Our new business information wiki – Business Essentials on the Web

As part of our continuing experimination with all things Web 2.0 (Social Media) we have created a wiki for essential business information. Still currently in beta, this wiki is a designed to allow any of my British Library business information colleagues to add useful links.

 

But more revolutionary (for the British Library) is that we are also opening up the wiki to anyone who has useful information to add. In particular our partners, who have expertise in a wide range of business support activities.

 

The wiki will be of help to people who are not able to come and visit our St Pancras building, and who find that Google does not provide all the answers.

 

Obviously we ony want useful content on the wiki, and will be taking any spam off straight away, much like you see on Wikipedia. Our wiki guidelines explain in more detail.

 

Please join our little community and add your comments and submit links of your own.

http://bl-business-essentials.wikispaces.com

 

The current hot topics are, Business planning, Grants and finance, Industry specific, Intellectual property, Marketing and PR.

If you have any ideas or comments on the wiki, you can email bipc@bl.uk

What is a CRM, and when are they best used by small business? Lucidica workshop Tuesday 3 November

This morning I managed to find the time to attend a workshop by one of our partners. Lucidica are a relatively new partner for the Business & IP Centre and currently provide six workshops related to IT and business.

This particular half day workshop on what is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and when are they best used by small business, was presented by immensely knowledgeable founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Thomas Jeffs.

He got straight down to business by explaining that a successful CRM implementation requires both staff discipline and management buy-in. With out both of these you will be wasting both your time and and your money.

Here are my notes from the morning:

What can a CRM system do?

1. Contact Management

• the most basic function of a CRM
• who they are
• what they are doing
• central point for all staff

Shared office address book – suppliers – customers – for many business this is just a piece of paper stuck onto a computer terminal

if people don’t use it and keep it up to date it become worthless

2.  Sales Force Automation – now the most popular aspect of CRM – making sure you make the best use of your sales force

• What to do and when, with regards to sales and follow ups
• Helps make sure you chase opportunities when you need to
• Allows you to forecast your predicted sales and leads – only tends to work on larger scale of operation
• Allows you to see how your sales agents are doing
• Essentially automating your sales force and sales force reporting
• Benefits not so clear to staff due to reluctance to fill in details of customer interactions

3.  Marketing Campaign Management – linked to previous activity

• How much did £100 in marketing spend raise in sales?
• How many leads did a marketing campaign generate?
• How many internal resources were required as a result of a marketing campaign? E.g. Did it attract the wrong kind of customer who were ‘high maintenance’?

4. Customer Service Management – support tickets – complaints – consistency across the Business & IP Centre

• A centralised place for tracking – breaks dependency on one member of staff
• Can provide automated responses to issues. E.g. generated ticket number and expected response from the company
• Can monitor and escalate issues if still outstanding
• Result in – consistency  and efficiency of service
• Benefits clearly visible to staff and customers

It is important to establish which of the above are the most relevant to your business, as this will have an impact the the most suitable package for you.

How do CRM systems help your business?

1. How do they do it? – Automation

Health warning

-       Automation to internal users is good

• Creation of follow-up tasks/ reminders
• Workflow tools
• Creation of templates, timelines and standards

-       Automation to external users is mixed

• Acknowledgement of complaints/issues/feedback work well
• Automated quarterly sales email – don’t work so well – de-personalises the business.

2. How do they do it? – Tracking / Recording

-       Change of address for existing clients

-       Client moves to a new company

-       Recording emails and phone contacts with sales leads

-       Recording information that client is under contract with competitor for next three months

-       Has your entire team access to this information

3. How do they do it? – Reporting

-       Reporting is the purpose for a CRM for management

-       Some things a CRM can tell you:

• Predicted sales for next three months
• Which clients haven’t been in contact for a while
• Which sales agents are getting the most leads
• Which sales agents are making the most sales
• Which contracts are up for renewal
• What total sales have you achieved from each marketing campaign
• Which clients have service level issues
• Which people work for which clients

Thomas reviewed several case studies based on real experiences at Lucidica.

Which CRM is right for you?

1. Which CRM? – Questions to ask

1. What is the function of the CRM?
2. What will it need to integrate with?
3. Who will need to use it, and from where?
4. What is the potential benefit for my business in £’s?

