On Internet Business

Business Leader profile: Askar Sheibani

Posted by Michael under awards, Leadership

Born in Azerbaijan, Iran, Askar Sheibani arrived in the UK in 1972 to study engineering. He had no spoken English but his intense competitive streak and willingness to take risks led him to qualify as an electronics engineer even though he could see that he wouldn’t achieve what he wanted in the electronics sector due to what he describes ‘… as a lot of discrimination back then.’ But it wasn’t just discrimination that made him want to strike out alone. His first years in electronics showed him that many organisations were caught up in ‘politics that stifle you rather than motivate you’ so when he spotted a gap in the market, he set out to fill it..

But his efforts to create an environmentally, swift and efficient hardware repair centre in the UK were not appreciated by the industry, the government or his bank!

Sheibani had recognised that the lack of a UK based hardware repair centre meant repairs cost more, took longer, and had to travel long distances. He thought that it was obvious that a local repair base would reduce cost and turnaround time, as well as cutting the environmental burden. The DTI did not agree – the adviser he spoke to said British businesses preferred sending products back to their manufacturer and that Sheibani should stick to his job and not take risks.

His bank also refused funding because they thought it too and unviable. But he was not deterred – he invested £50.00 in a second-hand shed which he installed in his back garden and turned into a tiny workshop. His friends and family felt his plans were insane particularly as he had a young family. Sheibani was also told that his business would be ‘destroyed’ by the big manufacturers who would object to him taking business away from them.

His business, Comtek, now has a £10 million turnover and units in Wales, Holland and Germany as well as England. It’s repaired more than 2 million items for customers like BT, Orange, Siemens and IBM. It was the winner of the 2010 Green Business of the Year award at the Fast Growth Business Awards.

And twelve years after he founded Comtek, the Secretary of State for the DTI asked him to join the Ministerial Advisory Board – advising the very department that had rejected his entrepreneurialism

And his advice for entrepreneurs? Very simple: ‘No matter how many barriers there are, how many people try to de-motivate you, how many people say it can’t be done, it can be done. If you’ve got the passion, go for it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it.’

Asia Domain Name Registration scam

Posted by Michael under Uncategorized

Like many people over the past few weeks, I’ve received the following email:

Dear Principal,

We are a domain name registration and dispute organization in Asia. which mainly deal with the global companies’ domain name registration and internet Intellectual property right protection in Asia.

Currently, we have a very important issue needing to confirm with your company. On Apr 15,2010, we received an application.One company named “NanYun Technology, Inc” wanted to apply for registering the domain names related to “xxxx(my domain name) ” and Network Keyword through our body.

We are dealing with it. After our initial investigation, we found that these domain names and Network Keyword applied for registration were as same as your company’s web keyword. I wonder whether you consigned NanYun Technology, Inc to register these domain names and Network Keyword through us? If yes, we will complete the registration on these domain names and Network Keyword. Or you do not even know this company what so ever?

I want to confirm whether you are the corporate representative of your company. If you are, I will feedback some problems to you; if you are not, please forward my letter to your company’s corporate representative or administor. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Gavin Yue

Auditing Department

What is the Asia Domain Name scam?

First, nobody has been in touch with Mr Yue, wanting to register a domain name just like mine. These emails are sent out by their hundreds of thousands to businesses across Europe and the USA from addresses in mainland China and Hong Kong.

Second, there’s no need to deal with them if you want to register domain names with suffixes (endings) outside the standard .co.uk or .com. There are reputable domain registration organisations around, and

Third, this is spam, it’s unsolicited email.

Fear = money for domain name scammers

What this scam relies on is a knee-jerk reaction from the business owner. The fear that their internet business might be infringed on by some sharper using a similar name might drive them to register these suggested names with the Domain Name Registration Service at a vastly inflated price.

There is absolutely no system for telling one company that another may be about to register a domain – domain name registration is instantaneous from the moment the registration is accepted as not already being assigned, so there’s just no way that these scammers could do what they claim. You might feel that it’s still worth it to get those domains into your own hands, but more often than not, the company will take money from you and not register the domain names. Even if they do, you’ll find you paid dozens, or sometimes hundreds more than you needed to – and nobody was trying to get them away from you in the first place! And sometimes getting access to your credit card details is all the scammer was after and your card will then be used to try and buy goods or extract cash from other businesses.

