Sixteen-year-old Harvey Washington and 18-year-old Isaac Marshall are Directors of new web design studio, Arcscribe. Here, Harvey talks of setting up a limited company as a teenager – and setting up office in Norwich Digital Hub
We’re Arcscribe, a team of two: me (16) and Isaac (18). We do web design, management and all other digital business services for SMEs across Norfolk.
I met Isaac on my college course. He was a year older than me and had already done one year of A-Levels at UTCN (we were doing T-Levels at City College at this point). I’d personally always had an interest in business and computing at high school, and I’m glad I met Isaac at college to help me and we’ve both built something great. We left our courses early to pursue this and were never looking back.
In school, especially at GCSEs, I excelled in Business and Computing, Isaac also did Business and Computing, and we both come from similar backgrounds with self-employed fathers. Both of us have now left college to pursue Arcscribe full-time.
We first had the idea for Arcscribe when our friend was discussing doing business. We thought to ourselves, we’d take a little crack at it and make some websites for local small businesses for a couple quid a pop. This then scaled to larger businesses, and we started to see it as a viable future rather than just a side hustle.
Being 16 and 18 obviously comes with hurdles, especially regarding business bank accounts. Many high street banks require all directors to be 18 or older. Some newer banks have different rules which we’ve found helpful. We’ve also been constantly learning on the job about company law, accounting, and other business skills which will stick with us and be helpful for life.
The new office we’ve moved into is the Norwich Digital Hub (30 Crown Road) where the team has been lovely in helping us get settled in and is such a step forward for Arcscribe. It helps Isaac and me focus and maintain work-life balance—and it provides us with a reputable address. It helps people take us more seriously.
Isaac and I have had the pleasure of visiting schools and meeting students about work experience and post-16 options (which is certainly ironic since I’m only a year older than them!) and I personally am a strong advocate for entrepreneurship and self-employment to be a more recognised form of post-16 pathway. There are so many amazing entrepreneurs in the making out there who could leave school at 16 and do amazing things with a little push. I’d like to see it talked about more – you don’t need a college or a university degree to do something great. In the nearly six months I’ve worked on Arcscribe, I’ve made connections, developed skills and met people that would put me far ahead of any college course or degree – on a CV. I aspire for a likeminded generation to do the same.
I hope to grow and scale Arcscribe to a small team of a handful of creatives like me and bring local small and medium businesses to the digital future regardless of whether they’re experienced or don’t even know how to use Word. We want to bridge the digital divide that plagues so many businesses by make their processes, information and acquisitions as easy and accessible as possible.
Visit arcscribe.co.uk or call 01603 327078.
Featured image of Harvey Washington by Layla Saunders
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