On Internet Business

We are up for another award ! Quayside are finalist in Online Business of Year Award

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

I’m delighted to discover that we  are a finalist in the Online Business of the Year category of the Fast Growth Business Awards. It’s thanks to an excellent team that supports the company that we’ve got this far, and the national recognition that this delivers to Quayside is definitely their reward for exceptional levels of dedication and ingenuity at a time when the business environment has been tough and the economy has made it tough for any organisation to thrive.

Our short-listing is an exciting acknowledgment of the quality of Quayside’s teamwork, and the Fast Growth Business Awards London awards dinner in April will be a highlight of the year for me, not least because last year’s winners, Seatwave.com are a truly innovative online marketplace where fans can buy and sell tickets for concerts, sporting events, shows and almost any other kind of live event imaginable.

Being in such good company is a fantastic incentive to continue our growth and development.

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Google – the short history of a global revolution

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Search

1998 – Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin who overturned the conventional search engine procedure of ranking results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page in favour of a system that analysed the relationships between websites.

2000 – it’s already the world’s largest search engine, having indexed a billion web pages

2002 – the new cost-per-click advertising model that Google introduces becomes its greatest revenue generator

2004 – floated. As Google shares hit the NY Stock Exchange, and investors see the historical income jump from $85 in 2001 to $1.5 billion in 2003, they make nearly a thousand Google employees into overnight millionaires.

2006 – the YouTube generation: Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion, dwarfing the $580m that News Corporation paid for rival social networking website MySpace in 2005. The combined power of Google with YouTube, which shows more than 140 million videos daily, makes Google the biggest media giant the world has ever seen.

2007 – Google Street View premiers in five US cities but soon runs into protest in other parts of the world – such as being told by European Union data privacy regulators to warn people before it sends cameras out to take pictures for its maps and to shorten the time it keeps those uncensored photographs from one year to six months.

2010 – Google Buzz, the challenge to Facebook, is launched – will it become the future of social networking?

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Getting and keeping the best staff the ‘1-800-got-junk’ way

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership

Since listening to Cameron Herold in March 2009, I have been interested in the practises of 1-800-got-junk – a company that, under Herold’s leadership, grew to over $106 million. One of their key successes is in recruiting and retaining the best possible staff.

How do they make themselves a great employer?

• The ability to have fun – Herold believes that people who are enjoying themselves collaborate better, communicate more and achieve more. He seeks out those who don’t take themselves too seriously and can ‘hang loose’ because he believes rigidity is damaging to business growth. By making fun part of the work day, Herold encourages his staff to enjoy life and work and to feel they are prioritised by their organisation, not just cogs in a machine.

How do they recruit the right staff?

• Cultural fit – fit first, skills second is Herold’s law – when he’s hired somebody with excellent skills, but whose outlook doesn’t match the views and vision that prevail in his organisation, it’s always gone wrong. Having staff whose focus and beliefs are congruent with the focus and beliefs of the organisation as a whole offers stability and the chance to move forward as one.
• A sunny outlook – optimism and a positive nature are vital to Herold’s view of the organisational ethos. Pessimism creates a negative business culture that is threatened by challenges and opposed to change and that means that stagnation, rather than growth, becomes the desired business model.
• A shared vision – Herold offers a two page ‘picture’ of his own organisation and sees if it inspires the potential recruit – if they get excited about the way he wants to do business and if their own vision for their future makes him feel excited to recruit them, then it’s a match.

How do they maintain growth?

• A fire within – when his staff want to help achieve his BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) for the business, and when they are motivated by the BHAG, not the short term rewards of bonuses or incentives, then growth follows naturally and organically.
• Love of goals – all his staff post their top three weekly and monthly goals above their desks, and this means that the whole organisation ‘trickles up’ to overall success – Herold believes that some people naturally set goals for themselves and those are the people who are more likely to achieve them, so goal setting is one of the key personality traits he’s looking for at interview.
• Tenacity – the ability to manage constant change is what Herold defines as tenacity; it’s not time-serving but the natural response of some individuals to work through challenges rather than giving in to them and he says he sees it in his key employees, time after time, challenge after challenge.

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Entrepreneurs’ Organization Forum meetings

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

In May I will be taking over the presidency of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization in the UK. Stepping into this role is exciting and has caused me to reflect on the benefits that entrepreneurs obtain from working with EO, notably the peer-to-peer support and expertise of Forum.

