Exchanging Thoughts

First results from Barclays ‘Have Your Say’ scheme

A few months ago one of my colleagues wrote about the Barclays ‘Have Your Say’ scheme, which was developed to bring help and support to small businesses across the UK.

Now halfway through the scheme, Times Online have reported that over 3600 business owners have taken part.

One of the most interesting findings is that many businesses have not been disheartened by the financial crisis. Instead, “many appear to be preparing to grow when the economy rebounds.” In addition, over 51 percent of business owners believe that they can expand in the next year.

However, not all the findings were positive. The survey showed that only 35 percent of business owners felt that their business had a positive effect on their lives. Furthermore, 42 percent revealed that running their own business was very hard work and sacrifices had to be made in their personal lives.

The ‘Have Your Say’ scheme is continuing into October and Times Online promise they will continue to feedback all the results.

It will be interesting to see how more business owners respond to this scheme and more importantly, what can be done to alleviate some of the problems and concerns identified in the future.

Technorati Tags: small business advice, business advice, barclays, have your say scheme

Eight ways to keep your team engaged

With the current economic situation, and companies struggling to survive, many are looking to make staff redundant as a way of cutting costs. I was interested to read an article in Management Today, that highlights ways in which to keep staff engaged and motivated. With the view to improve staff morale and productivity, and in a bid to keep staff onside within the business.

The article outlined eight ways to keep staff engaged:

1. Show that you have a plan – A way of showing people that you are confident and are prepared to show leadership through the difficult period. By emphasising the things that you can do, and not dwelling on negative aspects.
2. Be open but be realistic –You need to tell staff what is happening and how you plan to resolve any issues that arise. But don’t give them false hope, as this will only lead to disappointment in the end.
3. Do it in person – Communicating to staff face-to-face, will build employee confidence in your ability to survive the situation. Use management that work with the staff on a daily basis, because there tends to be greater trust and confidence in them, rather than more senior managers that are rarely seen.
4. Involve your people – In difficult times, staff like to feel like what they are doing has some meaningful contribution, and that they are actually making a difference to the company.
5. Show your compassion – If the need arises for you to make people redundant, you need to show that you have looked to other alternatives before redundancy, this will also improve the confidence of the remaining staff.
6. Redefine success – Don’t allow staff to be blamed for situations and outcomes that are out of their control. By setting achievable targets and goals, it can lead to greater success for staff.
7. Offer recognition – Show staff that you appreciate the work that they are doing. Whether this is through employee of the month schemes or simply telling an employee that they have done well.
8. Keep on celebrating – Congratulate all success, whether it is a case of gaining new business or a team member winning an award. Staff will perform better if they feel that their achievements are recognised.

The article also highlights things to say and not say to staff, when you are trying to engage and motivate them.

“Do say: 'We will be honest and open with our people, and show them the way forward, but we will also be realistic about our prospects during this downturn.'

Don't say: 'We're all doomed.'”

The suggestions that are made are in regard to the current economic climate, but they can easily be applied to everyday business situations, as a way of keeping employees engaged and motivated, whilst at work.

A further article in Management Today that may be of interest, when addressing the issue of engaging staff is; The Next Steps: Engagement - Views on engagement.

Technorati Tags: Management Today,Staff motivation,engaging staff.

The Nectar Small Business Awards are open

I thought this might be of interest to you if you fancy making a noise about your business. Basically, the Nectar Small Business Awards are officially open. If you are a UK based small-medium sized company you can enter now.

The aim of the awards is to acknowledge great ideas, achievements and the best practise within companies. There are three categories for the awards:

• Small Business of the Year
• Start Up Business of the Year
• Entrepreneur of the Year

The awards will be judged by a panel of business experts, including Karen Hanton, founder and CEO of www.toptable.co.uk.

Winners of each award will win a £2,000 cash prize and 50,000 Nectar points. The winners will get recognition and the opportunity to strengthen their relationships with potential clients.

If you fancy it all you have to do is check the criteria for the awards @ the Nectar website. The deadline for entries is 18th May 2009. 

For anymore business related award opportunities, visit the National Business Awards website. It has regional and national categories – so could be worth giving them a go too.

Can small firms benefit from deflation?

Deflation is not good – I think we all know that but Small Business has recently written an interesting post about how small firms can actually benefit from it because of reduced costs in many areas. Hmm, I think I need convincing on this one.

