Hi, I'm Brian.
If you start a little business… little technical hurdles are always arising, and simple solutions can be expensive. harebrian is the painless entry point for solving the tech problems that get in the way of your passions, offering free, community help.
Here are some things that harebrian can help with, and keep it real:
Automation
Making things happen on their own - like scheduling invoices or making bookkeeping quicker. These things are logical steps that you do every day that stop you thinking about more important stuff, like serving your clients.
AI
Not the kind where you delegate everything to a machine, just simple micro add-ons to other automation, making the more subtle tasks easier to automate.
There's a small technical jump to make from the free 'gmail' or 'outlook' email account to one that uses your own domain name. Having your own email opens a few more doors, and lends extra credibilty. It also allows you to grow later and use departmental addresses like accounts@.
CRM
A 'Customer Relationship Managment' system can be a piece of software or it can be a way of working with spreadsheets and files. You'll hear advice to use the 'systems', you can also start without them and find your way to the one that suits you best, if you ever need one at all.
I started harbrian on Tuesday 18th August 2026 in Coffee@108 in Aston Clinton — the 'official' champagne launch (it was just me drinking coffee).
My aim is to help small ventures in what ever way I am best-suited. I will do this without charging to start with, then if things get bigger and more serious for those ventures I'll offer to do some more serious and more adventurous work for them. I call this Micro Help. Very targeted assistance. Very much aimed to help your aims.
GDPR
...is not as scary as it sounds. The basic idea is to be completely upfront about how you're going to use the personal information you might collect. Informed consent is the key, and registering your intent.
Security
There are 'trivial' and 'crucial' bits of security, and it goes with GDPR as a duty to protect personal information. You're probably not going to get hacked... you're not worth it. But, as the song goes, there are fifty ways to lose your data.
Media
Images, videos and audio are not all created equal. File sizes can be surprisingly big. It's good to know what's possible and get control over compression, quality and bandwidth.
Bookkeeping
For your accountant to their job you need to do a bit of bookkeeping. You also need to have access to your own figures in a way that helps you to make decisions. As you grow your enterprise this becomes exponentially more important, and delivering what HMRC requires of you gets easier when you've got a system in place.
Branding
You hear about companies paying millions to have a "new logo"… that's not what's happening: They pay millions for market positioning, market research, clever idea generation and marketing stratergies to survive in a changing world. The new logo is an ornamental snowflake on the top of a strategy iceberg. I can explain the iceberg and eliminate the stress about whether you need to spend ££££ on a logo (you don't).
Risk Assessment
If you interact with the public or other businesses in person you may be asked for a risk assessment of your activities. This is another not-as-baffling-as-it-seems tasks, like GDPR, that helps you to comply with the law and satisfy insurance companies that you've done due dilligence.
Email me at hello@harebrian.co.uk
I've got one of those Instagram accounts for you to follow at www.instagram.com/harebrian.co.uk
And I've got a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/harebrianAC (the AC is for Aston Clinton - it's that local)
Contact Form
I am based in Aston Clinton, near Aylesbury, Wendover, Weston Turville and Tring.
This website is manual (to save money!) Created like it's 1998 with HTML and CSS.
Websites were niche-hard to do in the 90s. Since then, things have got both easier and more demanding.
This is the end of the website.There are no other pages yet.