What is Forum?

It’s a confidential peer support system that allows individual entrepreneurs both to present challenges and issues that confront them to the group, and to comment on the challenges and issues being face by others, by sharing relevant personal experiences.

What makes it different to a normal discussion?

First, there’s a one day training programme to help entrepreneurs learn to talk about taboo subjects ranging from marital strife to annual profit. This training gives entrepreneurs a chance to explore what good communication is, how a safe environment for sharing sensitive information works, and what their responsibilities are for maintaining integrity and confidentiality.

Then the three key principles come into play at each meeting. They are confidentiality, personal responsibility, and gestalt language protocol. This means:

1. Everything said in forum is ultra-private.
2. That members are reminded that they only get out what they put in – so not only do they have to assist others by sharing their experience where they can, but they also have the personal responsibility of taking back any lessons they learn from the experience of others and putting those lessons into practice.
3. That giving advice is forbidden – only sharing experience is allowed. This is crucial to the development of entrepreneurs and their businesses because it gives priority to personal insight rather than to offering advice – it makes the recipient of the experience wholly responsible for turning it into action, and it means they have nobody to blame for ‘bad advice’ if it doesn’t work out as they anticipated it would.

Each of the monthly sessions focuses on an issue presented by one member, which he or she would like the others to help him or her resolve. After a presentation of the issue, which can last up to twenty minutes, those around the table with the presenter are given three minutes each to ask questions that clarify the problem and illuminate the wider context within which the problem, and the entrepreneur, operate. This, in itself, helps the presenter learn about the problem they’ve identified and whether they have framed it correctly. Then discussion is based entirely on the personal experiences those around the table have had with that issue.

What are the benefits of Forum participation?

• Personal responsibility is enhanced, while new ideas are made available in a safe environment for sharing sensitive information
• The ability to learn from the experiences of others without having to follow any kind of prescriptive course
• Many Forum members feel that by sharing their own experiences they help others avoid or transcend problem issues, so they are ‘giving back’ to the entrepreneur community.

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EU and retail sales – online up, store-based down, problems ahead

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

It’s predicted that online retail business in Europe could increase by 20% in 2010 – massively exceeding store-based trade. Key market increases are expected in France, Poland and Spain as they develop the online retail habit that has already bitten the UK, Germany and Italy. Research conducted by the Centre for Retail Research for price-comparison website Kelkoo predicts that the euro-based online shopping market could reach 172 billion euros in 2010 – which would outstrip the forecast for USA online retail growth of just 10%. By contrast, the predicted growth for shop-based European retailing is just 1.4 %.

The UK will see the lowest rate of growth, just 12.4%, although overall it is the largest European market, being worth around 50 billion euros. It’s a staggering rate of growth in comparison to retail – for example, German retail sales dropped by nearly 2% last year.

And while online retail booms, the euro economy as a whole is worrying everybody – the PIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain all have national credit rating under extreme pressure in the euro-zone – and while the Irish government has pushed through difficult budgets to ensure economy stability returns, Greece in particular seems unable to commit to the same degree of rigour. As the governments in Athens, Lisbon and Madrid face pressure from other euro-zone nations that really don’t want to be bailing out their neighbours, tiny Latvia which chose to peg its own currency to the euro-standard is worst off of all – it’s lost a quarter of its economy since the worldwide recession started, and retail sales have dropped by nearly a third.

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Review – the value of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to business

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Mechanical Turk is a service provided by Amazon, better known for book sales, that allows individuals to complete simple tasks for small payments, or businesses (called requesters) to post low grade work which is then completed swiftly by a range of people.

It’s a dual user website, like elance, where businesses post HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and individuals apply to complete them. The difference between elance and Mechanical Turk lies in three areas:

1. The payment to service providers
2. The relationship between the requester and the HIT completer
3. The nature of the tasks.

First, the payments – each HIT has a fee, often a really tiny amount, and the business may pay sixty individuals a few cents, rather than one individual the whole amount as they would with elance.

Second, there is no interrelationship between a requester seeking to have HITs completed and the people undertaking them. The whole process is mediated by the Amazon service so you don’t have any real sense of who’s doing your work or why.

Third, the tasks are short-term, repetitive and requiring lower skill levels than elance. If you want several dozen people to test the registration system on a new website, Mechanical Turk is your baby, but if you want detailed feedback on their experiences of the registration process, it’s not.