2. Which CRM? – Quick and dirty recommendations

-       Excel – 1st choice for people thinking about what they need to track

-       SharePoint – 1st choice for precision applications and power users

-       Sage ACT! – 1st choice for integrating into Outloook and Sage, below 10 users, primary use for contact management and sales force automation

-       SugarCRM – 1st choice for Linux users

-       SalesForce.com – 1st choice for users with little infrastructure and who rely on internet traffic for business

-       Goldmine – 1st choice for businesses with over 10 users but can’t afford Microsoft CRM

-       Microsoft CRM – 1st choice for businesses with high volume of sales and contracts

Summary

-       Make sure your CRM does not have superfluous functions

-       Make sure it can scale both up and down

-       Make sure you can get your data out of the system

-       start small and evaluate after six months

Lucidica Technology Seminars

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

- how to improve your website so search engines, like Google, lists or ranks it better/higher.

Email Marketing

- how to use professional looking emails, in bulk, to market effectively, and/or keep your clients informed (e.g. newsletters).

Technology “Must-Have’s” For Small Businesses

- from the best computers and laptops, virus-protection and back-up software we know of; to “what is a server and when does my business need one” and many free software and technology tips to reduce technology risk and increase value in your business.

An Intranet and more with Microsoft Sharepoint

- touted as a big thing in the 1990s, Intranets are finally adding value to business – especially small business now they are affordable with products like Microsoft Sharepoint. In this seminar we explain what an Intranet is, how you can use Sharepoint and how to get this powerful solution from Microsoft for FREE. We’ll talk and show you how you can use Sharepoint for your own CRM, wiki, time sheeting forms and reporting, expense summary forms, other procedures and forms with built-in workflow and much, much more.

What is a CRM, when are they best used by small business and which one to select

- Client Relationship Management (CRM) software can bolster your relationship with existing clients as well as help you work on your prospective client contacts better and more frequently with ease. We’ll outline what a CRM, how it should be used for small business and profile the top 4 or 5 CRMs affordable to small business.

Designing, developing and maintaining an effective website

- every small business should have a website. Here we dispel many myths about designing, developing and maintaining a website – it’s really not that hard! For most websites we design and build for our clients we recommend they buy some great Adobe software which allows them to maintain their website like they edit Word documents. We provide plenty of advice and tips on what is a good design, and what your developers should be including in the code when they build it.

My blog reaches 30,000 visits

I don’t rate this as a ‘real’ story, but I can’t resist recording the fact that according to my free Sitemeter account the number of visitors to this blog has now reached the 30,000 mark.

I am aware that many of my visitors are coming via Google, so are accidental tourists rather than regular readers, however I am still somewhat proud of this achievement for a British Library based blog.

Looking at the chart below reinforces the advice I have heard about blogging, that patience is required to build visitors.

Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009

In just over a months time it will be Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009. To be precise, it will run from 16 to 20 November and consists of thousands of events around the world, promoting and celebrating entrepreneurship.

This year we are holding a week of special events and workshops, covering essential skills, getting inspiration and confidence, and chances to meet great contacts.

Each day has a different theme, focusing on a particular area of business.

Here is a summary of our activities, with more information on our website pages:

Monday 16 November: Business basics day -The essentials you’ll need to get going in business – finance, market research and business planning.

Tuesday 17 November: Innovation day – Learn how to protect your ideas and make money from them, plus an evening with Lord Sugar.

Wednesday 16 November: Women’s enterprise day – Meet a whole host of female entrepreneurs, from the big names to women that are just getting started.

Thursday 18 November: Social enterprise day – Start thinking about how you could make your business more ethical or take the plunge and set up a social enterprise.

Friday 20 November: Home enterprise day – Find out more about working from home, watch our free online seminar, and meet other home workers.

Saving Britain’s business future

The September issue of Real Business magazine has two mentions of the Business & IP Centre which are so flattering I can’t resist sharing them here.

In an article titled Saving Britain’s future, Charles Orton-Jones produces a 10-point manifesto to rescue Britain’s economy. At number three on the list is Open Business & IP Centres in six cities. To quote the initial text,
‘In 2006, the British Library opened the Business & IP Centre. The centre fuses the British Library’s vast repository of databases and commercial documents with a plethora of services for entrepreneurs – a sort of Pimp my Business Link.’

