The recession has had an impact on almost every person working in the UK today. From salary cuts to redundancy, we have all experienced the credit crunch in a personal way and adapted to the challenges it has presented differently. However, according to a recent report, female employees feel they are doing more than their male colleagues to put Britain on the path to economic recovery.
The survey, conducted by Vodafone Working Nation, revealed that one in ten female workers feel that they are reacting to the gap in skills caused by redundancies well – increasing their skills sets at an equal pace to the changing demands of the market – compared to just one in twenty men.
Nearly two thousand employees participated in the survey that was focused on how a workforce responds to redundancy. Of that 2000, 90% said that redundancy had left significant gaps in their organization, 20% said that they have had to learn new skills which almost 60% felt they had not received sufficient training for.
Sam Matthews, partner of management consultancy firm KMS, comments: ‘Obviously, regardless of size, when an organization makes redundancy cuts, there will be a gap in skills available and a period of re-adjustment. According to the survey female employees respond better to acquiring new skills to fill vacuum than their male counterparts. It is vital that any organization contemplating redundancy, consider how they are going to re-organize their workforce and what support they will give their employees.’
Archive for September, 2009
Redundancy What Impact Does It Have On Your Workforce
Monday, September 21st, 2009Flexible Working – What Value Can It Add To Your Company?
Sunday, September 20th, 2009Every year, over half a million people in the UK form a company. Once all the hard work they invest initially begins to pay off and their business starts to grow, they start taking on employees.
Regardless of all the HR involved in becoming an employer, one of the main challenges many entrepreneurs face is finding the right people and keeping them. That is where the concept of ‘flexible working’ comes in. But is it more than just a marketing term and can it add any real value to your company?
When it is implemented correctly, flexible working means more than just a laptop, PDA and a Blackberry. It can mean flexi-time, working from home and job sharing and it can be a vital part of your staff incentive strategy.
If you show flexibility as an employer, not only are you more likely to retain important members of your team, you will also have a more focused and positive workforce.
Do You Trust Your Team
Saturday, September 19th, 2009In market conditions increasingly defined by intensive competition, late payment, and falling consumer spend, the prevailing message seems to be trust no one. However, it may come as a shock to some, that according to a recent survey, most business owners don’t even trust their own employees!
According to the poll- carried out by The Board of Small Businesses – over 35% of business owners don’t trust any of their staff, while a resounding 80% feel that can’t trust a least one member of their team.
Many entrepreneurs feel that the no employee will ever give their company the same level of commitment or hard work that they will as, at the end of the day, it is not their business. But is this the right attitude?
According to Matthew Webb, who formed his construction and engineering company almost twenty years ago, showing your staff that you trust them can go along way. He comments; “The key to success in any business, big or small, is the people you employ. To get the best out of them, in my experience, you need to empower them with trust and responsibility.”
Is Company Formation The Key To Economic Recovery
Friday, September 18th, 2009A recent survey, carried out by The Board of Entrepreneurs, revealed that most people living in the UK believe that it will be entrepreneurs, not the Government, that will lead us down the path of economic recovery.
Of the 4,000 people asked, almost 35% felt that entrepreneurs would provide the impetus for economic recovery, compared with the 20% who think that the Government would pull us out of the recession.
Alan Moran, head of entrepreneurs at accountancy firm Graham & Smith comments: ‘The recession has redefined the definition of a ‘good career’. Before the credit crunch, graduates thought that getting into a large corporation guaranteed them security. However, as this theory has been disproved time and time again, more and more people are interested in forming their own company. That sort of entrepreneurial sprit can only mean good things for the UK’s economy. ‘
According to the survey, the person most entrepreneurs would like as their entrepreneurial mentor is Richard Branson, closely followed by the Dragon Peter Jones
Recruiting The Right Staff From Company Formation
Thursday, September 17th, 2009For most recent company formations, launching a company within budget restrictions is one of the main objectives. As a consequence most small businesses launch with a skeleton staff. However, it is vital that they are the right staff and are as passionate about making your company a success as you are. In this post we catch up with entrepreneur Laura Andrews – CEO of Beautiful Organics – as she realises that your brand is the people who work for you.
When I first decided to form my own company, I thought I could run the day to day operations on my own. However, the company which I envisaged at the start of the process looks very different from the brand I have now developed. As a result of the PR and marketing activity we have done, I realise that this company has a lot of potential to retail offline as well as online.