You can limit the geographic location of the folk who complete your HIT, so for example you can ask only UK workers to review your UK road sign quiz, or only German speakers to read your new German-language website.

Payments are managed by Amazon Mechanical Turk which takes a 10% fee over and above what the requester is going to pay the HIT completers –if a HIT pays $0.20, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects $0.02. The minimum commission charged is $0.005 per HIT.

And that’s one of the biggest problems – you can use the Mechanical Turk, if you’re not a USA based business, but it’s complicated, or as Amazon put it: Requesters must provide a U.S. ACH-enabled bank account and a U.S. billing address in order to submit a request for tasks to be completed through the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site. If a Requester is not a legal entity, but is submitting tasks to Amazon Mechanical Turk as an individual, he or she would also need to provide a U.S. driver’s license number. So if you have an American arm to your business, Turk may be valuable to you, but it’s not truly international for requesters as it is for HIT completers.

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Recruiting for Entrepreneurs

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources

It’s been estimated that small businesses spend around £69 million a year in the UK just on advertising, interviewing, induction and training new staff.

Small businesses, especially those that are entrepreneurial, also need to attract and retain high quality talent. But small enterprises often run into the problem of identifying suitably qualified and dedicated staff members because larger businesses outperform them in most forms of recruitment most notably on-campus events, word-of mouth referral and talent identification. In addition, larger companies offer stability, security and clear career progression.

So what can small businesses do to compete?

First, using human resources sites such as Monster and Careerbuilder can level the field on many standard areas of recruiting, although they won’t necessarily produce candidates for highly specialised positions.

Using your website as a recruitment tool is also a good way to identify talent in your industry – it’s a form of marketing that delivers the best results when combined with social media outreach to inform the likely candidate base about your company and the work ethos that you offer.

Start-up businesses may not be able to take advantage of career fairs at schools and colleges, but can benefit from taking part in structured curriculum-based information sharing such as giving talks on emerging technologies and fields of employment, this has worked well for the games and multi-media industries in particular. Offer your services as a speaker to local colleges who are training people who might become your employees – you can also offer an internship or work experience opportunity which is a good way of finding people who may later become employees.

Always be aware that the expense of hiring the wrong person is greater than the cost of recruiting the right one, and use techniques such as psychometric testing, effective interview techniques, and considering the personality fit that a candidate requires to work well in your organisation.

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Business Planning Resources round-up

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources

While there are many tools and information sources online, picking good resources to investigate your business potential can be make or break – here are some of our top picks:

Researching a new business

Scavenger gives you online access to hundreds of reports and guides relating to almost every kind of business from coffee shops to creative industries. You can use the scavenger site to find case studies and to explore what training you might need to succeed, what your customer base will look like and who the competition will be – it’s not free but the reports are affordable and it’s better to pay in advance to find out the facts than to pay with business failure by not knowing what you were up against.

Writing a business plan

A key to succeeding in business is having an accurate and informative business plan that will give you new business clear direction and ensure your spend your set-up time doing the right things. It’s vital to invest effort ensuring it’s strategically perfect. The Business Link website has comprehensive information on who a business plan should be aimed at, what it should contain and how to gather the information you need, as well as showing you how to lay it out.

Do the math

Bplan has a range of calculators that you can use for free, such as their cash-flow and break-even calculators and their start-up-costs estimator which tells you your likely capital start cost. There are also sample business plans to look at and some can be downloaded for free.

Investment angles and angels

If your start-up costs exceed your finance, or if your business is likely to need early investment of capital or expertise, Angel Deals is a virtual global network for the business community. It links entrepreneurs seeking funding and growth with investors seeking deal flow and people seeking work. It’s a one stop resource for every kind of investment.

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Business books to read in 2010

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

Here’s a round-up of some of the best business books I’ve read in recent months – there’s something here for every entrepreneur:

Great Game of Business, author J. Stack – When first published in 1992 this book contained the seminal ‘The Higher Laws of Business’

1. You get what you give.
2. It’s easy to stop one guy, but it’s pretty hard to stop 100.
3. What goes around comes around.
4. You do what you gotta do.
5. You gotta wanna.
6. You can sometimes fool the fans, but you can never fool the players.
7. When you raise the bottom, the top rises.
8. When people set their own targets, they usually hit them.
9. If nobody pays attention, people stop caring.
10. As they say in Missouri: Shit rolls downhill. In other words, change begins at the top.

