Dead Blog

This blog is dead, deceased, gone to the great wordsmith in the sky. It is no more...

I'm now blogging here.

I'm not sure what happened. Maybe the lofty ambitions of an early blogger in 2006 just seemed too much once I actually got going? Or maybe I just got busy. Whatever it was, actually doing it must have proved that my heart and soul was just not in it. That in itself is a valuable lesson, so no regrets.

The description of the blog's aims seems insufferably pompous in 2012:

"An account of running an award-winning small business by the founder (& best selling business book author). She claims 20 years experience in business "characterised by low boredom/high fun thresholds".

Oh dear! What was I thinking of? But at least it was in response to market forces - I was told that no-one was blogging about running a small business and I checked and thought they were right.

It started OK. There were 10 posts in two months - I did say that I would post once a week. Then nothing until 2008: two years later!

I remember making a concious decision not to commit to any particular posting frequency with my main blog, so I obviously learned that lesson. It's just not possible for one person in a very small business to post like clockwork when it's not a direct money-spinner. And I don't want to outsource it and lose 'my' voice. Did you know that everyone uses words differently? Our word patters are as distinctive as a fingerprint, reflecting the wonderful uniqueness of us all.

With 20:20 hindsight, this blog's stated ambitions just didn't live up to the blog's name: I know that would have started to niggle me badly. And the posts were not exactly on topic half the time.

But I did find a lot of useful stuff to pass on and that's my main strength now: turning the self-directed training, exploring and trialling that takes up about a third of my working life into stuff I can use and share. And now I have a whole new product I am piloting based on passing on what work: my Publicity Clubs - all on top of the day job running the PHPR.

RIP little fledgling blog, and thank you for all you taught me.

Back again

Have been blogging in various spots but this is the one that Technorati recognises and allows me to 'claim' - has the feel of land-grabbing in a goldrush.
The others are on media sites like Fast Company, which I love and other spots where I experimented, like the Daily Telegraph's small business club:
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/pennyhaywood/

Being a media person, I thought blogs on media sites were pretty cool.

My Fast Company blog is at http://www.fastcompany.com/user/penny-haywood

When my DVD turns into a frisbee and how baby oil saved the day

Don't you just love it when your computer throws a wobbly?
Last night, my PR Planner DVD containing a massive media database and contact software started misbehaving. It caused the disc drive to spin round, but the DVD was not recognised. It then failed to obey the eject command. After a rather firm 3 seconds of holding the eject button the spinning stopped but it was 5 mins later before the disc drive opened, spitting out a spinning DVD, with a really nasty noise. Hm mm. Looks like a hardware problem. Mentally post a prayer of thanks upstairs to my foresight in wringing a free full 5-year extended warranty deal out of my local PC World branch manager.
Their technician had infinite patience and had me trying a number of discs in the drive which all behaved perfectly. But not the PR Planner DVD, which was collecting a few battle scars from its sudden conversion to Frisbee format.
Maybe it's a software problem, said the technician. So we un-installed it. Too late - I realised I'd need the licence code to re-install and I couldn't find it. And the PR Planner helpdesk was shut for the night.
As it turned out: no worries. The darn thing still wasn't being recognised so re-installing was not a current available option.
We tried it on another machine, where the DVD behaved perfectly, starting up the installation wizard, but - you're way ahead of me - there was the small matter of the licence code.
And that's when the technician started muttering about Brasso. Seemed a little rough to me, so he suggested mineral oil as an alternative: rubbed in the business side of the DVD, then carefully wiped off and polished with a specs cloth. Mineral oil is just posh for baby oil. I have some. I tried it. And lo: it worked!
OK, I had to wait until this morning for my code, but it's been running sweetly all day.
I've been using it to churn out press releases on a dynamic new client who run great (and expanding) networking events called Bacon, Eggs and Entrepreneurs. Coming to a town near you soon! They have 14 branches to date.
I expect all you IT support guys know the baby oil wheeze, but it's the first time in 20 years that anyone has suggested massaging my data.... but if it oils the wheels of business... (the rest is drowned out by the groans).

SmallBizPod

Re-visited the pioneering http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk/, the UK's first small business podcast and pleased to see it's growing with an impressive list of interviewees. Well worth a visit if you're in search of some inspiration from people who have been there and got the kilt. Especially if you don't want to be tied to staring at a screen.
And what a great opportunity for publicity if you have appropriate expertise for the sma biz community.