A few pages later on, in the article 27 champions of entrepreneurial Britain, Catherine Woods puts the British Library in at number 15 – behind Peter Jones, but ahead of Alan Sugar and Richard Branson.

Business Librarians’ Association conference

As I mentioned a while back (To Blog or not to Blog? That is the question), I was invited to speak on a panel at the  Business Librarians’ Association (formally BBSLG) annual conference in Dublin. The chair of the session David Meehan has just posted a short review of the session with some kind remarks relating to my contribution.

My fellow panellists were Dr. John Breslin (Electronic Engineering, NUIG; Researcher at DERI) speaking about the social semantic web, and Ian Manzie (Business Manager Ireland, Thomson Reuters) on their new web-based ‘Academy’ approach to training users.

StartupTube – A ‘YouTube’ for small business help

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and given the spectacular success of YouTube since its launch in February 2005, it is not surprising to see lots of look (and sound) alike sites.

This time it is the organisers of the very successful Business Startup Show, who have recently launched  Startup Tube ,which links to the Startup Community founded by Katie Moore.

My colleague Fran Taylor has been working to develop a Business & IP Centre channel on the site – which has a selection of our Inspiring Entrepreneurs videos on it. Ironically these videos were originally posted onto YouTube itself.

I met the Prime Thinkers mentors

It’s been a busy few weeks for me recently (so much for a quiet summer). So I have quite a few events still to catch up on.

Our Meet the Mentors event on the evening of Tuesday 30 June was a great success, with around 30 mentors and 90 mentees. With a 3 to 1 ratio, and two hours to network, the mentees had plenty of opportunity to find subject experts to match their interests.

I took a group of the mentors around the Business & IP Centre before the event started, as many of them were not aware of the range and depth of our information and services. It was yet another reminder of how much work we still have to do to spread the word about the Centre.

Maurice Collins, the man behind our very popular Weird and Wonderful display last year was his usual charismatic self and reminded the audience of the expanding Prime Thinkers groups, and how all the money from the £100 fee goes to his Kith and Kids’ charity. Their aim is to empower families living with disability to overcome their social isolation and access the services they need.

Given the enthusiasm of my colleague Clare Harris who organised the event, I’m hoping this will be the first of many Meet the Mentor evenings.

Our Twitter followers go over 1,000

Last May I wrote about putting our toe into the water with regard to Twitter, The Business & IP Centre takes on twitter.

Since that time the amount of activity on Twitter (I can’t be doing with these modern lower case names) has increased almost exponentially. Even taking that into account, our recent move above 1,000 followers for the Business & IP Centre Twitter feed is pretty impressive. This is nearly half of the current following of the main British Library Twitter feed.

http://www.nickburcher.com/2009/03/twitter-demographics-and-usage.html

Inspiring Entrepreneurs – Surviving and thriving: controlling costs to boost your business

Another inspiring Inspiring Entrepreneurs event this evening with the title of Surviving and Thriving: Controlling costs to boost your business. You can catch the webcast of the event once it is posted up on our website.

Doug Richards the former BBC Dragon and founder of the School for Startups started by saying he wouldn’t be able to keep to his script. He had some great stories and a few gems such as, ‘if you are small, you will die if one customer doesn’t pay your bills’.

In other words the micro immediate level is the key, not what is happening to the economy at the macro level.

Forget convential wisdom, sales are marketing are the key – not cash flow. With sales – take the order, whatever it is! Don’t start a business with Kent Richards…(Doug’s brother, who he started his first business with).

Marketing – don’t spend money – Doug has an eight hour training day covering marketing techniques that don’t cost any money.

Nick Wheeler the founder of Charles Tyrwhitt shirts gave a very entertaining talk. He founded the business at University in 1986, and it took four years to double workforce from one to two. After another fours in they went bust.

‘This is the story of how a complete and utter idiot can build up a business.’

‘It’s all about having a belief in what you are trying to do. Every day you remind yourself of what you are setting out to do.’

