AnotherLevel.Company
A scrap metal business in the UK Midlands. They do more than scrap — they’re natural hustlers with a stream of ideas and the energy to back most of them — but that’s where they started, and that’s how they’d probably describe themselves.
I found them through a chain of connections that would take longer to explain than it’s worth. A designer I’d never met knew a designer who knew someone I was connected to, and somehow that led to a meeting. He had a client — these two — who had built their business almost entirely through Facebook and word of mouth. It was working. Then one of the owners got banned from Facebook for saying something they probably shouldn’t have, and that scared them enough to want a presence they actually owned.
The designer had their branding sorted — a clean text logo in a custom font, built for them and only them — but building a website wasn’t in his skillset. So he brought me in. I was running an IT consultancy at the time and was happy to take the work. He gave me a design, I built it — HTML, CSS, a little JavaScript where necessary — he marked it up and sold it on. Clean enough arrangement.
Then they wanted a change. And another change. And another. Eventually the designer stepped aside and connected me directly to the clients, which is where things got interesting. They’re a genuinely entertaining couple to work with. Forthright. Full of ideas. The kind of people who have three new business concepts before lunch and want to know if you can build something for all of them.
Since that first handover I’ve built three or four complete refreshes of their site. The only constant across every version has been that original logo. Everything else has been rebuilt from scratch each time — always HTML, CSS, and as little JavaScript as I can reasonably justify. They pay for hosting through a Netlify account I manage for them, and the relationship has ticked along comfortably.
The most interesting side work was generating custom QR codes for them in Python — branded with their logo in the centre, linking either to the main site or to whatever promotion they were running at the time. Small job, but the kind of thing that makes a client feel like they’re getting more than just a website.
They’ve tried to connect me with other businesses in their network, and in theory it could have been useful — they know a lot of people. In practice, their contacts tend to be in the wrong part of the country, and the kind of people who want to sit across a table from you before they’ll trust you with anything. Nothing ever quite landed. But as a client relationship, it’s been one of the more enjoyable ones. Straightforward people who know what they want, pay for what they ask for, and keep coming back.