To which Stack adds ‘The Ultimate Higher Law’ = when you appeal to the highest level of thinking, you get the highest level of performance.

This book is ideal for businesses focused on teamwork as it contains insightful information on how to get individuals focused and working together to achieve business success.

E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber – In an almost opposite way to the previous book, this one aims to fix the work life/balance for the entrepreneur.

Gerber feels that almost everyone who launches a business is a technician and will sooner or later suffer from Entrepreneurship seizure – the E-myth. He says small businesses do not work out because the technician-founder is working IN rather than ON the business, in other words is managing the mechanics rather than the strategy. Gerber takes the reader through installing systems in the business so that anybody can run it. The systems, not the individuals run the business. McDonalds is the key example here – with a constant workforce turnover, it still operates effectively because the systems keep the business going, not the people.

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers – author Geoffrey A Moore – This is a little more specialised, but it’s a book that reveals how high-tech products require marketing strategies completely different to those used in other industries. Moore offers ‘chasm theory’ which shows why high-technology products initially sell well to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull (the chasm) as they endeavour to cross over to mainstream buyers. But the book isn’t merely descriptive, it offers solutions to the problem by showing how to cross the chasm by getting marketing professionals to create profiles and target specific sections of the population rather than aiming straight for mainstream success, and uses examples such as Apple, Oracle, and Sun to elaborate the theory.

Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book by Jack and Suzy Welch – Jack Welch’s personal life is perhaps nothing to boast about in terms of work/life balance, but he does offer some of the most simple, powerful and proven management practices in the business today. His message is simple and clear if you: empower others, ask questions, tap into the potential of all of your associates, choose integrity and honesty over charts, graphs, and politics, and spend more time in action than slaving over budgets, you’ll achieve entrepreneurial success. One of the best sections of this book is the list of questions that need to be answered to develop a winning strategy – another real take-way gem is the material on how to take the pain out of agreeing budgets.

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What is a good conversion rate ?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail

Conversion rate is a critical measure in the success of an ecommerce website. Conversion rate = number of orders placed/number of visitors. According to research by Nielsen Online, the US sites with the highest conversion rates for January 2009 (as a percentage of unique website visitors) were:

Schwan’s, which is the premier site for home delivery of frozen foods and dairy products including ice creams, entrees, meats and desserts. It ships right across the USA. Conversion rate = 52.5%

Proflowers is hardly known outside the USA, but is the equivalent of interflora in the UK, you can send flowers for delivery from ProFlowers, or alternatively order plants, roses, and Christmas gifts to be delivered. Conversion rate = 27.3%

Quixtar is part of Amway Global and produces and sells Nutrilite dietary supplements, XS Energy Drinks, personal care, home care, air and water purifiers and Artistry cosmetics, relying primarily on person-to-person referral rather than advertisements for sale of products. Conversion rate = 22.4%

Blair.com – a 100 year old company, originally mail order, selling men’s and women’s clothing and household items, now largely an ecommerce business, it has a conversion rate of 21.8%

Office Depot is both a home and business to business supplier providing office supplies, print, furniture and office machinery. The online site has a conversion rate of 21.1%

Vitacost.com offers more than 800 brands and 26,000 vitamins, herbs, antioxidants, organic and natural foods as well as cleaning and personal care items with such mystifying names as natraceuticals and cosmeceuticals – which harness the power of medicine to the aspiration of personal beauty. The site’s conversion rate is 20.4%

DrsFosterSmith.com – from 1983, when three veterinarians got together to offer an online pet product catalogue, Drs Foster & Smith has grown to well over 600 employees and has a conversion rate of 20.3%

FTD.com bears the familiar Interflora logo but is in fact Florists’ Transworld Delivery a floral wire service, retailer and wholesaler – it actually bought out the Interflora cooperative in 2006. It has a conversion rate of 20.2%

Amazon is a Fortune 500 company and is considered to be the global leader in e-commerce. It sells everything from books and electronics to tennis rackets and diamonds and boasts a conversion rate of 17.2%

CDW is a reseller of technology products and services for individuals and business and has a dedicated arm that sells computers and associated products to the American government. CDW recently agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm for a value of over 7 billion dollars. Conversion rate = 16.9%

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