“All this talk about working from home, I've worked from home since 1983!” says Ian Hodgson, the ‘Promo Man’ of the Central West.

For over 15 years, Ian has been supplying schools, sports teams, butcher shops and other business houses from Broken Hill to the Blue Mountains (included Orange City Life) with branded promotion items.

Be it pens, calendars, caps, stubby holders, business cards, holiday cards, t-shirts, or mouse pads, Ian has branded it all.

“You name it pretty much I sell it - clothing, jumpers, shirts, magnets — and I sell art and craft supplies and library resources to schools, preschools and some retirement villages,” he said.

But Ian was not always on the road wearing his unmissable rainbow-coloured company shirt. In another life you were more likely to find him in a plain white laboratory coat.

“I was a laboratory technician. I worked for Esso from about 1973 to 1978 thereabouts, and I also worked for a pharmaceutical company before that… although I don’t how I got that job. I did seven years at TAFE to learn how to be a laboratory technician to throw it all away and then sell life insurance!”

It was the insurance game that saw Ian move to Orange in 1993, where he worked for National Mutual, but in his time Ian has been partners in a stationary store (Apple City Paper) and sold Austar subscriptions door to door.

“That was in the late 1990s, so everyone was buying Pay TV back in those days. it was easy to sell! You’d knock on the door and they'd say yeah, come in!”

Ian’s job keeps him on the road and he reckons he might cover 55,000 kilometres in a year, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I can be my own boss,” he said. “You've got to be disciplined and you've got to get up every morning and go to work, but I do what I want to do and not be told what I've got to do. so I like it that way.”