Confidence - and how to plug those knowledge gaps on the cheap

It can be hard when you're running a small business to feel totally confident all the time because we have to be so good at so many things. In my case it covers stuff like:
marketing,
selling,
PR (my core business),
producing DVDs,
photography,
networking,
R&D - turning services into bundled products,
admin,
finance including management accounting and Ltd company regulations,
IT,
CRM (customer relationship management),
CSR (corporate social responsibility/being green),
staff recruitment, induction, training, appraisals, basic employment law & management.
design on and offline, plus interior design to create a great impression and a good working environment
There's no way that I'm expert in all these areas. After all, each are capable of supporting an entire career. So it can be pretty easy to feel inadequate. On the other hand, it's the diversity of challenges that suits my particular mindset and I expect many entrepreneurs are similar: you could say we're narrow generalists.
Even when we delegate, we still need to know enough to manage the process and cover for any lapses of others - the buck always stops here when you run a business.
The longer I'm in business, the more I try to learn, which is probably why that sixth sense that homes me in on the trouble spots works pretty well.
I soak up freebie and low cost courses and seminars (good for networking too).
Whenever a high cost course is tempting me because it has exposed a need to know more about something, I have often saved thousands of pounds with a browse through the internet and Amazon's bookshop to find sources of enough know-how to top up my expertise. Sometimes I don't even need to read the thing: it's enough to skim the contents or file the article and know it's there if I need it.
Best of all: sometimes I don't even buy it. I just add the tome to my Amazon wishlist and a few months later, the need for more info in that area has usually faded. And if it's hardened into an absolute need to know, I'm just one click away from ordering it.
But that this is no uncontrolled process. I and any staff have a individual training plans and a budget, with success outcomes to achieve - often sparked off by that initial temptation to go on an expensive course!

Keeping Motivated

Sometimes it's hard to rise above a sea of email, phone calls and client demands to think about interesting new offerings so your business stays fresh and interesting, keeps selling more to existing customers and staves off competitors who are tempting your customers with their novelty factor.
My business coach, the redoubtable Phil Olley, always says that people already have all they need to know to take their business to the next level. The problem is not lack of training, knowledge, money or anything else we think we need. These are just excuses we make not to get on and do it.
Whether you think you need to tidy your desk before you succeed or do an MBA, just make a list of 5 things you could do today to make your business better. And don't have that cup of coffee or touch a pile of emails until you've done at least one of them.
Phil is a breath of practical fresh air. He spends his life dreaming up tools and strategies to strengthen the right core vision for you, so that you tap into your own natural enthusiasm to drive your business and life in the right direction. His website has some excellent free downloads in his Treasure Chest to get you started and a free newsletter to keep you thinking about ways to work ON your business, not IN it.
And no, he’s not a client. He’s very good at doing his own PR and has been on mainstream TV as well as being featured in a number of national newspapers and magazines.
And on my list today? Make my blogs shorter and more time effective for everyone!

Spam, spam, spam, spam

Much as I love Monty Python, I'm increasingly fed up of spam, but as a small PR business owner who represents clients, my details appear on press releases posted in places where web crawlers go.
For a while, my ISP (BT broadband) seemed to be doing an OK job of filtering spam and my own message rules and blocked senders list took care of much of the rest.
But there's been a recent increase in US investment-related trash trying to talk up low value shares (apparently it works fleetingly, but by the time we get the emails, the early birds have mostly extracted the inflated value, generating a reversion on the share price).
Plus phishing attempts on behalf of banks and payment systems, some of which I've never even heard of, despite being in banking for 13 years.
Not to mention all those people out there that, for some reason, think I need a bigger, better willy (in case you haven't twigged, I am not a bloke), or any other form of med$ (my body is a temple although some wine and malts do slip in on high feast and priest days).
Like many small business owners, I know enough IT to get by (and after twenty years, I have all sorts of useless bits of DOS and other arcane OS floating around my head). But really, expecting individual computer owners to deal with this avalanche of 'stuff' is patently ridiculous. And it's instructive to note that my MS Word spell-checker doesn't even have the word 'spam' in its dictionary!
ISPs are in a much stronger position to spot a flood of material, evaluate it and stop it in its tracks, or forward it with a spam? flag in the subject line so we can trash it using message rules.
I have been doing my bit, patiently forwarding offending spam to my ISP in the full knowledge that most spam uses a once-only source address, so it's a waste of time. And recently, it's been taking up far too much time.
I can't help but think that the prospect of facing an enormous fine would focus ISPs on finding a solution in no time and look forward to the first prosecutions of ISPs for inflicting this time-wasting rubbish on us.
Just think of what spam is doing collectively. It must be sapping millions of years-worth of endeavour all over the planet. What could we achieve if we aggregated all the time wasted by spam? We might have conquered climate change, cancer and most other diseases of the mind and body, fed the world and colonised the moon before breakfast!
In the meantime, a free download of Mailwasher from ComputerActive magazine's website (the only source of software downloads I like) and I am bouncing spam with fake emails saying my email address doesn't exist (heh heh) and creating blacklists of entire domains. Plus Mailwasher allows you to apply other well-known blacklists to beat the spammers.
In just 24 hours, spam has all but gone: wheee heee!
And while you're at ComputerActive downloads, if your computer doesn't have antivirus, a firewall and spyware protection, there's no excuse because you can download AVG anti-virus plus the excellent Zonealarm firewall, plus Ad-aware to keep things protected.

