Zap LH was my first real taste of running a business, I founded Zap LH in my teens with funding from my family, Zap LH was so sucessful that I managed to pay them back in twelve months of operations and increase the size of the store by 30%..
My main objective was to promote social game playing by creating weekly events, sponsoring gaming teams and promoting the participation of female players. The company expanded dramatically after my efforts to promote network gaming and with the increased popularity of the gaming sector / LAN gaming and with regular events we were able to offer increased incentives and create a better gaming environment.
Under my management, the store continued to grow, my main goal was to steer the business in the right direction, motivate staff and make critical strategic decisions based on the best interest of the company.
As I was also an active gamer participating in all events I was able to see what we need to improve on and the customers appreciated the personal feel of the store, the staff where extremely friendly and most with an IT / Gaming background, I involved everyone in every decision we made, sometimes even involving our most dedicated customers.
As a result of our excellent customer services and empowered workforce we were able to offer to our customers an un-matched service quality, delivering uniform gaming that allowed any user to gain access to their gaming files, gaming statistics and media servers in store and online. This also helped us create promotions, personalised access and offers based on game play statistics.
With an in-house IT department we were able to create systems that would ensure reliability of service, we hosted all our Gaming and Web-Servers in house so that we could take greater advantage of the Local IT infrastructure as our business was growing rapidly not just local but we started having an online presence.
In late 2008 Zap LH was restructured following the sale of Zap LH and many of the IT and Management staff including myself left the company.
The decision was extremely hard but their was no other solution, we had high running costs and with the introduction of fast internet connections and the price of a gaming PCs falling we just could not compete with “Free” thus many loyal gamers started playing at home on internet based gaming networks and the revenues we were getting from our online presence was lower then maintaining servers and staff.
