helping business in flintshire

Reading about the latest Kindle and related e-book readers, I was struck by a realisation.  We are about to repeat history and nobody has noticed. Remember when Apple brought out that Mac, and Microsoft were pushing Windows? The war is about to be replayed.

These were desktop PC’s, but for use in a personal capacity, rather than business.  Which one where you?  The stylish creative designer with no idea how it worked, but happy with the results?  Or where you the spotty geeky engineering type, who would rebuild it to make it work a fraction quicker?  The designers went for the Mac’s while the engineers went for the PC’s.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Anyway, it is a good 20 years later, and technology has moved on.  We are no longer using desktops except for a work environment. Fun is about laptops, fun is about mobile.  The last few years so netbooks, but Apple introduced something new, the IPad.  While at face value, the iPad is a white elephant, it looks like it will influence our future by far more than we realised.

Roll forward 3 years, will the future look a bit like 1996?  With Apple having a tiny share of the market, but with very loyal customers? The other side is taken up with Google’s new Android playing the part of the dominant MS Windows 95!

So, what does the future hold?  It might be everyone having a tablet as their personal computer device, and all our data hidden around the web.  Tablets, as we imagine them, not the iPad reality, could do everything we want them to do on a personal level.  They would be our diary or notepad, or Walkmans, or video player or Nintendo DS replacements.  They could be our books, or photo frames or 100 other things.

The difference is, they would be very light, and cheap and last a day – and not be technical.  anyone could use one.  The answer is a something similar to a paperback book – but maybe thinner!

These devices are already making an appearance on the market.  Android tablets are coming from everywhere, big name brands, Chinese OEM models, and everything inbetween.

The question is, will history repeat itself?

What do you think?

TTX02, known as the world’s first electric sport bike, was launched in the UK on December 15 and is currently available for pre-order.

Dubbed as the ‘laptop on wheels’, the superbike has a dedicated IP address and is capable of connecting with most electronic devices, such as smart phones and MP3 players. The electric bike can be connected as well from any browser through an onboard web server and Wi-Fi.

TTX02 was designed by Azhar Hussain, whose first electric bike competition on the Isle of Man took newspaper headlines earlier this year. As an entrepreneur with various experiences in consumer electronics, he emphasized that the development of TTX02 demonstrates the automotive industry’s present success that was previously seen in electronic hardware only.

TTX02 will be available for release in the first quarter of 2010, with limited production of up to 50 units. With a Circuit Pack, the bike is expected to cost about £25,000.

Hussain is the founder of TTXGP, the world’s first zero carbon motorbike race which was held in June this year. The design of TTX02 has been inspired by the winning motorcycle Agni X01, which was developed by TTXGP’s manufacturing arm Mavizen.

Meanwhile, TTXGP had earlier confirmed that three motorbike racing events will take place in the UK from 3 July to 11 September next year for the UK Championship 2010. The race is in concurrence with the TTXGP North American Championship, which will be held in May 2010. The winners from both TTXGP events will contend in a grand finale race in November next year.

Originally posted 2009-12-22 09:25:10.

The jury remains out on Google Maps, with property portals around the globe uncertain as to its impact on their businesses.

Seventy international delegates at the Property Portal Watch workshop held in San Francisco said that the emergence of Google Maps – so far in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand – had failed to make any real impression, other than hype and conjecture.

The delegates also agreed that using mapping as a property search tool was not as user-friendly as a list.

However, most of the portals reported seeing Google as a threat, mainly because they did not know what Google’s real intentions are. Some believe that Google may be on the path to disintermediating not just estate agents but property portals too.

Alistair Helm, chief executive of realestate.co.nc in New Zealand, said that Google is now driving 64% of overall traffic to his site, but that Google Maps only drives 5.5%.

The delegates said that until Google integrates Google Maps into its main search engine, it is unlikely to drive significant traffic.

Delegates were split as to whether to engage with Google Maps or avoid it.

