In through the outfield

8 January 200818 December 2012

Customer service with a sense of irony

I recently joined the loyalty scheme run by my local plant nursery and was rather surprised to receive a letter with the following introduction:

“Greetings, Oh Most Highly Esteemed Green Card Applicant (letter composed by Wych Cross Hype Ltd a wholly dis-owned subsidiary).

We are delighted to announce that your application for a Wych Cross Green Card has been entirely successful and your expensive looking, gloss green card is enclosed with this letter. Please try not to lose it before you have at least tried it out!

As you know, your card is to be used for scraping ice off your windscreen, wedging that wobbly coffee table leg that’s been irritating you for years, flicking paper pellets at work colleagues and impressing gullible people at parties. You will also be aware that cutting your card into little pieces for security reasons is the recommended way to make your scissors very blunt very quickly. In between times you can also use your card to collect and redeem points (and we all know what points mean!) every time you shop at Wych Cross.

We wish you many hours of happy and rewarding activity with your new Wych Cross Green Card and anticipate your next visit to us with particular pleasure.

With Warmest Felicitations,
Ray Kennedy
Managing Director

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It certainly appealed to my funny-bone in this age of over-egged marketing letters.

6 January 2008

tellyAds – an archive of UK television adverts

Another great find for those researching television adertising and consumer tastes courtesy of Phil Bradley’s blog.

As they say on the tellyAds website;

“Why sit through hours of telly just to catch your favourite ad? We’re collecting as many current UK commercials as we can, so you can watch the ones you like when you want to watch them.”

They currently have over 5,666 adverts to date, including such classics as the Go To Work On An Egg series featuring Tony Hancock, and my current favourite musician Regina Spektor.

However as they seem to be concentrating on recent ads they don’t currently have any of the Cadbury Smash classics from the 1970’s, recently voted the most popular UK ads of all time.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=zbU2PY8PI9w]

27 December 200716 December 2012

Secrets of a successful entrepreneurs

I have been listening to yet another thought provoking show from Peter Day. This time it is from his GlobalBiz show on the BBC World Service.

He was visiting the BridgeClimb experience in Sydney, Australia, and talking to its founder Paul Cave.

He talked frankly about the importance of customer complaints to his business and how he aims to continuously improve and grow their service. One of his biggest challenges was to change staff attitudes so that when they receive a criticism or a suggestion, it is seen as a positive thing. He wants them to celebrate when they get feed back of a negative nature, because this allows them to work out how to change and improve their service to address those comments.

He also outlined his secret to becoming a successful entrepreneur; “You need drive thrust, vision and follow through.”

Most business take a lot longer, the pockets need to be deeper than expected, and you need to be very very resilient. You have got to have an enormous determination, an obstinacy to proceed in order to make a business happen.

Also the subject is best taught by ‘pracademics’, and that some of our best entrepreneurs are not polluted by education. Many of our professions, particularly law and finance are about reasons ‘why not’.

Finally, entrepreneurs have the ability to see around a corner, when there isn’t a physical way of doing so. They sense what is there in a way that many of us are unable to do.

2 December 200718 November 2012

Teenpreneurs – Inspiring Entrepreneurs

I have finally found time to catch up on the events I attended during the hectic Enterprise Week 12-18 November.

The Teenpreneurs event was fantastic with Fraser Doherty, founder of Superjam, Emily Cummins, inventor of the solar-powered refrigerator, Ben Way, serial entrepreneur and founder of The Rainmaker, Wilson Chowdhry, CEO of AA Security.

The most memorable story was from Ben Way who recounted the time when venture capitalists knocked on his door wanted to know how much money he wanted to start a web shopping comparison site. His mind racing but with a cool demeanour he asked for £25 million. The investors said that was the amount they had to offer, so the deal was done. Even more remarkable was that Ben was 17 years old at the time. However with the bursting of the dot com bubble of the late 90’s he ended up with nothing. On the same day he appeared in the Sunday Times Rich List under Robbie Williams he could not afford to buy a tube ticket.

The most impressive speaker was Fraser Doherty who had begun experimenting with business ideas from a young age. By 14 he had persuaded his Gran to share her jam secrets with him and soon started making it himself. He is now 18 years old but came across as the most mature person in the building that evening.

He described some of the ups and downs of his business progress, including having to go right back to the drawing board after Waitrose rejected his initial brand and packaging.

Fraser has a blog to enable us to follow his remarkable career.

13 November 2007

The Future Face of Enterprise

I greatly enjoyed attending the The Future Face of Enterprise – Policy Summit 2007, part of the launch of Enterprise Week which this year was hosted by The British Library.

There was a good range of speakers including three representatives of government:

Rt Hon John Hutton MP, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
Jonathan Guthrie, Enterprise Editor, Financial Times
Ben Verwaayen, Chief Executive, BT
Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Executive Director, Tesco Plc
Joanna Shields, President, Bebo
Phil Hope MP, Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office
Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP, Minister of State for Competitiveness, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
Farzana Baduel (Founder, TaxClaim),
Julie Meyer (Founder and Chief Exec, Ariadne Capital),
Maive Rute (Enterprise and Industry Directorate General, European Commission)

Ben Verwaayen gave an impressive unscripted talk emphasising the global nature of business and how this gave opportunities for both developing economies such as India as well as mature economies such as ours. Technology meant that geography was no longer a barrier to employment opportunities. Several of the speakers mentioned that London is now the leading city for international business and finance. The positives that immigrants bring to our society (they are far more likely to set up in business) were also contrasted to the negative press they have been receiving recently.