According to the latest Business Inflation Guide, the cost of running an SME is now cheaper than it has been in years which is a little bit of good news in these dark times.

Small Business writes:

“According to the research, costs for enterprises fell by 2.9 per cent across the UK in the last quarter of 2008, with the northern regions seeing the greatest decrease of 3.8 per cent.

“The inflation guide, which measures the cost of 20 items commonly purchased by small businesses, shows that there has been an 18.3 per cent decline in fuel prices, an 11.5 per cent cut in raw materials and a 2.8 per cent reduction in insurance.”

This is also emphasised by Moneywise writer Rebecca Atkinson who suggests that continued deflation could actually “boost incomes and confidence”.

However, I should stress that there are only certain groups of people who will benefit, in her post Rebecca goes on to comment:

“Falling prices technically mean your money goes further. But this only applies if you don't have any debt and your income is fixed.”

Deflation is not exactly good news because it occurs when demand is low and markets are badly weakened. Only certain groups will benefit from it and it’s important to remember that there will be far more negative consequences for the rest of us in the long run. All we can do is hope it doesn’t last too long and cause too much damage.

An online Dragon’s Den is launched for business ideas

When having a read through my feeds earlier on today, I came across a post on a US blog College Start up, which discussed the latest venture of billionaire Mark Cuban. He has come up with his own answer to President Obama’s Stimulus plan: create his own.

Taking not only his, but other people’s future in to his own hands, Cuban is offering people the opportunity to upload their business plans and get feedback and advice. It’s a kind of online Dragon’s Den. He has some rules users must follow, but it looks like a great way to open the door for investment and advice:

1. It can be an existing business or a start up

2. It cannot be a business that generates any revenue from advertising because he wants this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. That’s the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time

3. It must be profitable within 90 days

5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you don’t make your numbers, the funding stops

6. You must demonstrate as part of your plan that you sell your product or service for more than what it costs you to produce, fully encumbered

7. Everyone must work. The organisation is completely flat. There are no employees reporting to managers. There is the founder/owners and everyone else

8. You must post your business plan on his blog, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download

9. He makes no promises that if your business is profitable, that he will invest more money. Once you get the initial funding you are on your own

10. He will make no promises that he will be available to offer help. If he wants to, he will. If not, he won’t

11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that he specifies, and he has the ability to watch the funds flow

12. In your business plan make sure to specify how much equity he will receive or how he will get a return on his money

13. No multi-level marketing programs

Once the company ideas are uploaded, Cuban considers which he is willing to fund and publicises the lucky business plans through his blog. He believes that the generation of new ideas and “the next big thing” is the only way in which the economy and business in general can look to improve.

It is great to see an entrepreneur using the current situation as a route to encourage other individuals with ideas to step forward and create their own business ventures that would boost employment and profitability. I also think it’s a clever way to invest in good strong business ideas.

Technorati Tags: Mark Cuban,College Start Up

My five top internet tips to improve your business

The internet is awash with information and it’s a great place for you to improve your business efficiency for nothing.

Everyone knows Google holds the key to most information finding, but it can be top heavy with sponsored links and cleverly SEO’d eBook sellers – so I thought it might be useful to save you a bit of time by sharing my top five tips for using the internet to improve your business.

1. Sign up to LinkedIn – it’s like Facebook, but for businesses. It’s a great place to recruit (saving you the huge recruitment fees you’d usually face) and you can use it as a business support network. It’s a community of likeminded people, so you’ll get out of it exactly what you put into it. Network with other new business leaders, the huge corporate leaders and potential partners and customers
2. Skype – I love this tool, it provides one-2-one video calling completely free. This means if you have employees on the road working from home you can stay in touch for next to nothing. Many of our calls at work are long distance as we have clients all around the world. Skype calls can be free if the calls are done completely over the internet or much cheaper and it allows users to roam around and not be tied to a land-line. You just need a headset plugged into your computer and away you go
3. Get into Google. Google is the fastest single way to find where your customers are, what they’re talking about and what they think of your product. The most useful advice I can give you as a professional communicator is to listen. If you have a web presence you can do this using a free analytics service such as Google Analytics as you can track your sites most popular pages and see how people get to your site which can help you tailor it to be more effective for selling your product or service.
4. Yammer - Yammer is a private social network for companies that want to stay in touch with each other. If you have team members working in different rooms or on different sites it’s a great way to stay in touch easily. Each user is given a profile displaying their photo, title, expertise and background. Yammer then asks a question: “What are you working on?”. It basically acts like a discussion board for your company. You can post a status update; ask a question; shares news, links, opinions, and information.
5. Speed up your news - Download and install an RSS (really simple syndication) reader like FeedDemon (download here) or Google Reader (sign-up here). It acts like a personalised newspaper – when you’re on a website, if you see the image on the right then you can add the websites news updates to your newspaper. The best things to sign up for are news websites (the BBC, FT, The Guardian etc), corporate blogs (with the top ten here, and listed below) and obviously our blog, here
• These blogs should give you the inside view on some of the world’s larger corporations:
  1. The Google blog
  2. The LinkedIn blog
  3. The whole foods blog
  4. The eBay blog
  5. The Wal-Mart blog
  6. General Motors blog
  7. Future Banking blog
  8. The McDonalds blog
  9. Amazon Daily
  10. The Cisco blog

The Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme is it going to work?

This is my first post on Exchanging Thoughts, so please be gentle with me, my name is Chris Norton and I am Director at Wolfstar a public relations and social media specialist. I have been working with Helen on a number of things over the last eighteen months and from now on I hope to be teaming up with her to share my thoughts and tips for businesses.

On Radio 4 on Friday morning, Evan Davies discussed the fact that there is very little awareness among small businesses when it comes to the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) Scheme, which is what has inspired my post today.

The Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme aims to motivate lending to SMEs which are currently struggling to secure finance from banks in the current climate. To me this sounds like a good idea – we could all do with some help with our cashflow.

In my opinion, the scheme sounds ideal for SMEs feeling the strain under financial pressure. However, Mike Symes of SME Business News suggests that some banks may not be wholly behind the scheme or have very little product awareness. He writes about the experience of Joanne Ward of Wesley Services in Leeds:

“Joanne Ward, the company secretary and financial controller, attended a meeting with her bank manager to discuss renegotiating the firm’s overdraft. When she mentioned the EFG, Mrs Ward was shocked at the reply she received. “He just said: ‘We don’t like these schemes and we’re not interested in them.”

This is further emphasised by a recent article on Times Online, which suggested that banks are “not up to speed with the parameters of the schemes” and “are still being very harsh with small businesses.”

In the piece on the Today Programme, the person being interviewed did say that the lack of visibility of the scheme is the reason why a lot of small businesses hadn’t secured any of this funding yet. So, although the scheme seems excellent in theory, it is yet to be seen whether it operates well in practice. I would be interested to hear the experiences of other SMEs who have enquired about the scheme – is it any good?

Technorati Tags: EFG Scheme,Today Programme,Evan Davies

Zimbabwe’s traders don’t gamble – why do we?

I see the Central Bank of Zimbabwe has introduced a 100 trillion dollar bank note. As of time of writing this is apparently worth about 225 Euros, but with inflation running at more than 200 million percent, by this time next week it probably won’t be the price of a teabag. Market traders have resorted to pricing their goods in foreign currencies in the hope of hedging against losses.

Clearly this is an extreme case, but there are some important parallels to be drawn with our own situation in the UK.

Last year the Pound’s value against the Euro fell from 1.37 in January to 1.02 in December. This meant that anyone needing to buy Euros, be it a commercial importer or a British pensioner living overseas, was paying over 25% more for their Euros by the end of the year than at the beginning.

Businesses, say, buying raw materials from overseas, who had put a Euro conversion rate of 1.30 into their budget, saw profits slashed if not wiped out altogether. Riding on the previous few years of boom, their only goal was to increase sales and revenue. The problem was, they forgot that it’s not revenue that counts, it’s profit, and if your profits are being eroded to the tune of 25% in a year, there ain’t much left.

It’s never too late to learn the lesson. We live in difficult and unpredictable times. Economies and markets are volatile and will remain so. It would be a brave person who can say with any confidence where the Sterling/Euro rate will be in another twelve months. It might be where it is now. Or it might be 1.40, or less than parity. But, one thing we do know is that the name of the game in business is to eliminate risk, and that means eliminating foreign exchange risk as well.

Hedging forward is incredibly simple, cheap, and sensible. Contrary to some views, it is IMPOSSIBLE to lose money by taking out a forward hedge. The worst that can happen is that you don’t benefit from a windfall profit from an upward swing in exchange rates.

