Where do we begin? 

The idea

We noticed on Facebook there were a few draws where you can win a car or a motorbike.  This got us thinking. Could we do we it? We decided to have a go. Our love of cars and motorcycles inspired us to try.

What’s involved? To be honest more than we ever thought.  What prizes are we going to raffle and what sort of things.  As we own a garage based in Blackpool, Lancashire cars and motorbikes seemed the natural thing to do.

“What about classic cars”, Craig asked. “We know about them and love them and let’s do motorbikes as well”.  And that’s how we came up with the name “Win a Classic“.

“OK, we need a web site”,  David replied “and the web address is available lets buy it”.

So we bought the web address and even ended up buy more!

We bought.

www.winaclassic.co.uk

www.winaclassic2.co.uk

www.winaclassic2.com

www.winaclassic2.net

www.winaclassic2.uk

That was the easy part.  Now we needed some software to put on the web site.  So we spent a few days looking at what’s available and found a company in Ireland that sold a package.  It was all sounding good up until then and then it started to get hard.  Having the package was a very small part of it.

We needed a bank account in the business name.  That’s not hard I hear you say. Well it is!  Banks don’t like anything at all to do with raffles /draws etc.  In their mind it is gambling and you need a licence to do that.  So we were not sure at this point and had to put the brakes on for a time.

Now we needed legal advice.  Did we need a licence?

After paying a fortune in fees it turned out that we didn’t need a licence. Good news.  But if we wanted to advertise on the likes of Facebook, etc we needed a document called a “legal memo. What did this involve? Well it turned out this is a document to prove that a solicitor has looked at your web site and in their opinion under the Gaming Act, as in Law, your new business does not need a licence for gambling as it is classed as a Free to Enter Draw.  Which means, you have to giveaway free tickets to anyone that sends a postcard in and they must be included in the raffle/draw.  There is a bit more to it legally but you get the drift .

So we had to find a very good solicitor and pay them another fortune for the legal memo.

Weeks passed and then we got the go ahead from the Solicitor.  This took us to the end of September 2023 .

So now we have the website, the bank account and the legal memo. What next? Oh now we need a credit card processor service.  That shouldn’t be hard as we constanly received marketing calls offering deals on card terminals.  Turns out we were wrong again.  As we were a new venture and had no trading track record only a few merchants would consider us. Eventually we did get one to accept us.

Great news now were ready!