84% of Charles Tyrwhitt staff say they have fun working for the company.

Critical Factors for Success:
The idea – Vision – Focus – Passion – Hard work – Patience

Compound growth is the key to long term success.

Heather Gorringe the founder of Wiggly Wigglers started with quote from Winston Churchill, ‘Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm’.

If you are running a small business you need to be both proactive and reactive. The key thing she is doing to survive the economic downturn is to ‘keep working harder’.

Johnny Martin is a business finance expert who runs a regular course in the Business & IP Centre on financial management.

Imagine you are in the Dragon’s Den – how would you answer their questions about your business finances?

He feels you can’t start too young, and gets his children to use duplicate invoice books in order to receive their pocket money via their PayPal account.

The second most common reason for businesses failing is poor financial management.

Documentation can be the undoing of a business. Please check if you have any undocumented agreements.

You need to know where you are financially.

Be able to look ahead (at least six to nine months). Don’t go for financial support at the last minute, you won’t get it. Use forecasting techniques.

Be able to understand the difference between variable costs and fixed costs, and how to calculate your gross profit and gross margin. To survive in these difficult times you need to protect your gross margin (the value you are adding).

Turnover is vanity, what is important is profit.

The presentations were followed by a varied set of questions:

What happens when a business fails?
The main cause is lack of focus. Manager think they can do anything and fail when they diversify beyond their competencies.

How should businesses use the web to market the products:
Google Adwords are the place to start. Find the right company to help you navigate your way for very little money. Big companies are getting ripped off. Doug Richards – Search Engine Optimisation is not rocket science. You can spend a boring weekend learning enough to know what you are doing.

Heather Gorringe – the web is a bit like your local pub – whether you are there or not people may be talking about you – online is the same – you need to be there to listen and respond to your customers.

Complete our small business information survey and win an iPod Nano

I’m not normally one for offering inducements to read my blog… but, for a limited time only (July 17 2009)… you have the chance to win an iPod Nano courtesy of the British Library.

My colleague Nigel Spencer has created a 5 minute online survey giving participants an opportunity to help shape the future of information for small businesses.

The survey is part of a major study into how small businesses get the information they need to develop and grow. It is being carried out by the British Library on behalf of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).  The questions look at how and where you get information now, the problems you face and changes that you would like to see in the future.

The findings from this online survey will be published in the form of a statistical analysis and no responses will be attributed to individual businesses.

Survey Link:  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=FNU3R5eZlMTE7KhpyzcdOQ_3d_3d

Marketing Maestros: Innovative Strategies for Small Businesses

Many thanks for writing a blog article about Marketing Maestros!  Just a thought – if possible, would you mind adding a link to the webcasts as well?  http://www.inspiringentrepreneurswebcast.co.uk/

Once again a great Inspiring Entrepreneurs panel this evening, with regular chair Matthew Rock (the founder-editor of Real Business) brining his inimitable enthusiasm to the event.

(You can still watch a  webcast of the event at http://www.inspiringentrepreneurswebcast.co.uk/)

Ajaz Ahmed Chairman of AKQA, the world’s largest independent digital agency showed some impressive examples of innovation in advertising, illustrating his point about the importance of originality.

His key message was for his company to let their work do the talking’. In other words, don’t tell you customers how great you are, show them.

Not surprisingly Simon Calver the CEO of LOVEFILM (a £100 million turnover company) is a fan of films, and so used examples to illustrate his four P’s of business success.

P1 – ‘I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse’ (The Godfather).
Focus on the consumer proposition first and worry about building the brand later on. The three legs which hold up his company are choice, value and convenience.

P2 – ‘Self preservation society’ (The Italian Job) i.e. Preserve the cash in the business. Make sure you focus on the time it takes to get cash in and out. If you get it right it gives you a competitive advantage. Also analyse everything you do – where you spend your cash and how you do it.

P3 – Spin City (American sitcom)  Never under-estimate the importance of PR. In his case they have three targets, their investors, trading partners and of course their consumers. You have to be constantly creating new stories about your business the papers will want to publish.