Therefore, I have extended our proposition to reflect this and decided I need some extra help.
I invested a lot of resource into finding and recruiting the right people for two roles; an operations manager and an in-house PR executive. While the person I recruited for the in-house PR role is doing exceptionally well, the operations manager hasn’t quite worked out and as a result we have had to part ways.
I understand that we are really asking a lot of anyone who comes on board with us, as the current workload is extensive and the and hours are erratic. However, I really need someone who is as passionate about the company as I am and willing to put in the work for long term reward. Therefore, I was really looking to recruit a passionate individual who can almost act as a brand ambassador of the company whether they are on the phone to customers, journalists or suppliers.
My recent experience of employing the wrong person for my business has taught me that it is vital that any person who comes into contact with your brand receives the right message. Therefore as much as you are your brand, so are the people who work for you.
Exhibitions – What Value Do They Add To A Company Formation
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009In yesterday’s post Laura Andrews – the author of our series ‘Diary of a Company Formation’ – mentioned an issue which most entrepreneurs will be familiar with; the difficulty of retaining strategic perspective, when you are so close to the day to day operations of your company. Laura decided to remedy this by taking on a non-executive director, with a large amount of experience in the sector. In this post she introduces the person who has taken the role and assesses the relative ROI of exhibitions.
When we decided to do most of our pre-launch activity ourselves, we knew it would be hard work, but the exhibition and all the follow up activity is beyond a joke! We spent three days exhibiting and then a couple of days collating leads, sending out direct mail and samples and to be honest, though it is early days, I am not sure if will give us the return on investment we originally hoped for.
I think if any other recent company formation or budding entrepreneur is to learn from our launch strategy, it is important that I am brutally honest about all of our experiences. We initially considered exhibiting at London Fashion Week’s ‘Beauty Start-ups’ event last year. Though it was costly, we felt that it would be a great opportunity to introduce our brand to its target market. First of all let’s identify how much it cost;
Cost of the Exhibition:
The stand; £2,300 for two days,
Promotional posters, skins of the stand etc; £988
Media packs, samples; £200
Promotional staff; £675
Total (excl VAT) £4,163
Clearly, as a recently formed company, that is a lot of money to us. So what results did we get?
All in all I think we handed out promotional material – samples, branded leaflets etc – to almost 7,000 people. All of whom could be defined as our target market. Also many of the people we talked to were in the beauty industry, so we made some excellent contacts. Therefore, we succeeded in our objective of raising our brand profile to our target demographic and making some useful contacts. However, exactly how this translates into actually generating revenue and returning the money we spent on the exhibition, is difficult to quantify.
From a leads perspective, we only captured 60 email addresses from the competition we ran to get a free starter pack of our products. We also didn’t have an effective strategy for capturing the contact details of everyone who visited the stand – this was a big mistake.
In conclusion, would we exhibit again knowing what we do now? The answer is probably not. However, as I said, it is still early days and I am hoping that we will benefit from the direct mail and PR contacts we made.
Anyway, it is another lesson learnt and now we are ready to move on to another exciting phase of our company! As I mentioned, we have taken on a non-executive director, who will be a shareholder in the company and provide valuable strategic insight. Megan Matthews has working in the beauty sector for 20 years. A couple of years ago she started her own online marketing company which will be using to run all of our digital marketing.
Now I have just got to concentrate on our preview evenings – more on that later.
Laura
The Trials and Tribulations of Company Formation
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009In yesterday’s post, Laura Andrews – who has recently formed her own company – explained the frustration she felt at the way in which larger companies treat start ups. In today’s post, she explains how this has extended to her suppliers and marketing agency.
Working in the retail sector for a number of years, I am well aware that customer service in this country is a lost art. However, I was completely shocked at the poor level of service and client care given to start up companies in the business to business sector.
Okay, so as a start up budgets are tight and the amount we order may be lower than what some of these larger organisations are use to, but is that really an excuse to ignore your client and in some cases, regard the business they are giving you with contempt? I think not. Are these organisations really so short-sighted that they can’t see that in a couple of years, when we are more established, we may be making large orders and driving a lot of business their way? Well, I will certainly be remembering the good and bad service we have received this week as our company grows!
There are a number of incidents this week that have caused the above rant; namely our marketing agencies lack of client care and our printer’s inability to deliver anything to a deadline.
