MARTIAN Records is a partnership between Martyn Alford and me.

We started selling second-hand records and CDs on market stalls around Devon in 1989. Not only was it great fun, but it was a very cheap and effective way of learning the ropes.

Today we have shops in Exeter's Gandy Street, Taunton and Weston-super- Mare, as well as Exmouth Indoor Market.

We started off very small and for anybody setting up in business, particularly in the current climate, I think it's probably a better way of going about it than going to the bank and borrowing as much as you can.

To have a business that right from day one owes the bank loads of money is a lot of pressure that I wouldn't want to live with.

I was young and headstrong when we started and wanted to borrow money and get a shop, but my father said that's not the way to do things. Start off as small as you can — that was probably the best bit of advice I ever had.

I also believe in always keeping it simple. A lot of the time business gets very complicated and that's where all the problems start. There's enough red tape anyway in business without creating your own.

It's just basic principles of making sure we can afford to do the things we do, not expanding too quickly and not bogging yourself down in your own red tape.

We have always kept things like shop fittings fairly basic, but hopefully the customer is knowledgeable enough to see that they can save on the product if they are not looking at fancy shop fittings.

Over the years finding the right locations has been the most difficult thing. For every shop we have opened there's probably another one we have had to close, including in Honiton, Yeovil, Bristol and Cheltenham. A lot of times you try something, it doesn't work and you have to try something else. Towns are different and have their own personality, and sometimes you just get the wrong location.

As long as you make your mistakes relatively small and you are not putting everything on the roll of a dice it's not terminal.

To be good in business you have to have optimism and be able to pick out the positives in most situations. We have probably had as many shop failures as we have successes, but each of those was a learning process.

We were incredibly lucky to find Exmouth Indoor Market very early on. It's been a fantastic place for us and I can't sing its praises and other places like it too much.

In the last few years, the music industry has gone through a complete revolution. The number of independent record stores in this country has halved over the last four years, but there's still this love of going into a record store and browsing.

We have survived for a combination of reasons. We are in secondary locations and therefore things like rent and rates are more affordable.

We have also responded by going into very niche markets. We have always been a store for people who really love music, so we have gone into specialist markets like jazz, blues, metal and folk.

The mainstream stuff like chart albums is fairly well catered for by the supermarkets, but people still come to us if they want advice or want to listen to stuff before they buy it or even just because they like the record shop atmosphere.

We have diversified a bit by doing some clothes and pieces of merchandise.

When you are a small business you are much more versatile and you can adapt; big businesses are almost like an oil tanker with a very large turning circle.

Being in business is about more than just money. These days everybody seems to be obsessed with the financial side of it, but most people just set up their business because they want a sense of freedom and to run their lives their own way. It's important that they keep that at the forefront of their minds, that money isn't everything.

Being self-employed or being in business is great fun. Partnerships may not work for everybody, but I couldn't have done it on my own. It can be very lonely running a business on your own.

With all the staff we have a good team ethos and everyone contributes, which makes it a lot less lonely.

I'm hoping people will come to value small independent businesses a bit more and realise that without them our town centres are going to look pretty bleak.

The central ideas of giving good value and good service that run through most independent businesses will, hopefully, allow them to survive.