Joanna Shields (originally from the U.S.) told the audience that she was shortly to take up British citizenship. This led to muffled laughter from the audience which I felt gave a fascinating insight into the British psyche. The same comment in the U.S. would have led to loud applause and cheering.

Perhaps most impressive of all (and I find that young entrepreneurs often are) was Farzana Baduel the Founder of TaxClaim. She was amazingly confident and poised. Her main message was just go for it, and don’t listen to those who would counsel caution.

Matthew Gwyther editor of Management Today led a very lively discussion on a range of issues but focussing on challenges for women entrepreneurs.

From left to right:
Farzana Baduel (Founder, TaxClaim),
Julie Meyer (Founder and Chief Exec, Ariadne Capital),
Maive Rute (Enterprise and Industry Directorate General, European Commission),
Stephen Timms (Minister of State with responsibility for Enterprise, BERR),
Phil Hope (Parliamentary Secretary with responsibility for Social Enterprise, Cabinet Office), Joanna Shields (President International, Bebo)
Lucy Neville-Rolfe (Corporate and Legal Affairs Director, Tesco).

7 November 200718 November 2012

Levi Roots and his Reggae Reggae Sauce

Once again our Inspiring entrepreneurs events proved to be geniunly inspiring. For me the most surprising speaker at our recent Winners 2: The rise and rise of black British entrepreneurs event was Levi Roots.

He is a reggae musician, chef and entrepreneur, who achieved fame after appearing on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den looking for funding for his ‘Reggae Reggae Sauce‘.

He was a great speaker and joked about how he had slayed his person dragons and now had two of them on a leash. He also talked about the 12 years he had been producing his sauce before striking lucky on the Dragons’ Den.

Videos of all of the speakers have just been put up onto our website.

5 November 200718 November 2012

Crazy Coffins – thinking outside the box

Crazy Coffins have proved that by ‘thinking outside the box’ (apologies for the appalling pun) you can discover a whole new area of customers in what might appear to be a dead end business (oh dear…)

It all started in 2000 when a fan of the Red Arrows asked to be buried in a model fighter. They constructed a plane with folding wings and a cockpit casket. The word began to spread and after a being featured in the Sun newspaper the phone didn’t stop ringing for three months. Now they are even exhibiting their coffins as art at the Museum für Sepulkralkultur in Kassel, Germany.

1 November 200718 November 2012

KEEN on enterprise for students in East London

Last Wednesday Striding Out organised the launch of KEEN, a student enterprise club supported by Knowledge East, a higher education partnership for undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics from eight East London universities

The evening consisted of short presentations from:

Sam Conniff from Livity a socially-responsible youth marketing agency.
Zoe Stanton from Us Creates who design effective, progressive and individual initiatives for societal issues within the UK.
Jordan Kensington, from the Invincible Media Group, founder of the Urban Music Awards and promoter of British Music Week.
Henry Warren from Gemin-i, who specialise in developing innovative web-based solutions to empower, educating and inspiring people across the world.

The speaker who made the greatest impression on me was Jordan Kensington, the very confident (some might say brash) founder of Invincible Media. He is convinced that all an entrepreneur needs is a very clear view of their future. He explained that he started his business with no money, but he had a film running in his head of the future of his business. His belief in this image was so strong that everything else just fell into place. This approach is overlapping somewhat into NLP territory, but it obviously worked for Jordan as his business empire has grown rapidly. He even had the gall to succesfully export his Urban Music Awards from the UK to the USA.

31 October 2007

The Boots Centre for Innovation wants your ideas

One of the most interesting speakers at The British International Innovation & Technology Conference and Exhibition was from the The Boots Centre for Innovation. It was good to hear that an organisation as large an bureaucratic as Boots is prepared to do something radical in order to foster innovation.

They recognised that getting new ideas from inside the company was not the most effective way to deliver new products to the market. So they teamed up with the Institute of Life Science at Swansea University, the Welsh Assembly and Longbow Capital to build a new centre based in Swansea ,investing £3 million of Boots money.

They can provide support and funding for the development of innovative products and technologies. But are particularly looking for new ideas for products in the following ten areas:

1 Improve and maintain the health, look and feel of skin
2 Improve the health and appearance of teeth and gums
3 Devices that enable people to monitor key aspects of their health
4 Improve the health, appearance and comfort of eyes
5 Improve digestive health, particularly issues related to stress, poor diet and obesity
6 Minimise the severity and duration of pain
7 Improve quality of sleep for everyone [including pregnant women, babies and the elderly]
8 Minimise the complications of living with diabetes
9 Anti-ageing products and devices for mind and body
10 Create more convenient methods of taking and using medicines and health products