well, I work in this area and can do a lot of it" isn't very helpful! I need to get better at my "elevator pitch".

Bank accounts & money management 🪙

When you found a limited company, your directors have to buy shares. I bought my shares for £1, but at this stage had no bank account which led to my joke that the pound coin on the table was the company account 😆.

After looking at business bank account options, and importantly what they would also give me, I settled on Mettle, a bank that's part of NatWest. Mettle is exclusively for business owners, be that limited companies or sole traders, and there are no branches - all management of the account is done via an app. If you need to pay cash in then you can do that at a post office.

When considering bank accounts, I checked reviews online and also looked at their restrictions. In Mettle's case, I can only accept payment in pounds sterling, and I cannot accept cheques. Both of these restrictions were fine for me. If I later have a customer in Europe that wants to pay me in euros then I'll have to open a separate account, but my preference would be pounds sterling.

Mettle also gave me the FreeAgent accountancy software for free - I didn't want to run the company's finances in a spreadsheet! So long as I make at least one transaction per month through my Mettle account I won't have any FreeAgent fees to pay. I was aware of Quickbooks, Xero, and FreeAgent so compared them. Their costs were similar, given the features I needed, but I choose FreeAgent because a) it came free with my Mettle account, b) it seemed easy to use, and c) it's what my accountant uses.

Oh, yeah, the company has an accountant. Speaking to a friend at Fruitworks, he highly recommended his accountant. I've got no concerns stating who my accountant is, as you could find that through Companies House, and I'd happily recommend Karl and K Williams & Co. Karl is really quick to reply to queries, and is a friendly chap. His fees are quite reasonable too.

Getting a logo

My daughter traced a photograph of her laptop, so that keyboard is actually accurate 🤯.

My daughter decided she was going to design my logo for me, having seen the truly appalling examples that candidates on The Apprentice come up with. She knew she could do better. The logo was produced in April - May 2025, so the "AI" based suggestions (below) come from that time.

Logo suggestions from AI

For fun, we asked Microsoft Copilot to come up with some suggestions. In response to the prompt "For my company, “Jonco IT & Security”, suggest some logo ideas. The company colour is #7030a0, and some services are listed on the website: https://jonco-it.co.uk/services/" it provided some suggestions. They got the colour OK but the actual logos were awful!

Rejected logo 1: Microsoft Copilot's logo suggestion for a "shield and network".

Copilot had also offered a logo based on "abstract tech", similarly awful:

Rejected logo 2: Microsoft Copilot's logo suggestion for an "abstract tech" based logo.

Website

I'm no website designer, and while I can put together a functional site it's not likely to win prizes. Requirements for my site were that it was cheap to host, quick to load, worked across multiple screen sizes, and informative for visitors.

I chose to create a static website (as in there's no back-end database) using Cecil. I've used Cecil for a few basic sites so it was familiar to me already. Pages are written in a combination of Markdown and HTML (both of which I know), and I can customise the CSS to change how the site looks.

Feedback from one prospective customer, via a friend, was that the site "didn't look very professional". On digging a bit, that appeared to be because "it wasn't very whizzy". Now, I don't know about you, but if I'm looking at a site for a vendor I don't want loads of pop-ups offering me things I probably don't want and that cause distraction. I want to go to a site, find the information I'm after, and leave.

Nonetheless, I took that feedback on board and made the site a bit more "whizzy". There's now images at the top of (most) pages, with the page title fading in gradually. I've also moved the services to the front page, rather than a separate "services" page.

Another tech company in the area looked at my site and commented "there's no cookie banner". Correct. I hate cookie banners (a completely failed piece of legislation) so designed my site to not use cookies. I also don't track visitors. If you choose to give me your data (via email or contact form) then that's great. I'm not going to use a cookie to track you, and thus no cookie banner is required 🥳.

Part two is coming...

There's a lot to discuss based on my experiences so far, and that's after only eight months of trading. In the next part I'll talk about costs, insurance, LinkedIn, and the challenges of finding work.

Banner image: Screenshot from my website, with my company logo overlaid.