Simply google ‘Asia domain name’ to find out just how prevalent this scam is. You’ll see several sites on which you can report receiving the spam email and details of what has happened to others who’ve been unfortunate enough to respond in good faith.

What to do when your bank says no

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

Every entrepreneur knows that the past year has been incredibly challenging for small businesses, and even large businesses have struggled over one key issue – financing.

Recent research from the Institute of Directors suggests that the financial climate has been tougher than banks would like to suggest, with 57% of those who responded saying that they had been refused finance, and only 14% of those who were declined finance being offered the Government’s Enterprise Finance Guarantee.

So what should SMEs do? The first step is to utilise the bank’s system to challenge the original decision and invite a second look from the bank’s own dedicated business lending team or department. Every bank has a slightly different system for this, but the best way to start is by contacting their business finance helpline to find out how your business can instigate a challenge to a no verdict on your request for finance. Also, talk to the FSA who regulate UK banking, and see if they can advise you on how to proceed.

Dedicated small business hotlines:
o Bank of Scotland SME Helpline – 0800 141 2658
o Barclays Credit Support – 0845 300 0748
o HSBC SME Helpline – 0800 328 4912
o Lloyds TSB SME Helpline – 0845 072 5555
o Natwest Business Hotline – 0800 158 5977
o RBS Business Hotline – 0800 092 3087
o Santander – Angela Wakelin: Director of Corporate Banking – 07919 308246

Pound image courtesy of Alan Cleaver

Fast Growth Business Awards 2010 Winners

Posted by Michael under awards, Business Growth

I have now recovered from the Fast Growth Business Awards held at the London Marriot in Grosvenor Square last night. It was a lovely evening hosted by the financial journalist Adam Shaw.

I was proud to have my team with me when we (Quayside) were announced as finalists in the Online Business of Year. Unfortunately we didnt win this year and the award went to www.Parcel2go.com.

The winner of the Retail/Leisure business of the year went to Joules Ltd.

The winner of the Green business of the year was Comtek.

The winner of the New Business of the Year was Naked Wines.

International business of the year was won by Patersons HR and Payroll Solutions.

The Young Entrepreneur of the year award was won by two dynamic entrepreneurs, Warren Bennett and David Haithirarmani for www.asuitthatfits.com.

www.Wonga.com won two awards.

The judges included high profile entrepreneurs including Julie Meyer founder of Ariadne Capital and Will King  founder of King of Shaves.

How to write a business plan – and then tear it up

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources

Every business needs a plan for several reasons:

a) To obtain funding
b) As a way of ensuring the different parts of the business (marketing, finance, production, sales) operate in harmony with each other from start-up
c) To allow for future planning and development
d) For successful recruitment of staff.

But equally, a business plan can be a way of destroying business development if you stick to it too slavishly.

Research is not reality

While you may spend months collecting information, it doesn’t necessarily add up to a business. Talking to potential suppliers and customers, investigating competitors, stating the problem you’re going to solve and the why and the where and the when and the how of solving it are all good ideas – but they are theoretical exercises. Creating a sales forecast, a skills audit and so on are brilliant ways to predict what might happen, but they are only predictions not a guarantee of reality.

A plan is not a model

A business plan is a paper exercise that pleases your bank and your investors. A business model is a dynamic structure that is constantly tested, in the preliminary stages, against reality. Say a potential customer tells you that he’ll place orders if you can deliver within 48 hours. You use your business model to test whether that’s possible. Can you get your goods to him in time? Do you expect to hold enough stock to guarantee his orders? Does holding that stock strain your cashflow to breaking point? What happens if there’s a rail/postal strike that stops your business meeting his needs – do you have a fallback option? Can you afford it? How many times can you afford to use it before your start-up struggles financially? What other alternatives are there: buying in stock to resell to him/ working with another supplier to meet his needs/offering an alternate product at an advantageous price?

By testing facts against a model you build a constantly updated picture of how the business will have to operate to succeed. This is a very different thing to a business plan which is an idealised model of how the business can BEST succeed. While both are essential, it’s the latter that helps you hit the ground running and continue to run while other start-ups are bogged down in adjusting their theoretical assumptions to cope with reality.