Substance, not Spin

You can put the best face on an organisation with PR, but if there are fundamental problems with the product or service, it ain't gonna help much to have a good reputation if the fundamentals continually let the organisation down.
But a good reputation also sets up service expectations and this is an area where small businesses have an edge if they can outgun the big boys with outstanding product and/or service delivery.
A good example of this has just happened to me today. I had my expectations badly shattered by Sainsburys. They have gone from high quality provider to something much worse in our household having caused three lost days off work by botching arrangements to deliver a fridge freezer to my elderly mother-in-law. She's in hospital just now, so we have a round trip of 1.5 hours and a 4 hour daytime wait in her flat each time they make a delivery promise. That's effectively, a day off work, and thanks to both my husband and I running our own businessess, there's no kind employer picking up the bill.
In my book, three strikes and you're out. Sainsbury's Kitchen Appliances failed to contact me as promised between 5-6pm last night to give me the time slot for today's guaranteed delivery (having botched it up twice before, they swore blind it would be sorted this time).
I rang to see when they were coming first thing this morning. No explanation. Nothing. They just stated that it definitely would not be delivered today and "all they could do was re-schedule the delivery". Thanks, but no thanks.
I cancelled the order and asked for an address to direct a letter of complaint and request compensation for 3 lost work days. And this is where it gets interesting. Despite the Sainsbury's logo being plastered all over the website, I was told that Sainsbury's Kitchen Appliances are actually run by a company called DRL Ltd in Bolton. They gave me their address to write to as Sainsbury's Kitchen Appliances c/o DRS, plus the email address as enquiries@sainsburyskitchenappliances.co.uk.
Apparently the fact that you are dealing with DRL Ltd is stated in the T&C which, they smugly informed me, "we expect customers to read." Well, yes, I did skim the T&C, but I trusted the Sainsburys name so it didn't occur to me that I was looking out for a fundamental change in the company I was dealing with. I actually read the DRL reference as DHL, and assumed Sainsbury's were devolving delivery to that well-known carrier. The good reputation of Sainsburys, and the fact that they deal with grocery deliveries so efficiently in 2-hour time slots, was a major factor in choosing to buy from them. I actually feel conned as it took a lot of unfruitful contact with the delivery telephone line to finally discover who we were actually dealing with. I've never heard of DRL.
Up until now, we had been surprised that we were getting mucked about by Sainsburys - and mucked about is a mild description. The last time we arranged delivery, my mild-mannered and gentle hubby came back incandescent with rage after a 5-hour wait. He had arrived at the appointed hour to be told by the resident manager at my mum in law's flats that the delivery guy had been and gone some 15 mins earlier than arranged. It didn't help to be told the guy was instructed to wait 15 mins every time he couldn't gain entry.....
The supplier's co-ordinator said she would ring the driver to turn him back, forcing hubby to hang on, but she didn't get back to him. Eventually he rang them when the end of the agreed time slot had passed to be told they that they couldn't reach the driver.... .
This was the second time they'd messed him around, having earlier agreed a time band for delivery which they tried to change on the delivery day itself. As hubby had shunted his work commitments to spend the morning fruitlessly kicking his heels, he was committed to turning up for work, which happened to involve catching a ferry to interview someone for the BBC. There's no way he could further alter that schedule.
There's no amount of PR that can whitewash over basic service delivery (or lack of) problems like this. It needs a fundamental overhaul if the communications, management and incentive/disciplinary systems are failing to control drivers who ignore contracted arrangements and delivery promises. Then that overhaul needs to be communicated clearly to ensure that people who have suffered realise that something effective is being done, so they stop sounding off about it, as I am doing just now.
Small businesses have a much shorter line of communications, and even if they do outsource something, they can put senior people on to fixing it or offering an alternative, instead of a call centre operative repeating that 'all they can do is re-schedule." If all small businesses conducted their businesses like this, no larger companies would have evolved from them! And I believe that DRL are missing a major trick by not pulling out all the stops to grow a good business on the back of one of the strongest brand names in the UK retail sector.
Research in the pre-internet days showed that a badly disgruntled customer's tale reached 200 people by the time friends of friends passed on the story. More if the complainants contacted a consumer watchdog body or the media. Now, the story can follow a company all round the world thanks to online tools like these. And mud sticks.
The trick is to understand that the best PR is to keep an eye out for matters of real substance that are affecting your business and always veer towards substance rather than spin.
Let's hope Sainsbury's take real action to tackle any problems being perpetuated in their name

