Category Archives: Consultancy

Consultancy, Owen

Innovation: A recipe for success

Interesting post today on Richard Branson’s blog by one of his colleagues who talks about how innovation was the key component behind making the Virgin brand so successful. My favourite line is right at the bottom:

One of the key things I have learnt from Richard over the past 15 years or so is always challenge. Challenge your business to innovate by asking the unaskable, challenge industry norms and always ask, why? And then more importantly, why not?

I concur with Jayne-Anne, who wrote the post, about how innovation is sobranson1Virgin Millionaire Richard Branson doing a quick photo with outside of a Bloor St. Press Junket during TIFF '08metimes lumped together into the same camp where technology lives; but in reality can apply to anything that disrupts the status quo. Anything that prevents a process from following the same linear motion that has been running for days, months or years has the potential to provide you with competitive advantage. Don’t get me wrong, there’s always risk attached to change. But without change, challenge or questions a business stagnates, ends up living in the past and is doomed to failure (The recent demise of Woolworths is a case in point here). You can read the whole post by Jayne-Anne Gadhia here.

So, the question is .. when was the last time you were disruptive?

business, Consultancy, Management

How To Survive The Credit Crunch

There is a great post over at Link4business http://link4business.info/2008/11/how-to-survive-the-credit-crunch. About how to deal with the payment of invoices on time. As the excerpt below explains:

Credit Control – “no sales transaction is complete until you have been paid for the goods or services you have supplied. If your customers are not paying you within the agreed timescale, be that monthly or whatever, then it’s time to call in these outstanding payments. Make sure you remind customers a few days before payment is due. Whilst a letter or email could do I personally favour a quick telephone call along the lines of “Payment for our invoice 123456 is due next week, can you confirm that you have no queries and that we can expect payment on time?”

If you don’t receive the payment then wait a day or two to allow for genuine postal delays – these do happen – and follow up with another call. Be polite but firm and don’t be fobbed off with excuses. Remember, other suppliers will also be chasing payment and if your client is short of cash they will get paid first.”

Of course a very simple point to remember in all this. If somebody has got no money, it does not matter what you do, it is not possible to get it back. Hence why a online/off-line reputation is so important and paying on time if you want to keep your credit.

Consultancy, Marketing

Do you “get” Social Media Marketing?

Here’s a great video you might find interesting:

Don’t discount the first few minutes of the video, Perry talks through the basics of social media, then puts together a flow of how the Marketing side of it works. He compares social networking websites to a Party, your blog as your Home. When you go to a party you don’t ram what you do down people’s throats. Rather you are nice to people, you may even invite them to your home and possibly tell them what you do. The people you meet will remember you for this and recommend you to their friends, extending your reach way beyong the few social contacts you have made.

Moral of the story: Be Cool .. interesting concept.

Consultancy, Relationship, SMO

You Got 7 Seconds To Do It – Hot Data

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I have been reading the IOD magazines in my Christmas break and they have got an interesting article on e-commerce. They claim that you have got seven seconds to capture and interest your visitor. With so much content online these days the old maxim that content, content, content would guarantee a number of visitors is yesterdays news. Why?

First it takes time to produce quality content, not only do you have to be well informed you also need an opinion. Even if you have these two aspects it may not be enough. Writing content is an art as Sherrilynne over at Strive Pr can explain. Is it cheap to produce quality content? Hell no, even the most established bloggers such as Dosh Dosh require an indeterminate amount of time to write and check there content before it goes on there website. Other bloggers or companies employ other people do it for them. Which ultimately costs money instead of time.

Is Content King? Nope. A few months ago I looked at setting up a debt recovery business. In my research I was staggered to find so much quality content already on the net . I could have written till I was blue in the face with original content. I do not think that that my debt recovery website would have got on to the golden first page of google results for debt as a search word. As Chris Barling, in the IOD article also CEO of e-commerce software company Actinic, explains: “People try to trick Google, but it’s very good at finding relevant sites.

So what to do? Owen and I have been talking too about this problem recently and we do believe there is a solution. It does not lay in the content that you produce. Although original content is beneficial. It is no longer about one certain area but the concept as a whole. You can now buy a very respectable website for £1000 pounds. Unless it is geared to engage your market in all honesty you are better spending the money on hosting a wine and cheese evening for your potential customers . The only problem with that is, in a time poor world you are severely limiting your market and my 7 seconds was up long ago.

Consultancy, Owen

Make sure you have backups

I was speaking to a Phil, a friend of mine who runs a limo service here in the Isle of Man and who’s had a spot of bother with his PC. He had trouble for a few days, tried a system restore and ended up in a worse situation than he thought, with his Internet not working and all his applications messed up. Finally, he tried messing around with his Windows CDs and accidentally wiped his PC clean. And when I say wiped, I mean he deleted all his files, his photos, his videos, his emails, everything. And guess what … no backup!

What he really needed was an external USB drive to backup things to. And it wouldn’t have cost the world either. I was looking at the sale on buy.com and saw a 1Tb Iomega Desktop Hard Drive for a whopping $129.99 (at least that’s the price this week). With a hard disk that size you can take backups as many times as you want, and even take a few extra just to be on the safe side. It even comes complete with a license for some backup software that’s designed to make your life easier. Setup should be no more complex than plugging in a cable into one of the USB sockets in your computer.

So Phil, next time may sure you have a backup!

Ask a Question, business, Consultancy

Company Law

There is a very interesting, well written post over at http://link4business.info which deals with some of the practicalities of setting up a company.

Questions like: Must all companies have a secretary? Are answered.

Here is an excerpt.

“Yes and No. From 6th April 2008 private companies will not need to have a company secretary but public limited companies still will. Furthermore companies registered before 6th April 2008 will have to change their Articles of Association at an Extraordinary General Meeting of the shareholders to remove the requirement to have a company secretary.

It should be noted that although a director of a company can also be the secretary that only applies if there are more than one director. A sole director cannot also be the secretary.”

I recommend taking a look at the site for more information about forming a company.