In the UK, Zoopla has notably decided to partner Google Maps. Equally notably, Rightmove has given it a wide berth.

Grants for business in Flintshire start at the Welsh Assembly’s Single Investment Fund (SIF). This is a scheme where all the individual grants that were available have all been placed in a single ‘pot’.

The WAG can assist all sizes of businesses with bespoke packages of support that meet their needs, for example for start-up, expansion, modernisation, restructuring or to develop new products, processes or services.

Support is conditional on the business and its investment project meeting the necessary criteria, which include:
• The project must take place in Wales.
• The European Commission restricts support in certain sectors, including fisheries and aquaculture, coal, steel, synthetic fibres, shipbuilding and agricultural primary products.

Well served markets such as printing, UPVC window manufacture/
installation, building contractors and plant hire are also unlikely to
be eligible.

• Many service sectors that serve more than the local market are also eligible. Retail businesses and local services such as garages, day care nurseries and hairdressers are not eligible.

If SIF is unable to help you, there are a few other resources available from other organisations. The most ‘friendly’ is Finance Wales We discuss a more realistic option from them at the end of this article.

However, before you start looking for grants, please read the following which is taken from a very good document from WAG called ‘Getting a Grant – Director’s briefing’

Do not waste time trying to get a grant unless you are prepared to overcome four potential obstacles.
1.1 You must be ready to put up some of your own money.
• It is extremely rare for a grant to finance 100 per cent of the costs of any project.
• Grants typically cover 15 to 60 per cent of the total finance required for a project.
Even if a larger proportion of the project cost is available, you will still need to invest time and resources in researching and applying for the grant.
1.2 Grants are usually only available for specified projects. For example, investment in capital equipment and job creation, researching and developing a new product or process, or training programmes.
• The normal, organic process of company development does not usually qualify, however there may be support for small and medium-sized enterprises that will accelerate investment and job creation.
1.3 You must have a clear project plan.
• You will probably need to show how the project ties in with the strategic direction of your business as outlined in your business plan.
1.4 Grant schemes are for projects that are not already under way, and almost always impose certain restrictions.
• The project must help towards achieving the objectives of the grant provider – usually a department or agency of local, national or European government.
• In most cases, you must be able to show that the project would not take place and achieve the same benefits without the grant.

Pass these hurdles, and you may be on your way! For more help and guidance on all aspets of business advice in Flintshire, contact Flintshire Business Services

UPDATE:
We had a meeting with Finance Wales last week where we discussed the current market and what is available to businesses in Wales. While the grant is traditionally seen as the easy option to raise money for small business, the ‘correct’ way of raising finance is through loans and commercial investments. The idea being that if a business idea was profitable and sustainable, a commercial investor would be glad of the chance to invest in it.

Finance Wales have been working hard in this area and have seen success with a number of well known Flintshire companies. As the quote from WAG earlier indicates, if you have a solid business proposal, you are going to get support, and Finance Wales are a good place to start. Actually, with the amount of paperwork involved with a grant and the risk averse aspect of the banking sector, Finance Wales may be the very best place to start!

Originally posted 2009-03-05 10:45:05.

One of the great things about a recession is that the cost of researching new opportunities becomes lower.  Finding the next big thing is always balanced against the cost of following the current market, and in a growing economy, it is just as profitable to follow the herd as it is to spend some time looking for the niche goldmine.

When you do research your potential goldmine, many businesses have been looking at up and coming legistation for clues to where to be at the right time.  This is how people made their money with the ‘No win, No fee’ market when the market was made legal in 1996.  This is also how the Buy to Let market was born in the early 1995.  Recent legistation has included the HIPS, which created a whole industry of trainers.  Others have included the resulting fallout of the EU Smoking ban.

Although this policy of checking up and coming legistation had worked well for the manufacturers of wind power generators and suppliers of equipment to the public sector, there have been a few cases recently where this opportunity grabbing is no longer ensuring a profitable business. Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted 2008-12-02 11:06:59.

