Welcome to Help was a tech support/consulting business idea that never got off the ground. As you can see, the domain the web site was on remains.

The original name for the business concept was Geek Practitioners. This was a takeoff on general practitioners, as in medicine. The idea of answering the phone with "welcome to help" was the source of the new name, which had the possible benefit of shedding "geek" as an element of the name. Feedback from former clients indicated that "geek" in a name wasn't in favor, in part due to the reputation of a certain established company.

Marshall Ellis was a partner in XTreme Computing. Circa 2005, he expected that business to end at some point. There would need to be something to overlap and follow it. The structure of the old business and client requirements restricted the type of work he could solicit or perform otherwise. Thus the focus for Geek Practitioners was to be home and smaller business clients requiring limited time on-site. It needed to remain possible to be on call 7x24 to a larger existing client of the old business, even though the actual billable time was modest.

The modest revenue from the partnership's main client, the partnership having become a de facto business of one, and the preference to remain self-employed all went into the quest for the segue into a successor business. There were even flights of fancy in which Welcome to Help seemed ripe as a wider service/assistance business portal, rather than one for mere tech support within modest geographical bounds.

Life happens. The long expected end felt surprisingly abrupt, and coincided with the wider economic crash. Someone more comfortable with the sales pitch song and dance might have made a go of this or of moving from the closed business into a job. Being an older computer generalist was great for this and the old partnership, but not for job hunting.

So here we are, with a placeholder site for a business that never really was, by an increasingly obsolete geek who tells himself he's semi-retired, but worries about watching the now recovering economy go by without him.