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.

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!

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.