Company History
Company History
In 2000, I was working in a sign design company as an office manager. When the company folded due to the owner chasing the millions that his unknown uncle left him in Africa (which he found out via email - I wish I was lying), I ended up unemployed. Since I was the office manager, all the sign company’s clients had my cell number and continued to call me when they had projects they needed fulfilled. So, instead of telling them no, I took every job and learned how to complete each project as I was doing it.
After a while, I started getting referrals from these clients and, over the course of a year, it became evident that this was going to be a full time gig. At this point, I was only doing graphic design jobs, but after a while, I started getting requests for websites so I decided I would learn how to do that, too. I was building websites for about a year when I started getting calls from people who were finding their competitors’ sites at the top of search engines. So, now I had to find out why and try to duplicate the results for these new clients, which I did. Now I’m doing graphic design, website design and search engine optimization all on my own. I figured it was time to actually start a business being that it looks like my profession found me rather than me choosing it.
In 2003, I quit my day job, set up an office, chose a business name and got some employees. Like every business, I had to add the company’s running costs into the cost of our work. This never really gelled well with me since it seemed like we were charging clients for our down time. I figured the key to my success so far was offering our clients fair work for a fair price. After about a year, I decided to make my company virtual, since we were only meeting with one in ten of our clients and it was always at their location. Having a brick and mortar location just seemed like a waste.
From 2004 to present, all Jigsaw employees work from home offices. This not only saves our clients money, but it also makes us a green company. Today, Jigsaw is one of the better known design companies in the Bay Area. We have programmers, graphic designers, content writers and SEO experts with over 100 years of combined experience who work around the clock to produce high-quality end-products for our clients, and hopefully you in the near future. This is all because my ex-boss got conned by an email. Even today, I will take the time to reply every time I get one of those emails, as I feel if it wasn’t for that, my company would not exist today.
Alan Ainsworth
Owner/Lead SEO and Design
