Archive for the ‘Business News’ Category

Communication is the key – how to go on holiday when self employed

Business News | Posted by Katie
Nov 28 2011

We’ve just been on our first ever two week holiday and we closed the business during that time!  I know, it sounds crazy yes?

Don’t get me wrong, we have come back to overflowing in-boxes and more than one telephone message, but the to do list makes it all manageable but what I am really blogging about is that how just a little bit of communication really has made all the difference to our state of mind and our customer’s expectations.

Everyone needs a holiday, if you are to work effectively with renewed vigor it really is worth recharging those batteries, but as I have blogged before, being self employed doesn’t lend itself to holidays, especially not when you work with your other half!

So what did we do differently this time that enabled us to get away for such a long time?  We let our customers know when we would be away and what to do in an emergency – not that Internet marketing or SEO is ever life or death you understand!  How did we do this…. well I used Mailchimp to set up an above board, fully legal mail out to our address list.  I then added in subsections to our database and emailed out specific information to specific groups of customers informing them of what to do and who to contact if their website went down or their email stopped working.

And do you know what – no one had an emergency after all and by letting everyone know that we were out of the country and that we weren’t turning our mobiles on they didn’t get in touch even though they knew we were away.  Having had time off in the past when people still thought it acceptable to ring at 10pm on a Sunday night, these two weeks have been a revelation.

Having taken the time to work with Mailchimp and find out all the wonderful things it can do, we are going to be offering newsletter set up and management out to customers so do let us know if you are interested and when we are ready to offer a package we will be in touch.

So, now we are back from our travels (NYC and a wee cruise on the QM2) we are raring to go, fully recharged and extremely happy with our self serving customers ;-)

 

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My Blackberry & Vodafone Crumble

Business News | Posted by Katie
Oct 19 2011

The RIM outage last week that rendered our Blackberries useless was to be honest the final straw for us.  Having spent the last two years defending our reasoning behind having BB’s instead of iPhones – you know, that phrase, we are using them for business not for pretending to be teenagers – we have now decided that we need to ditch the berries and head off into the realms of HTC or iPhone.

So, what do we do?  We call our friendly Vodafone helpline, who after 10 different button push choices tell us that we can’t speak to a human but we can use the online chat facility.  That’s fine, my typing speed is quick and my Internet connection for the minute seems stable enough to cope.  I explain our problem to 1st chat representative and ask if we can change our contract onto iPhones, you know send our BB’s back to them, stay on the same enormous tariff that we don’t use all of the minutes, texts or data usage for anyway, so they are still making money out of us – I am kind of thinking this is sounding quite familiar to many of you.  Oh and did I mention that we have been with Vodfone for probably 12 years, loyal service blah blah blah.

Well, 1st Vodafone chat representative said there was no way we could get out of our current contract, nor could it be downgraded, but don’t worry, we could purchase new phones from Vodafone and they will change the tariff over from Blackberry to iPhone.  Job done…  ‘I will transfer this chat to our sales team’…. ok.  2nd Vodafone chat representative joins the conversation and I have to give him 15 minutes to read through previous chat and that he will get back to me.  15 minutes later and his first question is ‘so you would like to buy an iPhone’.  This is going great, yes is my answer and we will sell back our Blackberries to Vodafone in order to help pay for them.  Silly silly me – what was I thinking?  This now leads to a full discussion and a repetition of everything I have already typed and he has supposedly read, and for him to keep telling me not to sell our phones because did we know we were in a contract?  Did we also know that we can’t upgrade until next November?  Not sure I have ever experience online chat rage before, but I have now!

So to cut a very long story short, we are now left with two options, pay £500 each to have a new iPhone – not going to happen, or stick with our current over priced contract of which we only use half of the allocated service using phones that are now deemed unreliable and work only when they feel like it.  And before I get inundated with the comments such as ‘good old Blackberry giving Steve Jobs a fitting send off’ or ‘you should have got an iPhone in the first place’ I am genuinely interested to hear if other people have had similar problems and what you did to resolve them?

I will be sad to see my Blackberry go, but what is the point in having a work tool that isn’t reliable?  Not even sure if I am convinced I want an iPhone and perhaps HTC is the way forward, but right now, we are stuck in a rut with Vodafone refusing to budge an inch….

Answers and suggestions on a BBM…

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Moral dilema | business decision – when do you say no?

Business News, Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Aug 02 2011

You know that saying ‘you learn from your mistakes’?  Well, sometimes you do learn but it doesn’t mean the decision making is any easier.

So, the dilemma is:  what do you do when your customers don’t pay on time even though you have had discussions, you have agreed a way of working out the payments and then all of a sudden they stop taking your calls or not responding to emails?