P4 – Passion (a choice of seven films according to Wikipedia) Make sure you surround yourself with great people from the beginning. ‘Fiirst division people recruit first division people’, which makes the business great. Make sure you have fun too. Simon hosts a monthly BBQ for his colleagues. Also reward your people on a quarterly basis (in the case of LOVEFILM bonuses of between 10 and  20%. This allows for more flexibility in changing targets in a fast growing business.

In conclusion, starting a business is probably the most rewarding thing you can do in your life.

Tristram Mayhew the founder and ‘Chief Gorilla’ of Go Ape, the UK’s leading forest-based adventure company talked about Gorilla marketing.

Instead of focussing on their specific activities Go Ape are branding themselves as ‘creating adventures’, and are encouraging everyone to live life more adventurously.

Gorilla marketing means turning your customers into an effective free sales force. These are his tips:
1.    Wow them with what you do.
2.    Delight them – turn complainers into ambassadors.
3.    Build a trust and charm based relationship
4.    … and they will buy more, and more often – Tristram openly admitted that many of their ideas have been borrowed from the Innocent drinks company.
5.    Innovate, validate, cultivate.

Tristram strongly recommended The Brand Gap, it is very readable and nice and short too.

They are building a loyalty base using Tribe magazine (published every 6 weeks) to reinforce brand values.

They also make use of Social Media such as encouraging customers to post videos on YouTube, and have nearly 5,000 to date with hundreds of thousands of views.

By ‘making friends’ with existing adventure bloggers and giving them free Go Ape experiences they hope to generate positive reports online.

‘Doing good things.’ For example to help support gorillas in Rwanda 25 staff and 85 customers completed a fun run dressed as gorillas.

Will King is the ‘King of Shaves’, creator of the cult shaving brand that has overtaken Wilkinson Sword and Nivea to become number two to Gillette in the UK shaving market.

After 16 years of building the brand Will launched his own razor the Azor one year ago almost to the day. They already have up to 10% market share in the UK.

Lessons learnt:

The Harvard rule of 4
1.    No one has it
2.    Every one will have it
3.    Price for profit
4.    Price for sale

Take an existing product and make it better – eg iPhone, Innocent smoothies.

Change constantly, push boundaries – it also helps to generates news stories for PR coverage.

Will introduced his SPACE strategy, which stands for Satisfaction of Success, Passion and Persistence, Attitude of Action, Confidence and Communication and Enthusiasm and Enjoyment.

There is a great degree of satisfaction in succeeding. If you achieve great satisfaction, whatever that is, it may be having children or running a marathon, but you’ve got to work at that. There’s no substitute for hard work to get that satisfaction of success, which feeds on to the passion and persistence bit. Things don’t happen overnight, it takes years to become truly successful..

You’ve got to have a can-do attitude to get things done; if you can’t be bothered who else will? The confidence and common sense part relates to having confidence in yourself and what you’re doing but not being delusional; if you try to take on Apple with an iPhone it’s a big ask, but if you want to come up with a cover to protect the iPhone clearly that’s something you could do.

There’s a certain amount when you’ve got to have confidence beyond the success that you don’t enjoy, especially when you’re starting out – people won’t give you credit, people don’t believe you’re going to do it, people think you’ll go bust, you’ll owe them money, and you’ve got to imbue them with confidence if you’re going to be successful.

And finally the enthusiasm and enjoyment piece; if you’re not enjoying it then nobody else is, especially if you’re leading a business. So have enthusiasm, have an edge about what you’re about to do because people do look to you, especially if you’re running a business or are involved in senior management. If you can’t get them motivated by transferring your enthusiasm to them, then how are they going to transfer their enthusiasm either to the products you sell or to the services you provide? They’re not.

Many thanks for writing a blog article about Marketing Maestros!  Just a thought – if possible, would you mind adding a link to the webcasts as well?  http://www.inspiringentrepreneurswebcast.co.uk/

New Business & IP Centre website went live today

After many months of patiently waiting, I was glad to see that our new website went live today at www.bl.uk/bipc.

It has a much cleaner look than before and is designed to simplify what we offer to entrepreneurs, business start-ups and inventors.

The sections are divided into :

• Business networking
• Business planning
• Protecting your ideas
• Researching markets

I would be very interested in any comments you have on the website (both positive and constructive criticisms).