Can you imagine what is like to be overwhelmed by floods of cold calls every single day? Welcome to the world of the ‘decision-maker’….

We all believe in the product or service we sell. Or we should do if we deserve to be selling it!

But that belief clouds our vision: we assume that everybody will be just as enthusiastic about our offering as we are. All we need is ‘two minutes of the prospect’s time’ to make our case and then they’ll be grateful…

But cold-calling is actually not like that when viewed from the perspective of the people who matter – the recipients of the call. The truth is that decision-makers hate cold calls and have no interest in talking to you because the majority of cold-callers waste their time. That’s it in a nutshell.

Is what you have of value?
The standard sales process requires that you call a large number of people on a try list. As the caller you believe you have something of value to offer the decision-maker but, more accurately, you want to test whether you have something of value for them. Speaking to decision-maker helps to qualify them as a genuine prospect and, if they are, then you may even get an appointment.

Imagine being interrupted by time-wasting calls every 20 minutes. You’d hide behind email; your gate-keeper would be fiercer than a troll; you simply couldn’t respond politely to every call – you’d never get any of your own work done.

Wasted hours
All those five-minute calls would add up to two wasted hours out of your day; and, as a decision-maker, your time doesn’t come cheap! Then the caller only wants a further ten or 15 minutes for a brief meeting: the decision-maker soon learns that ten minutes really means at least half-an-hour.

The tried-and-trusted sales technique is for the caller to ask a few questions to gather information to grab the decision-maker’s interest, reel him in and set an appointment. Unfortunately, when you call, you sound exactly like every other salesperson who has phoned that day. Everybody does it and it’s usually a feeble approach: salespeople want the decision-maker to waste time educating them about why they called, to provide the reason to try to set a meeting.

Then, when the decision-maker politely refuses the offer of a meeting, salespeople are quite rightly persistent. Instead, they launch into questioning technique, probing, trying to flush out the objection, to give more reasons for the decision-maker to agree to meet. The prospect stonewalls. When salespeople persist, they get the bum’s rush: the phone goes click, whirr, and there’s nobody at the other end of the line….

Nothing of interest
The thing is, if you’re like thousands of other salespeople out there, you have absolutely nothing of interest to say to the decision-maker. This prospect doesn’t want to buy your copier, server or air-conditioning unit because there’s still two years left on the current copier lease, the server’s just been upgraded and there’s never more than two hot days in the UK anyway. The prospect is not immediately bothered about back-up solutions or water coolers or upgrading their book-keeping software because they have more immediate problems and what you’re offering is not the solution to that immediate problem.

That’s why people usually won’t take your call – because what you’re offering does not fulfil a specific need and you haven’t bothered to find that out in advance of the call.

As the salesperson, you think, you hope, you pray that you’re the exception. This time the decision-maker will take your call. Of course they’ll want to speak to you despite their previous experience – after all your call will be different from the dozen or so other calls they’ve already refused that day. The odds are stacked against you….

Cheap
Nevertheless, cold calling is viewed by many salespeople, managers, and companies as the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to find prospects. This may have been true when telemarketing was cheap… and effective. These days, telemarketing and cold-call prospecting is certainly not cheap and it may not even be an efficient or effective exercise.

It all depends on how well it’s done, the relative value of the item being sold and the availability of alternatives. Cold calling really is one of the toughest ways to communicate with a prospect because, generally when you cold call, you’re trying to connect with someone who is already pre-disposed not to enter into a dialogue with you in any kind of meaningful sense of the word.

Volume
In order to overcome this obstacle, you will not only have to make the numbers – a massive volume of unsuccessful calls for every useful one – but you will also have to be well-prepared. Get the best training you can, research each prospect as thoroughly as you can to boost your chance of a meaningful conversation, but prepared for a lot of rejection.

