Company Register

- Details of share transfers and allotments

- Share certificates

- Details of company officers

- Company mortgages and charges

The company register which Companies Made Simple provide includes the above blank documents as well as a number of other documents for you to complete to keep your statutory documents in order.

Our company register is a sturdy blue binder filled with 10 tabbed sections and a number of pages to make storing your statutory documents simple!

This post was brought to you by Colleen Van Dyk at Companies Made Simple

Keep up to date. Subscribe to our RSS

Laura.

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

Week Two
“Starting your own business is a massive commitment and once I had the idea for my brand and what I wanted to achieve, I knew it was time to start looking at how it was going to be financed. At this stage, though I had completed a basic business plan, I had no real idea of the market , my initial cost or – indeed – if the concept would be commercially viable.
In my mind, I thought that the two main initial overheads would be production and marketing costs. I wanted the brand to be marketed primarily online, through online PR and pay per click. I knew from previous experience that the online cosmetic sector is highly competitive and therefore getting the right message in front of my target audience may be quite expensive.
I decided that the first place to start would be to get some quotes from some web designers. As we wanted the website to be more than a brand platform – we wanted it our customer to be able to buy online – the brief was quite complicated. The price of all the quotes we received reflected this, however, there was one designer who was more reasonable and seemed to understand what we were trying to achieve, so we asked him to start work.
The next thing was PR – I had worked with a number of PR agencies in the past and therefore, I was well aware that their services were costly. At this stage I knew that we wouldn’t be able to secure funding from a bank – the credit crunch had just hit and all we really had were a few projections. However, as luck would have it, we came into some additional funds and decided we would invest the money into the business.
While the website was being developed, we switched our focus on to finding the right PR agency -at the right price. As budget was our main issue, I decided to approach the situation in a different way – I prepared a brief of our objectives and asked agencies to pitch for launch activity rather than the whole account. That way, I wasn’t making a long-term commitment and could get an idea of what the various agencies were like.

Before launch activity began, it was vital that we carried out some pre-launch PR and market research. Again, instead of outsourcing this activity, I decided to take matters into my own hands!

This was what I have completed so far, without the help of an expensive PR agency:
- Sending samples to various celebrities
- Drafting a press release and sending it out a number of high-end monthly magazines
- Creating a ‘holding page’ website prior to launch with contact details, a place interested customers can insert their email addresses and our brand mission statement.
- Identify our competitors and analyze their marketing activity.
 
During this time, I also created a more comprehensive business plan, detailing short, medium and long term projections and applied for funding at three major banks; I thought that the website, results of pre-launch PR activity and the substantial financial commitment that I had made, would be a more attractive proposition ,than when I had initially started the company formation process.
The first two bank srejected our application -they felt that the proposition was still to ambiguous in the current economic climate – however, we managed to secure funding from the third bank.This additional revenue allowed me to expand my team – more of that later!
Laura.