But businesses are not there to take gambles on exchange rates. If you set a rate in the budget at the beginning of the year, then for goodness sake make sure that’s what you’re going to be getting at the end of the year. It’s the only way to protect your profits.

Zimbabwe’s market traders have got the idea. Why haven’t we?

Richard Farleigh are you really listening?

Well I’ve just about recovered from the first few days of this week. After an interview and photo shoot for New Business magazine on Monday, followed by a very successful day at the Leeds International Business Advice day on Tuesday, the ongoing BlackBerry project, the prospect of a joint venture in America and the start of our transparency campaign, I could do with it being the weekend.

Not yet though, and it just promises to get even busier. We are growing very quickly, and like all businesses in that position we need to expand and that means we need cash.

Where is that lovely Richard Farleigh of Dragon’s Den fame when you need him? We miss him. Well apparently he is alive and well and doing what he does best – investing in exciting technology ventures. To that end I have just dropped him a line – apparently he reads every email so I will be waiting with bated breath for him to get in touch. Come on Richard, you know you want to…

Technorati Tags: Richard Farleigh,Dragon's Den,4X Currency

Save money by shopping around for the best currency deals

First week back from holidays and already long, carefree, sun-drenched Lake Garda days seem like a very dim and distant memory. The perishing temperatures and permanent torrential rain of September in Britain aren’t helping, combined with the gloomy economic forecast, the rising cost of living and plummeting house prices.

I don’t think anyone’s feeing very chipper at the moment. The thought of another 9 months of this before next summer kicks in makes somewhere where you don’t need flippers to get to the supermarket seem very attractive..

Anyway, one thing I did notice, in preparation for my visit to Euro land, was the ease with which I was able to compare holiday currency deals. Although we have millions of Euros constantly washing through 4X, unfortunately they belong to our customers and are not available to me as holiday spending money. So I went on the rounds of the high street suppliers.

I tried, three – the Post Office, Marks and Spencer, and the little man round the corner. In each case the rates were clearly displayed in the window, as were the commission fees or lack of. There was quite a variance in the rates, but they were very easy to compare and I plumped very firmly for the little man who was giving a significantly better deal than the other two.

Now, I changed £500. The amount I saved by shopping around was probably about £25. Not much, but enough for quite a few Italian ice creams, and worth having. And yet, when it comes to much larger amounts, such as for an overseas property purchase or paying a business supplier, it suddenly becomes so much harder to compare prices.

Unlike Bureaux de Change, currency companies are not obliged to clearly display their rates of exchange, usually forcing customers through a lengthy registration process before quoting a dealing rate. With some 135 such companies in the UK, most of them claiming to give the best rate, this makes price comparison almost impossible.

The usual reason given is that currency prices move around so quickly that the dealer won’t calculate the quote until the customer is ready to do the deal. However, there is nothing to stop the customer asking how the price will be calculated.

Dealers quote a percentage away from the ‘inter bank’ rate (which can be found on BBC.co.uk, or teletext  or ceefax). That percentage is their profit. Naturally this is not something they want to disclose, but if I were going to exchange hundreds of thousands of pounds would certainly want to know what the deal was.

You could either ask them how many ‘basis points’ away from the inter bank rate they will charge, or what percentage. That way comparison of rival providers is relatively simple, and when you come to do the deal you can check that is what you are getting.

The overseas property market has been somewhat in the doldrums over the last months. My bet is that this dreary autumn might start a few more people looking to sunnier climes. Shopping around for the best currency deals can mean having enough left over to furnish the place.

In the meantime, for those of us who can’t afford our villa in the Algarve just yet, I have a suggestion.

Why doesn’t the Government buy a smallish warm or tropical island. One of the Canaries would do. On a certain date, say September 5, the whole of Britain could be flown out to live there for the winter. It might be a bit cramped, but we would be on the beach most of the time so it wouldn’t matter. They could then just turn Britain off and close the doors until spring.

Think of all the money it would save – on heating, lighting, cough and cold medicines – we’d all be rich and happy and healthy and then we could come back when the sun comes out. Just a thought, but it’s still raining and I think I’ll drop Gordon a line…

Technorati Tags: 4X Currency Corporation, Holiday Currency, Inter bank rate