Next steps on the journey

 

For some time I have been deliberating about the next course of action. The last post relating to this was written on April 5th entitled ‘Exposing a larger surface area to increase opportunities‘.

 

I have managed to secure a basic I.T. contract working in the client’s office that allows me to pay the bills. This contract is a junior position and hence does not require me to be responsible other than to do the work at hand. The hours are 8am until 4pm which allows me to get back to me office before the working day ends. The money suits the position and wont get me rich but it does provide me a ’status quo’ on the cash flow situation enabled me not to slide into debt.

 

Now that outgoings are covered. I am focusing on winning business and building the company by following up on prospects that did not come to fruition due to the recession. I have noticed that since April the number of inquiries and opportunities have risen and I expect my company will have enough business for me to work full time on it very soon.

 

I am working on a proposal for a very large company at the moment and if that works out, we will be back in business.

 

I have been trading using a demo or practice account (see previous post). My trades are winning and losing and I have been bouncing around my start capitol so far. So no where near making a living from trading.

 

I am learning a lot about economics at the moment in particular about supply and demand and the maths behind the market. I can already see this shaping the way I think about the business world and changing the way I make decisions. I’ll write about this in a separate  post.

 

So all in all, I have covered the downside, working on the upside and making sure I am exploring opportunities and learning.

 

Life is good.

 

Financial difficulties

 

 

Closing a business is much harder than opening one. I have several service contracts that I signed for third party companies to supply me services for the company.

 

Now the business has run out of money, I have tried to negotiate a closure for these contracts. Some people have been reasonable and wished me luck and others have been very difficult and unreasonable.

 

The worst company is an SEO company who supplies news stories in the form of an XML feed to your website. This company is called Direct News, which is part of Adfero. I signed a contract with them last year with a 3 months notice period for termination in it. I wanted to delay the start of this contract by 6 months and so that contract was annulled and a new contract with a new start date was provided.

 

What I didn’t realise was they had changed the termination clause from 3 months to one year.

I admit this was my mistake not spotting this change, but I signed the new contract and now the business is going down I tried to cancel the contract they have refused to terminate in less than one year.

 

I even offered them 3 months payment for no service, but they have been really unreasonable and have demanded full payment.

 

I am seeking advice on how whether I can win a case against them for them misrepresenting the new contract by not highlighting the change. They say they pointed this out in the meeting but they did not, unfortunately there is no record of this either way, so it is their word against mine.

 

The total outstanding amount for all three remaining months is about £7500. What is really annoying is that the news has never really done anything for the company either!

 

A good lesson has been learnt here on my journey to being a successful businessman and that is ‘Trust no one’, ‘Read the contract’ and ‘cover the downside’.

 

 

What’s next?

What’s next? 

For anyone who has watched ‘The West Wing’, you know what I am talking about.

What’s next?

 

The business is 99% over. I have a few things to clear up in terms of contracts etc and also there are still some prospects out there that may come off at some point, but nothing immediate.

 

This leaves me with the greatest asset of all. Time.

I now have all the time in the world, the rest of my life ahead and I can do whatever I want.

So what to do now.

 

Well, I have learnt a hell of a lot since starting this journey a year ago, perhaps a good place to start would be to see what I have learnt and use this to form a new business plan.

 

1. I have learnt a lot about the markets, trading (both share dealing and spread betting)

 

This is mostly to do with technical analysis, the mechanism for trading, the importance of having a trading system and risk management.

 

2. I have learnt a lot about running a proper business, getting sales and productising ideas to sell to potential customers.

 

This is mostly about keeping costs down, being creative, taking that idea and making it commercially viable and then selling that idea to someone who then pays for you to build it.

This is great in a growing market, and extremely difficult in a shrinking market (as I have found).

 

3. Property would be great to buy now, but I don’t have any cash. Have not explored this avenue yet.

 

4. I love the flexibility of running my own business and the fact that this allows me to spend time with my family when I want to.

 

5. I like being the boss.

 

6. Not many of my friends understand this way of life and in fact some don’t even like to talk about it. (I had one friend who took one look at the very first paragraph of this blog and switched it off quickly as if the thought of discussing making money through assets was somehow unclean!)