Well, in the past this was the situation we were in and we naively thought that the customer in question would clear his debt and all would be well again.  How silly were we?  He ended up leaving us, still owing us a considerable amount of money, was verbally threatening on email and telephone and was so horrid that we ended up giving him the information he required to set up his website with someone else just to get rid of him.  That was a year ago and to this day we have still not received the money even after spending more money asking a debt collection company to get involved.

So, you can imagine how awkward we now feel when we find ourselves in a similar situation with two more customers.  Long standing customers, one of them is relatively local, and we are in the position where if we take the websites down we are effectively cutting off one of the major streams of income to their businesses.  Whilst this pains us and makes us feel uncomfortable, from a business point of view we are in the position of if we take their website offline then we are almost guaranteeing that the relationship is now beyond repair and we are probably going to lose their business.

Well, we had to toughen up, one website went offline yesterday – and amazingly enough the customer has got in touch – the other website is due to go offline tomorrow – we will see what happens then.  In the grand scheme of things, it is not cost effective having to spend time chasing payments so what do you do as a small business owner who doesn’t like to upset people?

I don’t know the answer!  As always, keen to find out how you deal with this situation because I am sure we are not the only ones.

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People say ‘I don’t get Twitter’ – I don’t blame you!

Business News, Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Jul 11 2011

As far as we at ABS towers are concerned Twitter is a wonderful thing, yes it can be time consuming, frustrating, comical and down right ridiculous sometimes but, from a keeping up with what everyone’s doing point of view it is invaluable.  Oh and yes we have got business from it.  All good reasons in our eyes why being on Twitter is a must for our business.

However, the same can not be said about many people we meet.  Don’t get me wrong, many have embraced Twitter along with Facebook and actively get involved, but you know, after the last week’s worth of tweets from ‘some’ people we have been following, it really is no wonder people don’t get Twitter.

Scenario….. as most of you are aware we live in beautiful Scotland and for the past week or so have been living in a golfers paradise thanks to the golf up at Castle Stuart, which, let me be clear whilst it’s not a million miles away it most definitely is not on our immediate door step and as a neighbour showed us yesterday in order to be there for the golf he had to leave here at 6.30am on a Sunday morning!  However, if you had been watching our Twitter stream you would be excused from thinking we live and work next door to Castle Stuart and actually its not the golf that people have been here for it has been for the wonderful shopping, accommodation, lunches and dinners that they can have #castlestuart #golfopen #golfspecial !

Before I go off into rant mode, I personally don’t have an issue with hanging onto the marketing coat tales of a big event.  What I do have an issue with is blatant advertising made to look like it is a public service, somehow it just seems wrong to me.  In our eyes ramming sales messages down our twitter stream throat is a sure way to make us unfollow.  It also makes us more aware of why people don’t get Twitter.

So we’re asking please…. remember the old example : would you stand in a room full of people you don’t know and without any prompting start shouting out a sales message?  The answer hopefully is no!

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How flexible can a small business be?

Business News, Client News | Posted by Katie
Jul 08 2011

In our case there are only 2 of us ‘in the office’  although as you know we work with many other companies, but in the grand scheme of things we can discuss an idea and pretty much put it into practice the next day – complete flexibility!

 

As Barry mentioned in his comment, us Brits are known for being a bit ‘tight’ sometimes especially when it comes to paying for something that we can’t touch i.e. SEO or Internet marketing.  So we decided to change the way we work.  The upshot of this is we are keeping our customers longer, they are actually spending more money with us, they are definitely recommending our services more and they are enjoying the freedom of complete flexibility.   So what do we now offer:

  • different types of packages for smaller businesses
  • no annual contract unless specifically asked for
  • flexibility to ‘dip in and out of our services’ whenever the customer wishes
  • a transparent pricing policy – ongoing work is ‘by the hour’ rather than a contract figure per month

Obviously there are limitations to our flexibility and quite often there has to be a compromise e.g. if we recommend a project requires 16 hours per month for 3 months to achieve the customer’s requirements and they only want to spend 8 hours for 2 months the reality is this will have a direct impact on our ability to produce the desired results – as long as the customer is aware of these consequences then there is no problem.  The absolute key to our business is absolute transparancey and ultimately an amount of flexibility that will ensure the customer is happy with the level of service for the price they are paying.

And, when Barry asked if we ‘stick to our guns’ regarding not lowering our price just to get a sale – then answer is absolutely yes.  There is no point in making a sale if it is going to harm the profitability of your business.  Who wants to work for free unless you are a dedicated volunteer?

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