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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Is spelling important any more?

SEO Scotland | Posted by Katie
Jul 27 2011

Growing up in the 70s / 80s and the constant words on my school reports were ‘bad spelling, poor concentration’…. luckily the introduction of spell checker solved one issue, the poor concentration I would like to think has improved with age!

So, what is my moan about today?  Well it’s about the lack of care people/businesses take to spelling these days.  I received a request today asking if we would be interested in linking to a blog – I am all for link building where appropriate but to be honest the subject of this blog probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for our website, however, the thing that put me off was that there were 6, yes I said 6, spelling mistakes within the first paragraph of the most recent blog post! (since writing this post I have contacted Skippy the blog writer and he has very graciously allowed me to link to his blog – I am sure the mistakes will be corrected by now though!)

I am aware that we all shorten words on Twitter, Facebook and other similar forms of quick communication – to see texts from my 60+ dad that don’t include any vowels is a joy in itself – but surely if you are creating web copy or blog posts then you have the freedom to revert back to normality and structure sentences properly and use correct spelling.  Or am I alone in this thinking?

Now before you trawl through our web copy or previous blog posts to find a glaring error, I am not for a minute saying we are perfect in any way, but I do use spell check and I do proof read things and I would suggest that the likelihood of finding 6 spelling mistakes within 2 sentences is minimal but I am, as ever, curious to hear people’s opinions on this because I would hate to think I have become old fashioned in my views!

Comments in the Queen’s English gladly received…… that’s i before e except after c, just in case you were wondering!

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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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It’s all about the money – or is it?

Business News, Everything Else | Posted by Katie
Jul 05 2011

Over the last couple of weeks I seem to have had a succession of meetings with prospective customers who’s only question is ‘how much is that going to cost me’.  I give a ball park figure and the sharp intake of breath and the roll of the eyes is now getting me to the point of asking them back ‘would you like me to work for free’?

Don’t worry, I am not going to go off on a rant again, its just that I am getting so disheartened with people thinking that we should be cheaper for the work we carry out… actually that’s unfair, the majority of people are aware that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys, or in our case if you pay proper fees then you get professional service.

In our ever evolving company, we often discuss well into the night the direction we want to take our business and many moons ago we made the decision not to ‘sell our soul to the devil’ or to be more precise – sell ourselves short.  No more would we try and fit in with a customer who says things like ‘what could you do for £20 a month’… the answer now is ‘nothing’!

So why the blog post?  Well as ever I just wanted to share with you the thought process behind our small business, and to hopefully give down to earth honest advice to other start up and small businesses.  If you know you are worth the money and you work hard for that money (cue Donna Summer!) then don’t undervalue yourself or your product.  By all means negotiate and even barter if it is appropriate, but in our experience the customers that paid the smallest amount usually demanded the highest quantity of our time and therefore we ultimately lost money.

As ever, your thoughts, suggestions or just comments are always welcome.

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