 

7. I don’t mind using the telephone to call people up

 

8. I like working on my own as well as with others

 

9. Spending money is a good way of losing money not making money.

 

10. The most important aspect of anything is to have fun!

 

Into the pot, I could also throw that I need some cash in the reasonably short term to carry on paying my expenses.

 

There are some options in order of what I am thinking I might do next:

 

1. Get some contract work which I can do quite easily which is high paid and short term to build cash reserves. The downside of this, is it is back to working on someone else’s asset, the advantage is low responsibility, short term and high cash.

 

2. Go back to working on freelance work form home. The advantage of this is that I can manage my time as I like so I can keep open for opportunities, work from home to see my family more, but the disadvantage is I am not building assets and the cash is a lot less than contracting work.

 

3. Carry on with the business as a background task to keep up with the prospects we have made, pursue any low cost / low time prospects as they might arise.

 

4. Come up with a whole new business idea

 

5. Learn more about trading in its various forms and make a living through that

 

6. Carry on learning and come up with another method of making some money

 

I am going to think about this over the next few days. I have been testing the water with contract work and there still seems to some of it about although not as much as a few years ago.

 

I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

The end of an era?

 

I have been banging on doors now for nearly six months trying to get some sales for the business and have finally given up the ghost of this incarnation of the business. My cash is all but depleted and I have closed the office and I am back working from home.

I have closed my Barclays share dealing account and haven’t opened my spread betting account in months.

I have no real assets to talk of and it is nearly a year since I started this blog.

 

So, am I depressed?, am I carrying on?, am I still waking up each morning flinging the curtains wide and rejoicing at another day.

 

You bet! Life can seem hard at times, especially for a new business in the heart of a depression, with a government that increases tax on dividends by 1% every year.

However, the spring is here, the trees around my house are starting to bud and I am already thinking about the next plan to build assets and generate an income.

 

No one said it would be easy and many entrepreneurs have said they have had many failing businesses before they made it big. So I guess this is just another step along the journey.

 

I looked back over the posts i made here last year and I still believe in the same philosophy of  being free, building assets, focusing on the things that matter in life and working towards financial freedom through asset based revenue.

 

This is the end of one era and very much the beginning of the next one.

 

Banging one’s head against a wall of mediocrity – a rant about marketeers.

 

It has been four months and probably around 500 phone calls to top marketing and advertising agencies as well as companies trying to talk to them about innovative new ideas that will make them money since I started up the new company in October.

My new business manager and I have been to many meetings and talked to many leading figures in the internet world. It never ceases to amaze me, how much mediocrity there is and how most people prefer to follow than to take a chance whilst pretending they are leading their companies forward.

An over whelming number of so called innovative figures in key positions for growing companies will not even listen to a new idea from people who have made a lot of money for people in the past.

I am amazed that there is such a degree of rigidity when approaching one’s job in the city. It is a rare find to find people are genuinely interested in listening. It seems most people, even people whose responsibility it is, is to bring new ideas to a company prefer to hunker down and pretend the world doesn’t really exist and just get through their day and appear to be doing their job.

Our business is finally taking traction now as we enter into a second round of meetings with key partners, but what a task it has been to get there.

My theory is that there are actually very few innovation centres in the world and that these are actually just one or two people in each place who are true entrepreneurs. They drive everything and everyone just talks the talk and pretends to be innovative.

Most managers and directors, wont even hear an idea. They either don’t even let you present an idea, or they think they are listening but they don’t hear. They somehow have a subconscious block to anything that might change their day to day, or make them visible to people higher up the ladder.

It is no wonder there is a recession going on with the inefficient middle manager nightmares that populate so many of the big companies. It has been said that this recession will be a recession of the middle classes. I hope it shakes out a few of the mediocre middle management whose sole purpose seems to be to pass pieces of paper to other mediocre managers either in their own organisations or in others.

It took Richard Branson a year and half to get his first advertising to get is first magazine off the ground and he spent all that time calling everyone he could. He made it and so will we.

 

 

The last four months

 

It has been four months since I stopped writing this blog. This was not a conscious decision but more that other things took over and I have been focusing on growing my business rather trading or writing.