Photograph courtesy of Global X

‘Alan Sugar Test’ helps find future entrepreneurs

Posted by Michael under Leadership

Researcher Rosemary Athayde, working out of Kingston University’s Small Business Research Centre has devised a test that is designed to help identify entrepreneurial attitudes. It’s called the Attitudes to Enterprise test and it explores whether young people show a flair for enterprise.

The idea is to discover the next generation of business leaders while they are still aged 15-18, but it’s not just aimed at talent spotting: the other part of the process is to examine whether schemes for young entrepreneurs have positive, negative or no impact on pupils’ ambitions.

It has already been used in the UK, Australia and South Africa and requires young people to answer thirty questions that measure intuition, creativity, leadership skills and the desire to achieve – there’s also a section about the amount of control students feel they have over their futures. There’s also a new section, designed for use with undergraduates, which contains questions about risk-taking.

Why Test for Entrepreneurship?

Athayde developed the Attitudes to Enterprise questionnaire as a result of four studies that included almost 1,000 pupils aged 15-18 and revealed some interesting statistics. One of the studies compared a group of pupils taking part in a Young Enterprise programme with a control group that weren’t and discovered that being involved in the programme did improve pupils’ attitudes to self employment. Taken together, the studies also showed that males, students in private education and black teenagers were more positive about self-employment than other groups.

She hopes the test will assist enterprise programme providers and the government in deciding what enterprise course exist, where they are located and how they are delivered.

Growing your Business: The essential weekly meeting according to Verne Harnish

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership

In his excellent book, Mastering the Rockefeller habits, Verne Harnish outlines his framework for growing a business. The weekly meeting is designed to be an issue-focused strategic meeting. Its objective is to make everyone’s job easier and more productive by ensuring effective communication and understanding. Also, having group intelligence focused on solving high priority issues means the business continues to move towards its key objectives.

Agenda

1. Good news
2. The numbers
3. Customer and employee feedback
4. Big issue

Good news (5 minutes)

Every weekly meeting starts with good news. This starts the meeting on a good note and serves as a “health check” on the participants. The good news can be business or personal.

The Numbers (10 minutes)

Look at the key numbers for the business that provide insight into the future performance of the business. According to Verne every business should have 3. Go over every member’s or team’s key measures of productivity.

Customer and Employee Feedback (10 minutes)

Look at customer and employee feedback: what are the recurring issues? If necessary assign a person or group to look at a particular problem and find the core issue.

The big issue (30 minutes)

Prioritise, Prioritise, Prioritise. Pick one issue to focus on and discuss. Choose one of the priorities from the Quarterly plan and focus on it. Have the person who is responsible for managing or achieving the objective present to talk or provide an written update on the situation.

One phrase close

Get everyone to describe how they are feeling at that moment about the meeting and the discussions.

Actions

Record and circulate

• What action is being taken
• Who is taking it
• When will it be done by.

How to recruit and keep the best people

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership

According to GH Smart in his New York Times bestseller a certain structured framework works to recruit and retain the staff your organisation needs. I’ve summarised the methodology into four key stages:

1. Develop Scorecard – the scorecard must outline the key objectives and explain what the job is about; here’s an example –

Key Accountabilities

1 Grow revenue from $25m to $50m by 12/31/11
• Increase number of national industrial customers from 4 in 2008 to 8 in 2009 to 10 in 2009
• Reduce revenue from residential customers from 75% of total sales to 20% of total sales by 12/31/11

2 Increase EBITDA margin from 9% to 15% by 12/31/11
• Increase fluffo-matic 70% margin add-on sales from 33% to 90% of all customer orders by 12/31/07

3 Topgrade the management (build a team of A players) team
• Hire an ‘A’ Player Director of Outside Sales by 12/31/08
• Hire an ‘A’ Player CFO by 12/31/08
• Conduct Semi-annual talent reviews to identify non ‘A’ players. Present action plan to the board

4 Establish a robust product development process
• Hire an ‘A’ player Head of Product Development/R&D
• Put in place an industry best-in class process capable of identifying customer needs and developing appropriate products for a 24 month product cycle that can be sold at an attractive margin

5 Open a West coast sales office by 6/1/09
• Open a sales office in Los Angeles.

2. Establish Competencies

What skills does the person need to be good at the job?