The British Library is all a twitter about Yammer

Although I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of Social Media, it took a colleague in our marketing department to introduce me to our Yammer page.

After a very short space of time we have 97 members and several hundred messages.

For those of you who are also new to Yammer, it is a micro-blogging tool for the enterprise, launched in September last year, and has already been nominated for the CNET Webware 100.

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’

As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced.

Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. The privacy of each network is ensured by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. Information is never shared with third parties.

The basic Yammer service is free. Companies can pay to claim and administer their networks.

Yammer was founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.

We have all worked at companies and understand the needs of companies to share information within a private network. We built the solution that we would want to use ourselves.

Update to our first Free Live Webcast – Mothers of Invention

After a few minor technical hitches I managed to watch the webcast of our Mothers of Invention Inspiring Entrepreneurs event last night.

Although the image was small and a bit grainy the sound was excellent and it almost felt like being there, particularly during the question and answer session.

Highlights for me were Liz Jackson the founder of Great Guns Marketing who had left school with just one GCSE, but through the help her first boss who became her mentor and an unofficial apprenticeship, has become a leader in her field.

Her top tips were:

• Don’t be a nearly man or women. Make every single day count. Pull your finger out and get on with it.
• Don’t believe in luck – Her definition of luck is where hard work meets opportunity.
• And a quote from Henry Ford I had not heard before. “If you think you can, or you think you can’t; you are absolutely right“

It was also fascinating to hear how difficult it was for Gurinder Chadha the director of Bend it Like Beckham to get funding for the film, even with a previous success under her belt.

Our first Free Live Webcast – Mothers of Invention

I am proud of the way my colleagues in the British Library have adopted and experimented with Web 2.0 and social media in the past three years.

We have activities in Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Linkedin, a free e-course on intellectual property, a good old fashioned monthly e-newsletter and of course our two blogs on business and intellectual property.

Our next venture is into the world of live webcasting starting on Tuesday 10 March 2009 at 6.30pm (UK time) with Mothers of Invention.

Not only will you be able to watch our Inspiring Entrepreneurs event online at website www.inspiringentrepreneurswebcast.co.uk/, but also put questions to our panel of experts.

	Gurinder Chadha OBE is one of Britain’s most successful film directors, best known for Bend it Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice and, most recently, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. Born in Kenya, she began her career at the BBC before making a huge impact with Bhaji on the Beach in 1993.
	Liz Jackson MBE started her telemarketing business Great Guns at the age of 25, with few educational qualifications and a £4,000 loan from The Prince’s Trust. In the first year of her business, she lost her eyesight, yet has gone on to build a £3m-turnover business with eight offices across the UK.
	Laura Tenison conceived her children’s clothes business in 1993 after a severe car accident in France; the woman in the hospital bed beside her complained about the standard of mail-order kids’ clothes. Today JoJo Maman Bebe is an award-winning multi million-pound retailer with stores across the UK.
	Dee Wright’s business The Hairforce is an innovative nit and lice removal service.  After just three sessions with one of Dee’s “lice assassins” both the nits and the lice are gone, and children are treated like VIPs in a massage chair; the whole experience is fuss-free. Dee supports female staff by providing a job which they can fit around school hours.

The British Library is bringing together four trailblazing British women for an evening of inspiration in celebration of International Women’s Month. If you can’t make the event, you can still join in the debate by watching our live webcast.

In partnership with HSBC, the world’s local bank.

Our speakers:
Gurinder Chadha OBE, director of Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice
Liz Jackson MBE, founder of telemarketing business Great Guns
Laura Tenison MBE, who runs award-winning mother and baby brand JoJo Maman Bebe
Dee Wright, the brains behind The Hairforce, an innovative nit and lice removal service

How to watch:
How: Visit the website www.inspiringentrepreneurswebcast.co.uk/
Date: Tuesday 10 March 2009
Time: 18.30 – 20.00 (GMT)

Don’t worry if you can’t make this time; you’ll be able to view the webcast after the event.

Success Story of the Month: Heather Gorringe at Wiggly Wigglers

As the Business & IP Centre continues to go from strength to strength we have begun to celebrate our success stories; those entrepreneurs who we have helped to launch or grow their business.