I stopped trading both in stocks and spread betting after the major banking crash late last year. I lost a lot of money betting that Barclays would bounce back and it didn’t, it went even further down.

I wanted to maximise the amount of cash I had to put it to best use as at that time there was no more cash coming in. I decided the best place for my cash was to invest it into the business.

After taking an office at Regus (see previous post) I realised I needed to employ someone who knew about calling companies to offer our services. I am no salesman but I recognised that sales is very important in us gaining work going forwards.

This was an important step as realising who should be on the management team is one of the first stages in building a good business.

I employed someone with over 20 years experience in the industry I work in, which is new media and we drew up a business model for going forwards.

We looked at our collective experiences and identified the target clients. We called round and from feedback we received we adapted the model to demand.

We also tried several different ideas in different market sectors.

They key thing we found is that we needed something unique to offer and then offer our main services on top.  This has worked well in getting meetings with large companies.

Over the last 4 months we have partnered with some of the biggest agencies and companies in the UK. We have won a small amount of work to keep us going.

We are now continuing to create meetings and opportunities with large companies and are waiting for a big contract to come out of the meetings we have made.

We have found things much slower than usual due to the current economic climate, with companies taking longer to make decisions and allocate budget. We have found a lot of companies have changed their strategy in keeping staff in house and are looking to outsource their requirements.

This is great for us, as we are an outsource company, but it means that at the moment the industry is in a bit of chaos with job roles appearing and disappearing quickly. This means delays in projects and ultimately business for us. In the medium to long term is should mean much more business.

The aim of the game now is to survive and keep knocking on doors until we get the contract to take us to the next level.

 

 

Regus Nightmare Saga part 2

Regus Saga continues

As you know from my post concerning the first part of the Regus saga I have had some problems with my office at Regus. Well, the saga is still going on and I thought I’d write about it here in case anyone is thinking of getting one, virtual or otherwise.

You may recall I was hassled into signing the contract quickly and I did so because I had seen the office and wanted to get into it quickly anyway. It was just the attitude that was all wrong and the monthly fee. I waited until the Essex sales manager returned to discuss this and to make sure I got the price for the office he first offered.

I was told I could move into the office on the 1st of October and went in on this day. No-one knew who I was and the internet connection was not on. The contract was not officially to start until the 7th so I thought I would wait until then as the office still needed painting and cleaning.

I arrived on the 7th October and the office was ready but the internet for the entire building was not working so still no internet. I moved in my things and set up my internal network ready for when I could start work.

I made an appointment to see the Essex sales manager on the 7th but he did not show up to the meeting or call me, so I arranged another meeting for the end of the week.

On the 8th, Internet was back up and I could start working. I had no voicemail yet but that is ok because the phones were supposed to be redirected to my mobile. I didn’t need to get a separate virtual office reception as that is provided by the receptionist in our building. The person who deals with the phones is away for a week so I will have to wait until then to set up a voicemail.

At the end of the week, I still had not heard anything regarding the transfer of my virtual office to the receptionist here at the Regus building or about my 47p call charge I received.

I thought I would just discuss this at the end of the week with my meeting with the office manager.

In the meantime I found out my client’s calls were being routed to another company so when anyone rang me, they said wrong number and my clients were left wondering what was going on.

The reception staff here at Regus were great in sorting this out and in general have been brilliant.

At the end of the week, the sales manager again missed the meeting with no call. I’m understandably getting a little annoyed now. So I arrange another meeting for the next week.

The week comes round and I find that my internet connection is very basic and to get some basic ports open I need to upgrade to pay £69.99 / month for a single connection to allow ports to open. I think this is very steep but have no option if I want to run my business so I signed up for that.

The next week comes round and we have already had another day of internet connection outage so that is 2 days in 2 weeks o f no internet connection. For an internet company this is a total show stopper.

The sales manager phoned me to tell me he was going to be later and could we postpone my meeting with him for an hour. This was fine, but he did not show up at all! It got to 5pm and I was on my way home when I saw him come out of an office in reception. He looked very sheepish like a schoolboy who has not done his homework.