There are other options – social networking, introductions, recommendations and referrals, advertising, exhibitions and the myriad of marketing communications channels. Cold-calling is a tiring, hard grind and it’s also expensive in time and energy; it’s emotionally draining. But, yes, sometimes it’s necessary.

What do you think? Is Cold Calling an old technology, or is it still the best way to do business?

Originally posted 2009-12-18 14:08:50.

As was mentioned earlier, the Flintshire Business Week 2009 sponsors evening introduced a number of local companies together in one room. One very welcome contact was from the Evening Leader, our local paper.

Very soon the conversation on how to get a business into the local paper was raised. The answer was enlightening.

Firstly, tell the paper that something is happening! While they have reporters, they are not yet skilled in ESP mind reading!

Secondly, if you have a story, make sure it is interesting to people outside your company and your industry. While it is good news that XYZ Ltd hit is quarterly targets and now has 35% of the widget market, it is of no interest to Mrs Jones, living on the outskirts of Mold.

Finally, Don’t think that a story is related to your advertising budget. While it would be nice for the local paper to see more income, their main goal is to produce interesting stories for the local population.

So, what is the sort of thing that should make a local paper write a story about you and your business? Let us know in the box below!

We are also hoping to speak to the national media soon and will ask them what they find interesting – Watch this space!

Originally posted 2009-06-18 10:41:55.

Roof-mounted wind turbines and solar panels are “eco-bling” that allow their owners to flaunt their green credentials but contribute very little towards meeting Britain’s carbon reduction targets, according to the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Developers will waste millions of pounds installing such micro-generation devices unless the Government revises its building regulations on carbon-neutral homes and offices.

Doug King, Professor of Building Engineering at the University of Bath and the author of a report on low carbon buildings published today, said that far greater savings could be made by installing better insulation and methods of trapping the Sun’s rays.

He proposed that the government target for all new homes to be carbon-neutral by 2016 should be relaxed in return for developers making equivalent contributions to wind farms and other large-scale renewable energy projects. “Wind turbines and solar cells on the roof achieve little or nothing and are what I describe as eco-bling. It’s just about trying to say to the general public, ‘I’m being good, I’m helping the environment’.

“The things that save the money are not done, because they are not sexy.”

Dr King said that wind turbines on urban homes often consumed more energy than they generated.

Field trials carried out last year by the government-funded Energy Saving Trust found that the most productive building-mounted wind turbines in urban or suburban areas generated only £26 of electricity a year. Many of these turbines, which cost about £1,500, were net consumers of electricity because their controls drew power from the grid when the wind was low.

David Cameron installed a wind turbine on the roof of his home in West London but was forced to remove it because he had not obtained planning permission. His spokeswoman said yesterday that the turbine had been returned to the architect. “The technology has moved on so there was no point in putting it back up,” she said.

Professor King said that for wind turbines on urban homes to be effective, they would have to be so big that their vibration would damage the building. He said that installing microgeneration devices could cost £10,000 to £12,000 per home and reduce its emissions by only a few per cent. He proposed an alternative policy under which developers would offset the entire emissions of new homes by contributing £3,000 per dwelling towards a wind farm on a hilltop.

Professor King said that offices would need to be redesigned to reduce energy use and cope with regular power cuts caused by the failure to replace ageing power stations. He accused the Government of failing to practise what it preached on emissions. A recent National Audit Office report found that 80 per cent of government buildings opened since 2002 fell below minimum environmental performance standards.

Running out of puff

1.9% of homes (455,000) are suitable for building-mounted turbines

5m a second minimum average wind speed to justify the cost of a small turbine

80% by 2050: target for cut in 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions

2016 date for all new homes to be zero-carbon under target

45% of current emissions come from buildings

80% of the buildings in which we will live in 2050 have been built

Sources: DECC, Energy Saving Trust, Royal Academy of Engineering

SOURCE

Originally posted 2010-01-20 11:32:54.