This month’s success is Heather Gorringe who founded Wiggly Wigglers in 1990, and now has a turnover of £2.5m, selling composters, plants, tools, worms, and much more.

Heather benefited from an advice session with Dame Anita Roddick, through our Ask an Expert programme. She also used our market research to investigate her industry and find her niche.

Digitising the British Library one page at a time

Lynne Brindley the British Library Chief Executive has been campaigning hard for the cause mass digitisation of content in order to facilitate access for all and preservation – Dame Lynne Brindley challenges Government on Digital Britain

However scanning books to turn them into digital ‘assets’ is not as easy as might be thought. I was lucky enough to be able to visit the part of the library where the work is currently in progress, and was impressed by both the scale and complexity of the challenge.

Recently I came across a YouTube video from German TV which gives a revealing insight into the project.

A full house for Blueprints for Business

Last night’s Blueprints for Business: A proven route to success, the latest in our Inspiring Entrepreneurs series was a full house, including some very young aspiring entrepreneurs from BBC Dragon Peter Jones’ new National Skills Academy for Enterprise.

As in previous events the speakers provided some fascinating and inspiring insights into starting and running a succesful business. In this case the subject was franchising, an often neglected area of business opportunity for entrepreneurs. As several of the panellists pointed out, joining a franchise is probably the lowest risk route to starting your own business, as the product or service and brand has already been established.

As Atul Pathak currently running 15 McDonald’s franchises put it; here was a business where the product and customers were delivered to the door for him. All he had to do was ensure he ran the restaurants efficiently and provided excellent customer service. The fact that he was required to spend nine months working in a McDonald’s branch covering every job, from cleaning the loos to cooking and serving burgers helped ensure he knew how to those things when it came to starting his first restaurant.

Atul divides his customers into two sets; internal and external. The internal customers are his staff, and the external customers are those who consume his restaurants products. He is also passionate about working with the local community, which he said was in line with the corporate McDonald’s ethos.

Sophie Atkinson managing director of Autosmart, the car-cleaning firm that was crowned “Franchise of the Year” in 2008, was clear that the franchising route was the way to ensure stability and loyalty. Her franchisees remain committed to the business and often stay for ten or 15 years, compared to around 24 months for employees in sales roles.

Toni Mascolo OBE, the man behind Toni & Guy who starting with one salon in 1963, has built probably the world’s most successful high-street hairdresser brand using franchising. He doesn’t need to advertise for franchisees since almost all his applicants come from existing staff, or in the case of Japan the children of the original franchisees. For him the key to business success and surviving four recessions is love what you do and express that in your customer service. The fact that Toni still regularly cuts customers hair is testamant to his dedication and commitment.

Update:
Cmypitch.com have also written a review of the evening on their blog, Why franchising appears more attractive to both parties in a recession.

British Library Entrepreneurship Training Day

Last week was a pretty hectic one for me.

It began with an all day Entrepreneurship Training Day on Monday 9 February. The day introduced postgraduate students to the Library’s collections, and the ways we can support entrepreneurs. Although the students were a bit reticent in the early part of the day they gradually warmed up, and we ended up with a fascinating closing session. The title was “Street smarts and book smarts – are business people and entrepreneurs really talking the same language as entrepreneurship scholars?  How can academia actually help business in the current economic climate whilst still producing high quality peer reviewed outputs?”.

I was privileged to chair contributions from Dr Tristram Hooley (Senior Manager: Stakeholders and Networks, Vitae), Simon Butt (Director of Communications, NCGE – National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship) and Dr Jim Gazzard (Enterprise & Technology Executive, Royal Veterinary College). In addition we were joined at the eleventh hour by the British Library’s partner business coach, Rasheed Ogunlaru. The students, who were evenly split between those who were planning to start their own business and those who were studying entrepreneurship, came up with some excellent questions

One questioner was met with an unexpectedly strong response from the panel. He wanted to know why he should move from his safe and secure research job, with guaranteed funding for the next three years, to the risks and uncertainty of starting his own business. The panellists asked him how he could be so sure of his future employment with government cuts in education funding expected almost any day now. For many people entrepreneurship is the safer option, as they are their own boss and more in control of their destiny.