We went into his office for our meeting. When I asked him about the initial offer and rates he had offered me, he tried to deny it and change the rates! I could not believe it. He told me his system was not flexible enough to give me what he had first offered. I told him what he had first agreed and he said he needed to work out some numbers and he would get back to me by 12 midday the next day with what he could offer me and we would have a further meeting to discuss by the end of the week.

The next day, I heard nothing and the week has gone by and he has not contacted me at all.

On Saturday I received another invoice from Regus. The invoice includes a whole list of set up charges that have never been mentioned before totalling hundreds of pounds as well as a £1400 fee for something undisclosed. There were also further call charges of over £20 on a phone which I have used a few times to locally call my wife for a few minutes. In addition to the charge of £69.99 per telephone they also charge a further £9.99 line rental.

The set up charges include £100 office set up, £69.99 phone set up, £69.99 internet set up. None of which is explained up front and is not included in any documentation given.

There is almost nothing on this £3500 invoice which I agree with and I have written an email to the sales manager asking him to urgently contact me today.

So far I have heard nothing.

I am seriously thinking of vacating this office and finding another one. I am giving him until the end of the day to get back to me.

 

My first day at the office

Just a short post to let you know, I moved into my office today. Everything went well apart from there was no internet connection and it won’t be on until tomorrow evening which effectively kills a day’s work.

The office has a great view from the corner of the building over trees and plenty of space for me. It has been repainted as promised and new furniture has been put in.

 It feels weird not working from home, like I have moved out, however, it is excellent and a necessary step in the right direction.

I already feel more empowered and that the asset of the business is being constructed as planned.

Also when I got home, I really felt I could leave the office behind and spend some quality family time.

 

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing

It’ s been awhile since I wrote a post and this one is a bit of a repeat of the previous post in this category, however, it does add more detail and give an update of how things are going. Being a dad doesn’t leave much time in the evenings and in the day I have been busy building the business asset.

As you know, I completed the website a week or so ago and now I have been going through the marketing database I created by parsing trade magazine’s websites and researching the net. I have created a sales brochure and written a personal letter to each of the companies new business directors.

I am sending this tomorrow to 33 selected companies. These are the companies I feel I am most likely to be able to work with. I have nearly 250 other good-match potential clients with over 750 other potentials that need investigating. I am going to slowly go through each of these companies and contact them all. I sending the letters in small batches so I can personally ring the companies a few days after I have sent the letter. 

I have also taken out an advert in the leading trade magazine for my industry for one year. We have got the only round advert in a sea of square ones.

I have also been working on my connections using LinkedIn as business social networking site. I have reviewed every job I have ever done and looked up people I used to work with. Some of them are now directors of their own companies and may offer some potential for business. I will contact all of these connections in the next week.

I have also set up a Google Adwords campaign to show adverts for the company when certain keywords are searched upon in Google.

I will also contact previous clients in the hope they have either more work or that they will refer my company to those that they work with.

Using this multi pronged sales and marketing tack my target is to win just one big client before Christmas.

 

Identifying future clients

Now that all the sales material is ready, business cards and letter heads have been ordered and the website is complete, it is time to actually contact clients and try to win some business.

I have subscribed to a trade magazine NMA (New Media Age) which is the leading magazine for the website and advertising /  marketing industry. The people who read, advertise and are written about in this magazine are my potential clients.

I wrote a script to parse their website for the top 100 agencies, all companies who have advertised and are written about. The data has been entered into a large database of potential contacts. I have been going through the database using a small program I wrote for customer management (CRM). I have visited most of the websites and recorded who the contact details are for CEOs and other heads who I might like to talk to as well as rating them to how we might help them and provide a service and writing a short paragraph on what they do.

I am going to do a mail shot to all the likely companies and call them up to discuss how we can help them. This a major challenge for me as I have never done this before and the prospect of calling them up is quite daunting.

I am sure I will get the hang of it after a few calls.

I am hoping the mail shot will be quick in getting out there whilst I take my time of the next week or two calling up the companies. So hopefully the mail shot might generate something before I can make the calls.

