Ben Goss looks calm, which is just as well given the year many of his clients have had. His company, Distribution Technology, sells software to financial institutions whose advisers use it when giving advice to customers, and to independent advisers.

For many people, software plus finance would sound alarm bells, but Mr Goss seems unperturbed. "The entire nation is dazed and confused when it comes to finance. The need to give guidance to large numbers of people has never been more acute. We have done a lot to reduce the cost of delivering advice and to help people get it more effectively," says the 40-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Distribution Technology.

Perhaps it helps that Mr Goss has given up coffee. "I used to drink several cups a day," he says, tak-ing a sip of water. "In a software business, a lot of work is fuelled by caffeine, but I find I'm doing better without."

Trying to take advantage of a downturn is hard, but Mr Goss argues that Distribution Technology is well placed. "When markets are this volatile, there are two effects," he says. "One is that customers need advice. In a bear market, your sales team needs to sell more with less. And second, advised distribution [financial advice] is an environment where margins are being squeezed. You just can't do it without technology."

Distribution Technology is Mr Goss's second company. Before he got into start-ups, he worked as a strategy consultant with Coopers & Lybrand, and then PwC in the 1990s, and worked on regulation and distribution in financial services. Around this time he formed the idea of providing financial advice through technology. "It was clear that people needed to invest for the future, but that it was becoming uneconomic for financial institutions to put advisers in front of customers. I met client after client [who was] struggling to deliver sales based on financial advice." The commission earned on the average investment of well under £10,000 means that, thanks to the cost of the adviser's time, "you might as well be stacking shelves".

PwC was creative and interesting, he says, but there was a drawback to being a consultant: "You're never responsible for something . . . I wanted to be more responsible."

So he left to start Sort, a provider of online advice, in 1998. "We did a lot of market research and found that people were willing to pay a fee for advice online. The research was invaluable - I've still got the tapes in the garage. So with two other guys I started Sort with a £15,000 loan - which felt like a lot at the time."

Sort was sold at the height of the dotcom boom in 2000 to US advisory group mPower and venture capitalist Capital Z, and Mr Goss became UK managing director.

He left mPower later, partly for reasons based in technology, but also because he disagreed with the approach the US-based owners had in delivering the software and financial planning. "The US and UK are very different markets. You can't just switch the technology from left- to right-hand drive. And the proposition was different. The US approach was saying 'Not only are we going to give you some technology here, but we are going to give you the religion of our approach to financial planning.' As you can imagine, each bank and financial institution has their own experts. You need to be more agnostic." Clearly, it was time to go back to being an entrepreneur.

Distribution Technology was started in 2003, but the seeds had been sown years before at a meeting Mr Goss describes as "serendipity". Many entrepreneurs have benefited from finding the right partner at the outset. For Mr Goss, that was Patrick Fitzgerald, who had years of experience as a software desig-ner. But their meeting was not through a business network. They met at National Childbirth Trust antenatal classes, which usually involve a lot of tea, biscuits and advice on birthing positions and pain relief. There is not usually much time for chatting about work and business.

Mr Goss says he and Mr Fitzgerald were not slacking, however: "I admit it was a lot easier to talk business than babies - but I'd like to say I was as helpful as any man can be during the birth."

He and Mr Fitzgerald started the company, along with a technical architect called Adrian Hall, now research and development director, funding the business with £130,000 of their own money and taking no salary for at least the first year.

Now Distribution Technology is growing very fast - revenues have expand-ed by more than 95 per cent each year since 2005, reaching more than £6.5m in 2008. The company has been profitable for the past two years, has more than 22,000 advisers using its technology, and has just opened an office in Hong Kong. Distribution Technology has just agreed £2.5m of expansion funding with Bank of Scotland after participating in the bank's Entrepreneur Challenge.

It has also moved its base from the City of London to Reading in order to join the technology cluster that has grown up west of the capital. At first, he says, being in the City was "the right place to recruit people, and that is where the deals were". Then they found they were recruiting people from companies based in the Thames Valley. "That is the dominant tech area in this country, so we moved the business. Pat and I were commuting four hours a day from south-east London - but it was the best place to get the best talent," he says. The move was financed with mon-ey from a syndicate of business angel investors, which took a stake of 25 per cent in the company.

Having started two businesses, had three children, moved house and renovated the family home in 10 years, Mr Goss takes on a lot of projects at once, but the only area where he may have over-reached, he says, is in the way Distribution Technology provides its software: "We have done it with software-as-a-service model, whichalong with a radical new technology in the advice process was perhaps a step too far. It may well have slowed adoption. At this stage, IT departments in large banks still want to control the software."

But technology cultures change fast, he points out. "I saw an elderly man on the train, who was loudly shouting - 'That's a memory stick isn't it? Tell me about them. Are they the things that keep getting lost?' It just goes to show how quickly things are changing. By the time we are 60 or 70, there will be all sorts of things we won't recognise."

And that will be just as true for the role of technology in financial advice, he says.

A veteran reveals his do's and don'ts for software entrepreneurs

Ben Goss is the co-founder and chief executive of Distribution Technology, a fast-growing developer of financial advice software for financial institutions, and his second start-up. He has picked up some do's and don'ts along the way: *Do your research. Understand the market and understand your customer's needs. Know how you are going to make some money. *Do try to fund as much as you can yourself - particularly at this time. Go as far as you can on your own means, but if you think you are going to need capital, get it before you really need it - you will receive a much better price. *Do locate where you can benefit from talent and facilities - clustering is very important. *Don't be tempted to make money any which way - avoid being distracted by revenue opportunities that take you off course. *Don't hire just anybody. It is a big temptation when you need people, but do not lower the bar on recruitment. If you are serious about expanding a business, you must seek out the right talent.