1. Leadership Competencies
 Hires A players
 Develops people
 Removes underperformers
 Treats people with respect
 Network of talented people

2. Personal Competencies
 Integrity/honesty
 Organization and planning
 Calm under pressure
 Aggressive
 Moves fast

3.Interpersonal Competencies
 Listening skills
 Oral communication
 Teamwork
 Persuasion
 Holds people accountable

4. Intellectual Competencies
 Brainpower/learns quickly
 Analysis skills
 Strategic thinking/visioning
 Creative/innovative
 Attention to detail

5. Motivational Competencies
 Enthusiasm/ability to motivate others
 Persistent
 Proactive/takes initiative
 Work ethic
 Sets high standards.

Rate the candidates on these competences and add key comments to help you establish their genuine skills.

3. Conduct Brief screening interview

A brief telephone interview weeds out unsuitable candidates by using a structured methodology and four key questions
I. What are your career goals?
II. What are you good at professionally?
III. What are you not good at or not interested in doing?
IV. Who were your last five bosses and how will they each rate your performance on a 1-10 scale when we talk to them?

4. Conduct top grading interview

Candidates that pass the screening call are then invited to a face to face interview that is a longer exploration of their suitability for the role and their key ‘A’ qualities. It involves using a structured methodology that then moves into detailed discussion, breaking down jargon into practical examples and revealing gaps in qualifications or experience or evidence of character flaws or weak development. The questions should be as follows:

o School: high points and low points (5 minutes)

o College: high points and low points (5 minutes)

o For each job in the past 15 years (2 hour 40 minutes):
a) What were you hired to do?
b) What accomplishments were you most proud of?
c) What were some low points during that job?
d) Let’s talk about the people: What was your boss’s name? What was it like working with him/her? What will he/she say were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement? Please tell me about the team you inherited. Did you hire anybody? Fire anybody? What was your hiring success rate? How many As, Bs, and Cs did you have by the end?

o Why did you leave that job?

o What are your career goals for the future (10 minutes)?

In each case, probe “5 questions deep” to get data on each area: What? How? Tell me more … this really pushes the candidate to reveal either mastery or weakness in key areas.

Productivity Tools Review

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources, Online Retail

It’s not everyday that you need to build a form or mock-up a software application, but when you do, it’s important to have the kit to enable you to work swiftly and effectively. Three that can really help are Formsite, Balsamiq and Cacoo:

Formsite is flexible and simple to learn – it’s an HTML form builder that allows the user to create anything from a customer survey to an order form or an employment application process. You can work from a template or start with a ‘blank page’ and tailor the form or survey to your own needs and because the form is stored on the Formsite server, you don’t have to install or download anything so it’s good for work on the move. Their most recent addition is a Spam protection facility that stops robots from completing your forms and distorting results.

Priced in dollars, starting with free access which offers a strictly limited range of forms and responses, and rising through $10, to $100 per month, for extras like consulting and customisation it’s a fully flexible system that allows form-building to be simple and response reporting to be an effective part of your business.

Balsamiq is priced at $79.99 although there is a free demo version you can download to play around with, that demo doesn’t have a save function, for which you need to have paid for a licence key. Obviously if you’re just ‘doodling’ software with your team, the free version may be enough for you as Balsamiq allows you to create software mockups using drag and drop and editing tools that appear on the desktop. It’s a really simple system to learn, and can allow you to brainstorm with a client or team from first principles, so that when an idea comes up while you’re on the road or just grabbing a quick coffee, you can start work immediately using the pre-made elements to offer an instant visual.

There is perhaps one annoyance: to ensure that customers don’t think that putting together a mockup is the same as coding software, Balsamiq has opted to keep the system in a kind of hand-drawn, low-fi style which can look a little odd.

Cacoo is a free web app that allows you to work through your Cacoo.com account to create diagrams like site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. It also allows for real time collaboration and users can upload their own images and create freehand line-work. It’s a relatively new system which means that it doesn’t, as yet, have a ‘premium’ option for paying users, although that’s due to come by the middle of this year. It would be good if that premium payment allowed users to export files on formats other than PNG and to save files to Autocad formats.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of the current system is that it lacks an import feature, meaning that all files have to be created from scratch from within the Cacoo space.