I will start doing this next week after I move into the office as I will have the privacy for the calls. I am setting myself a target of 10 calls by the end of Friday.

I have also made a list of as many people as I can think of that I have worked with in the past and will contact them letting them know about the new service and asking them to recommend me to anyone who might be relevant. I have been using the web site LinkedIn.

I have also got the prices for placing an advert into the NMA as well in the hope that this might generate some sales leads too, and also I have set up a Google AdWord campaign.

This is the most excited I have been about the business so far. This is where it truly gets interesting. Up until now everything has been preparing for the moment when we actually tell the industry we are ready and our doors are wide open and now that time is upon us.

 

My first office part 2- The Regus saga.

I signed up for the office as planned. I tried to speak to Regus on Monday but could not get hold of anyone, Tuesday was the same and then on Wednesday I did finally manage to get hold of the manager for London. The Essex manager is on holiday for two weeks.

He told me they had already given the office away that I had reserved and I had to sign a contract there and then if I wanted to get in quick before the other people.

I only hope this was not some feeble sales attempt to rush me into the sale as it if it was it was quite transparent. I did sign up for the office as I wanted it anyway and got a good price at the bottom end of their scale. He did not offer me the upgrade program from the virtual office I have with them and I am going to wait until the Essex manager is back before I pay anything and make sure the proper discounts are in place.

I had a virtual office meaning they answer your calls and redirect to you and also post can be sent there. However, when we signed up, they specifically said there were no call charges and this morning I got in invoice for 47p for a call charge.

I hope this is not going to be the start of a nightmare relationship. Regus are supposed to the top class, but so far, I feel like I’m doing business with  a dodgy car salesman.

Has anyone else got any experience of dealing with Regus?

—

Added later:

I have asked for my virtual office to be completely cancelled as part of the upgrade to actual office and are going to check out bestreception.com as they come highly recomended at a fraction of the cost. I’ll tell you how they compare after I have used them for awhile.

 

My First Office

My first office

I had previously thought I would wait until I won the first client before getting an office, but with a new born in the house it is very difficult to get any work done. Also, I think having an office to work from will focus me more.

I went along to two serviced offices near where I live. The first was still be refitted and will be ready by the end of the month. The sales guy was not there so I could not get a price and they did not call me back, so I am waiting until Monday to see whether that is a good deal or not. The second office I looked around was the one at Regus which I discussed earlier. They have a corner office on the third floor coming up at the end of the month. It has glass on two walls over looking trees and greenery and is a lovely office. I am also waiting for the final price from them too.

So, on Monday I am going to sign up for one of them and move into it at the end of the month.

Having an office is a big step, both financially and psychologically. There was a great bit in the film Gattica, where two brothers are swimming, racing in the sea against each other. The stronger brother should easily have overpowered the other, but the weaker of the two won. However, the stronger guy had to save him by carrying him, swimming back to shore.

The stronger brother said how did you win? And the other said, I left nothing for the way back.

With this business, I am giving it everything, there is no way back. It is all or nothing.

Let the good times roll.

 

Business planning and sales materials complete

You may recall from my previous post (Creative Destruction) how I stopped doing the day to day work on the business to managing the strategy and employing other people to do the day to day. I had lost all but one big client in this process. However, the client that I have got is very happy with the progress and the money generated for the business has been enough for me to spend the entire summer putting together an entirely new business strategy. (This client’s project naturally came to end this week, so now I have no clients! This is both extremely freeing and focussing at the same time.)

The time generated by having someone else do the day to day is amazing. Once I started looking at time as the most valuable thing and not money, the money has taken care of itself and I have been able to focus on the bigger picture, spend time with my new son and sit out in the garden on the rare occasion of sunny weather. Life is good!

I have made just enough money each month to pay expenses but not save or invest. This is the main reason I have been focusing on trading so much and not property investment as my investment capital has not been growing.

I have reviewed every project I have ever worked on over the last 10 years and identified all of the things that have gone well and things that have gone poorly. Out of this, and researching the latest methodologies, I have put together an entirely new approach to completing projects and interacting with clients.

This has taken a few months but is now complete.