On some level the blame lies with me. Before forming my own company, I thought that everyone had a similar work ethic as me; do what you say you are going to do, when you say you are going to do it. However, I am afraid that is not the case. When you are starting your own company you really need to keep on top your suppliers at all times, check and re-check deadlines and ask for progress on a weekly basis.
Moving forward, I have decided to risk being thought of as a nuisance, to get what I want. The best suppliers will understand as they will be professional enough to identify a potentially long-term customer.
Anyway, apart from all this, we did have some good news this week. Since forming the company, I have learnt a number of key lessons, one of which is that when you are so close to a project, it is difficult to focus on the long-term Therefore, I decide to approach a colleague I have known for some years who has considerable experience in the sector to become a non-executive director of the company. Hopefully, she will provide strategic insight and provide us with contacts that will help grow the company. This should all be signed today, so more about our non-executive director and the role I hope she will play in our company later!
Laura
Company Formation Catch Up – The Art of Negociation
Monday, September 14th, 2009We have finally signed off on the site design – it is exactly what we wanted and I am really glad I invested the additional resource into making sure it was perfect! So, with the site ready to go live we were ready to begin our major PR push. This didn’t go exactly to plan as we sat down to establish the final commercials with Woods PR . . .
From the point of company formation, we always prioritised PR as one of the most important activities in our marketing budget; therefore, over the past few months we have briefed and met with a number of PR agencies. In the most part, these meetings have left us feeling de-motivated. Then we met with Mary Woods – CEO of Woods PR – and we felt that we had finally found an agency that understood our brand and have the knowledge and experience to find the best route to market for our company.
We were in the final stages of negotiation and had a meeting to finalise the commercials, unfortunately as a result of that meeting we have decided to walk away. Ultimately, the main reason for the collapse of the relationship was a lack of communication.
When we initially briefed the agency, we made our budget and the return on investment we expected, extremely clear, and they appeared to agree. However, the commercials they offered at the beginning of the deal, compared to what they were then demanding, were miles apart.
From my experience of working in the beauty PR industry for a number of years, I was well aware of what activity would secure the most coverage of a new brand launch. Therefore, in order to keep costs down, it was agreed that I would complete a lot of the pre-launch activity myself – with the agencies guidance. Consequently, I sent over numerous press releases and ideas for them to progress and was disappointed to find out that nothing had been done with any of them. While this was not the best start to the meeting, I also believe that the agency made a number of key mistakes in their negotiation.
Most importantly, they completely overestimated the strength of their position; they thought that as PR was so important to our initial marketing plan and we were so close to launch, they were irreplaceable. I have noticed that this is the way many larger corporations treat SME’s.
Secondly, they established from the start of the meeting that they were completely unwilling to negotiate and that their offer was final. This is a mistake I have seen many business professionals make in a negotiation. If you don’t give your opponent any other options other than to walk away from the whole deal, it likely that they will and we did!
It is a shame we wasted valuable marketing time, however, we are now more confident than ever that we can make a success of our business ourselves and while we will probably outsource some PR and Marketing activity, we have learnt that it is vital to stay involved in all areas of the business – even if you are paying someone else to manage them.
Laura
Recession Has Prompted Innovation In Company Formation
Sunday, September 13th, 2009While they media continues to be saturated with stories of recessionary doom and gloom, a report published by intellectual property law firm Moran & Mercer suggests that it may not be all bad.
According to Moran & Mercer, the number of patent applications they have received since the recession hit has almost doubled, suggesting that the recession has forced potential entrepreneurs to be innovative with their business ideas.
Adrian Moran, founder of Moran & Mercer comments; “The number of people approaching us about applying for a patent has almost doubled relative to the same period last year. This could be due to a number of factors – namely the instability of the current employment market. While this is positive, it cannot be identified as a catalyst for economic recovery, as we have still failed to address the number one challenge facing any new company – a lack of available finance.”
High Hope For Retail Recovery Dashed
Saturday, September 12th, 2009The summer weather resulted in a much needed boost in retail sales over June and July, which prompted many economists to suggest that the UK’s economy was on the road to recovery.
However, low reported retail sales in August have undermined any hope of high street recovery.
According to the British Retail Consortium not only has the growth witnessed in June and July not continued in August, retail sales have actually dropped by 1%.
A source from the, BRC, comments: ‘ There is no doubt that the good weather we experienced in June and July accelerated a retail sales, however, many people working within retail felt that this upturn represented a general turn in consumer behavior. However, as August’s figures indicate, the UK’s high street is far from being on the road to recovery.”