Career change ahoy... (LFW)

[Smart Mart]

Having reached the age of 42 and having little to show from a varied career, I thought it was about time I tried being a little pro-active and tried the mighty PH massive for some careers advice.

I've been in sales, account management and courier work all my life barring a three year period where I managed a forecourt operation. Spent the first three decades of my life in Somerset before moving to Bristol in 1999. I am happy dealing with the public and equally happy working on my own.

Four years ago I started to admin a website for my boys football team (under-6's then, under-10's now). My boyhood football team heard about this and asked me if I'd like to write a few archive articles for their matchday programme on a voluntary basis. This I did and I still do it now.

Last year I took over their club website (it's a League One team with a pretty templated website that most League clubs use). It's my dream job - meeting the players, going to matches, writing match reports, interviewing the players etc - but the pay is awful, less than £100 a week. I get free entry for me and my sons plus a laptop to use and petrol paid too. It probably takes up 20 hours a week in total although this goes up and down depending on the time of season.

To make ends meet, I deliver 700 free newspapers a week for the local company, raising another £70 a week. With a little tax credit and the odd courier job, I'm lifted to an amount I scrape by on. I don't want to continue just scraping by, I want to blossom and start putting money by.

I want to branch out with the writing or website admin stuff to maybe earn another £100 a week or so. I'm planning on asking for a rise shortly at work but they won't pay a vast amount more than at present.

Does anyone have any further ideas I can try? Regular journalism jobs are tricky for me to get as I'm not formally qualified. I would like to stay in football if possible or sport at a push...

Thanks in advance.

Martin

[Smart Mart]

I ought to clear a couple of things up here.

I'm self employed and work as a freelance for them, I'm not on PAYE, so it's probably even worse than that in reality.

Some weeks though, I would only work maybe four or five hours a week(particularly in the summer months). It's the kind of job that you can spend almost unlimited time on just to get it looking right if you're that way inclined.

[Smart Mart]

zippy3x said:

Why don't you set up an independant fans forum for your club.

I know there will already be a few, but with your access to players and the club, it would give you your unique selling point.

Money can be generated via advertising banners.

I don't think I would be very independent if I worked for the club.

I'd be forever accused of only allowing certain information out and to be honest there's a good fans forum there already and I'd like the information I do know to go out on the official website and the matchday programme.

It's a good suggestion but not one I can really pursue.

[Smart Mart]

ymwoods said:

Smart Mart said:

I ought to clear a couple of things up here.

I'm self employed and work as a freelance for them, I'm not on PAYE, so it's probably even worse than that in reality.

Some weeks though, I would only work maybe four or five hours a week(particularly in the summer months). It's the kind of job that you can spend almost unlimited time on just to get it looking right if you're that way inclined.

For just website upkeep and updating of a site, then £100 a week is not too shabby in terms of pay because, by being freelance, the idea is that you do the upkeep for 10-20 sites therefore netting you a very good income.

If you are going out, writing the content, taking pictures, resizing them etc then this is nothing near what a full time web designer would get. Whilst I see that it is a template site I would hazard a guess that all the content, images and most of the code now is all your own work.

How about setting up a web design company where you do more freelance work? how good are you at designing a website from scratch?

Hi and thanks for your reply.

I don't take the pictures or resize them, the media manager does that. For instance, we are signing a player on loan today, the MM will do the traditional scarf over head pictures and interview him on either audio or video. He'll upload the pics to the image library on the site then I add my article (which is already written) and upload the whole lot on to the club's website. I then tweet the news, link it to the independent's forum (generating more traffic through the site) and also add it to the Facebook site and send it to twenty separate media outlets via a group email.

I do nothing in the way of website design as its all done for me really. The company who run the Football League websites provide templates for the sites - it's only really my job to update the content within the formula.

[Smart Mart]

boobles said:

Perhaps you should ditch that league 1 side & set you're aims higher perhaps at a decent Championship side or better still, the Premier league.
You clearly have the skill etc & perhaps another option could be, stay at the club you support & love but also do the same for another "bigger" club who may offer alot more pay?
I am not sure how realistic this could be, but worth phoning around i would have thought.

Hey, are you stalking me??

I could do it for another club but it's difficult at the moment to feel "involved" sometimes when i work away from the club. It's not really the sort of industry you can do from a distance... if life was different, I'd live nearer the club but it's not.

There's a internal message board that other clubs can post on that is pretty invisible to other users so I might place an ad on there....

Thanks all for your help.