My next stage is to take this and show it to my existing client and to network with as many new people as possible to share the ideas with. I have also been reviewing all my old contacts, no matter how obscure, and creating a database with all their details in. I have been keeping my internet social networking sites information up to date that are related to business such as linkedIn. In this way I am building quite a good network of possible contacts.

We got a new receptionist company today, that answers the phone in the name of the business and passes calls or messages. We also got a professional business address that will make us seem much more professional.

I am seriously considering getting an actual office set up much earlier as with a newborn in the house it will be difficult to get any work done!  (I have always worked from home and managed people who work remotely before).

I am confident that it will not be long before things start to take off with the business as everything is now in place; it is just a matter of following the plan and adjusting with any new information that comes in.

 

Sales

Sales

Yesterday, I read something which I thought I would share as this subtly changes the way in which I am proceeding with putting my presentation to my clients together regarding the new business idea I have (see previous post).

In the book ‘Selling to Win’ (Third Edition), Richard Denny says that just as you need to keep up with new technology you must keep up with new sales methods. He talks about the old way of finding the need and selling this to your clients as outdated. He talks about finding the need, and then turning it into a want.

The idea is that if you need something, you will shop around, find the best deal and be generally more picky about where you buy something from. However, when you really want something, emotion takes over and people generally buy first and think later.

So, I am going to change my approach in my presentation to focus on the needs but use the language which evokes the ‘I want’ emotion.

Luckily all my research and work so far has been around finding the need and the pain which he does say is essential, but it is just the presentation that changes.

I will let you know how I get on.

(It is a great book by the way, and I would recommend anyone who is involved in running their own business to read it. All business owners need to know how to sell.)

 

Whatever it takes

It has been quite some time since I wrote about turning my business from a self employed business into a business owner’s asset where I am not doing the day to day running of the client work.

The reason for my break in writing is because I have been working on more or less the same problem for the last two months.

Something my brother said to me really hit home and started me off on a different course than I had previously taken. We were talking about some issue or other and I did not feel I should have to do something that I felt was someone else’s responsibility. He said to me, it is not a matter of what you feel you should or should not do, it is a matter of getting it done.

This really hit home for me on a number of levels. Mainly that I think somewhere inside me, I had been waiting for someone or a set of circumstances to make my business take off.

It seems strange, but I have always worked very hard, and I realised there was a mental block in creating a business asset. All I had to do, was get my mental block removed and all would be OK. It is a matter of doing whatever it takes, regardless of whether you should have to do things or not.

I reviewed the fundamentals of creating a successful business. The basic tenet of business is that you must fulfil a need in the market, or better find the pain in the market and fix it.

I have always known this, but on a fundamental level ignored it. I have always assumed I knew roughly what was needed and then tried to sell that. It was like I didn’t think I should have to go back to basics and examine the industry I have known for over 10 years.

I forced myself to challenge this believe and reviewed all of the projects and client work I have ever done. I looked for problems, irritations, delays, over budget projects and bad customer experiences. I spoke to other people in the industry to find out their issues and problems and spoke to my previous clients to see what issues they have had.

I catalogued all of these issues and grouped together problems into common areas. It was surprising to me that some subtle changes and some fundamental changes were needed in the industry to address some very common and re-occurring issues.

I reviewed these common issues to find out if anyone else was addressing these concerns with their companies and processes. It turns out that some are, and most are not. These same problems are still occurring in all of the top agencies in the country.

I then spent many weeks putting together a new process that can overcome all of the difficulties that are listed in the catalogue of issues. The process includes running projects, hiring the right people, contracts, meetings, ways of working and is completely focused around how much value can be given quickly to my clients.

I have shown this process to my business mentor and to my directors. There have been a few changes and I am now putting together a presentation to present the process to my existing clients and potential new clients.

I will approach them for their advice in the first place and see if they are interested in the concept. I will use their feedback to refine the process and incorporate that into the ongoing refinement of the business system.

My hope is that many of the companies I approach will be interested enough to give us their projects.

I have scoped out an office space outside of my house and agreed a flexible number of desks with the Regus Office group. I have not taken anything yet as i will wait for the first project to be won.

I will let you know how the feedback goes and how I get on with progressing forward the business.