The idea for this company started in 2003 with a dinner at a cabin with some friends and family. Actually, my introduction to website design came about earlier than that. I was working for a company doing bookkeeping. The company had a bunch of email accounts and they were paying a lot for each account.
So I convinced them to buy a domain name for the company since it was available. We created email accounts and I saved the company a few hundred dollars per year. Shortly after that, the company agreed to have me design a website since we had the domain.
I continued on learning about domain names, web hosting, and did in fact design a website for my company. All of this was very intriguing to me. I had an uncle who designed website and he was generous enough to teach me a lot and take time and answer all of my many questions.
I began to think about web hosting more and more and about starting a company of my own. Most of the companies that I found online were very large. When I called for support it was a different person every time. The websites for these companies had lots of products and offered many services.
I thought that some people who wanted a website, would struggle to understand all of this. Some people would just need a person to walk them through this and answer all of their questions just in the way my uncle had done with me.
Now a short while later, we were having dinner at a cabin with some friends and family. I was talking with a very good family friend about my idea and he said that I should do it. That is, I should start a company. He was an entrepreneur himself and encouraged me greatly.
He was so excited about the idea that he wanted to invest in the business. He started me off with $500 and told me that I could pay it back whenever and use the money to buy what I needed. And with that, Lightway Web Services became a company.
I am thankful to my dear friend Dave who believed in me and whose friendship I still treasure today. Dave passed on within a few years of this, but I remember all of the conversations we had and am blessed to have known him and to have his encouragement to start the company that I still run to this day.