PR Agency time bombs

Today's PR Week, the UK PR trade weekly reports research by Time Act Solutions that a 'typical' 50-strong consumer PR agency spends 44.9% of its time on account management. That's not focusing on their finances, you understand. It's time spent on managing client relationships. On top of this, there's an additional 17.8% of time spent in formal reporting back to clients.
Many clients will be shocked to learn that less than 20% of the time was spent on media relations. While media relations isn't the only PR trick in the book, it is the one that many clients prize (I listed 30 low cost promo techniques in my book: DIYPR, including media relations, although some strayed into marketing territory as it was designed for small business owners who rarely the luxury of separate PR, marketing and sales specialists).
The study was based on analysing the staff timelogs from 50 agencies.
PR Week doesn't duck the obvious: if the findings are right, then larger PR agencies appear to be wasting much of their time. But it tries to soften the blow by pointing out that, where an agency is engaged in strategic consultancy, they won't be devoting so much time to communications delivery. Only trouble is, the survey shows just 0.6% of time devoted to strategic counsel....
Admin and staff management account for under 15% of the time logged, and as financial matters are not listed separately, we must assume they're lumped in with admin. The only other time shown in the PR Week article is 1.5% spent on business development. This seems extraordinarily low, unless some of that 44.9% account management time is actually devoted to following the eminently sensible business maxim: it's always cheaper to sell more to an existing client than seek out new customers.
Small is Beautiful
Not surprisingly, it looks as if smaller agencies manage to reverse the goods delivery v talking about it trend. PR Week showed the 7-strong Oxford-based Brazil team's timelogs spent 42% on media relations + 15% on writing press releases and account management + admin taking up 21%.
Our own timelogs at (the small, but beautiful) PHPR are roughly split between client service delivery on the one hand, and marketing, admin, staff management, finance and training (which, interestingly, the report didn't seem to track despite a push to develop professional skills in the industry from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations www.cipr.co.uk). At least the PR industry now seems to be taking timelogs seriously. When we started in 1986, most clients had never seen a timelog for PR agency staff, and I still hear new clients say we're the first to offer them transparent timelogs and invoicing. Seemed like good PR to me...
More on small agencies' reactions to the survey at www.PRWeek.com/uk

PR & Spin

Every time I see 'spin' used for PR, it makes me mad.
It may be a reflection of how public sector PR (and in particular, government PR) operates, but it is far removed from most routine business PR.
The reason there's such a divergence between private and public sector PR is because the public sector, by its nature, is involved in decisions that are taken on behalf of us all, even if they don't directly impact on everyone. Consequently, new public initiatives will almost always affect more readers/ viewers/ listeners than any private sector initiatives. So public sector PROs are fending off huge waves of media interest and some have become quite times cynical in their disregard for the media.
The private sector PROs have to be extremely inventive in order to get a media look-in. But inventive doesn't mean making it up. The big trick - and it's one that any business can copy - is to find ways to hitch your news stories to bigger issues, names or celebrities. Whether it's climate change, health, education, the environment, defence, travel, jobs, work-life balance, etc the more you think in terms of wider context, the more your press releases will appear to echo genuine news reports and will stand a much better chance of being carried. Plus your reputation as a social commentator starts to build up. Play that card regularly and well, and you will start to find the media comes to you for a comment and your organisation gets a name check every time you are quoted. Being seen as an expert in the media will go a lot further in enhancing your organisation's reputation and prestige than a few obviously commercially-motivated plugs. That's where skillful follow-up with sales approaches and distribution of marketing materials (on or off-line) pays off. When PR, sales and marketing are worked together like this, the results are dramatically greater than veering from one to the other. Good luck with your integrated PR, sales and marketing campaigns.