SEOsoftware.net has finally gone
Incidentally, SEOsoftware.net was finally relocated to its new owner today. She has officially gone! I will keep a link on this site for a while as Ray (the new owner) is a good guy and I want to send him as much traffic as I can.
Dreading the week ahead?
I’ve had one of those introspective days today, thinking about the week ahead. Trouble is, from where I’m standing I just can’t imagine the end of it.
The restaurants are causing most of the problems. It’s that week in the month when major payments leave the bank account – meaning we will be naturally low on cash. But it’s also that week in the quarter when lots of money needs to be found (rent etc…) which is a bigger problem. I always get pretty down when I feel that everyone I speak to is someone looking for a cheque – hence the introspective mood and negative post!! A call to the bank will be my first task tomorrow!
On top of that, I need to make some major progress with the new project this week or it is going to falter. Last week was not productive enough. We need that first breakthrough, that first piece of the puzzle. It’s really difficult keeping a team motivated in the early stages of a venture when there is nothing concrete for them to hold on to. I am naturally a very motivated person, but I’m aware that so many people find it difficult to focus, and will naturally drift without daily guidance during the early days.
My problem this week is that the pressure of the restaurant situation is going to hamper my efforts with the project. I just don’t think there will be enough of me to spread around to keep the whole show going.
Do or die?
Every project reaches a do-or-die moment. Has the venture gain enough support? Are the figures looking viable? Is it time to pull the plug?
This is one of the greatest skills for a businesses person or entrepreneur to master. Entrepreneurs are typically taking risks, and those risks often tied up with their own personal lives. Knowing when to walk away before a doomed project has started can mean the difference between bankruptcy and limitless wealth. Not easy for a natural optimist!
So my current project has reach do-or-die day 1. Today I will gather all the information I have acquired so far, will speak to each member of the team, and make a decision. Of course, should we proceed there will be further opportunities to pull the plug, but this is the first real opportunity to asses the project from the perspective of knowledge instead of pure passion.
It’s a balancing act. Having the courage to forge ahead where most others would falter, yet being realistic about the chances of success.
SEOsoftware.net sold
I finally sold SEOsoftware.net for $7,200, which was a reasonable price considering past performance and future potential. I now have some wrapping up to do (transferring the site etc) but shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks at most.
This is all part of the housekeeping operation necessary to allow me to focus on the big 2006 charity project. At the moment I have given Nic executive control of the restaurants, with only big issues coming to me.
Next step is a round of meetings in London, starting tomorrow morning. By the end of this week I will know whether the project is going to happen.
I’m pretty sad that the London whale so sadly died at the weekend – I was looking forward to saying hello. I’ve never seen a whale in the flesh, and I guess it will be a little while longer now before I do.
The team takes shape
Right, I’ve been very busy putting together the initial team that will help me achieve my £1 million charity donation by December 31st. Our first strategy meeting took place yesterday, and I now have a long list of things to achieve within two weeks.
If in two weeks we don’t hit our targets the project will be dropped, so the next fourteen days are critical.
My list is:
- Fine tune the project pitch and distribute to team members to use in emails etc.
- Find a production company that will follow us through the year, and produce the final television show on December 31st
- Conduct initial research into corporate sponsorship that will cover the projects running costs
The project that will actually raise the £1 million is top secret, and must remain so until March.
New Years Resolutions?
So how are you doing with the New Year’s Resolutions? I’ve been working hard on mine, and have actually started letting people know what it is.
2005 was a year of very hard work for me. I was totally obsessed with building my businesses and kinda neglected everything else. The birth of my daughter Ava has sharply refocused my thinking, and over Christmas my world seemed to change.
I’ve decided to bring back the real me in 2006. Along with the gross profit margins, sales and accounts that usually occupy my mind I am going to bring back creativity, passion and fun.
Nothing will get me back to my old self like a new project, so I’ve set one. A big one. In 2006 I’m going to try and raise £1 million pounds for charity.
I’ve spent the first half of January coming up with ideas, and I now think I’ve got it. In fact I think it is such a good idea that I can’t stop thinking about it.
So now to the hard part. First I need to convince my wife, because her support will be crucial. Second, I need to approach some people (family, friends, friends of friends) that I have identified as key to this project. Then the fun begins.
UK retail sales: What a very merry Christmas, but bleak New Year?
So its official, we people in retail land had a bumper Christmas – the best since 2001. According to the British Retail Consortium, like-for-likes were up 2.6% on 2004, showing the biggest monthly gain since May 2004.
How predictable then that the press are banging on about “the return of consumer spending” and speculation about an interest rate rise being back on the cards. Hold it boys. Look around. Where did all the shoppers go?
I don’t feel at all optimistic about consumer spending. Two days after Christmas and the stores were dead – you can see it in the figures and you can see it in the flesh. My prediction is that the first quarter of 2006 will be very very difficult for retailers. Christmas might have provided a temporary bonus, but the pickings weren’t good enough to last through to the spring. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a continuing rise in retail liquidations in early 2006.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There will be growth to be had I’m sure, but my money wont be on the high street this quarter.
Troubled Jumbo over London
Bing Bong. We would like to thank all our passengers for flying with us today, and remind you that if you spot Heathrow out of your window please make yourself known to the captain.
I guess I could crow bar this post into the “Disaster planning” category, but it’s just one of those things that begs to be talked about.
A jumbo jet, loosing power and altitude, decides to fly backwards and forwards over central London looking for a safe place to land?
I’m not joking. These are actual quotes from today’s Times:
The captain made a U-turn over Reading and - without the appropriate maps -
decided to head back to Heathrow, which he had spotted out of the window
earlier.
and:
The aircraft performed a series of sharp turns over Central London as it fought
to gain height before reaching Heathrow.
Read more at the Times Online
here.
A Web 2.0 entrepreneurial bubble?
Following my post
Online V’s Offline Entrepreneurs I have received a few messages about the possibility of a Web 2.0 bubble having formed. After digging around I’ve found quite a bit of commentary on the current state of play.
In a nutshell, Web 2.0 is made up of a group of technologies that make interactive applications and businesses possible via web delivery. For example, my restaurant company uses a Web 2.0 solution to deploy the financial, operational and personnel functions of the business online. My argument was that Web 2.0 has reduced the barriers to business for budding entrepreneurs, and therefore web businesses could provide a truer test of the entrepreneurial skill set than traditional business.
Now the theory being kicked about is that when barriers to entry become too low, and skills are abundant (web technology is maturing so there are plenty of experienced developers around), every man, woman and her dog sets up in business. Replication of ideas is huge, and there is an eventual crash.
Feeling is growing that a real entrepreneur bubble has developed. Blog posts such as
The Web 2.0 Entrepreneur Bubble are rife. It is certainly true that the “become a website entrepreneur and earn $xxx,xxx” stories are growing, and so to are comparisons with the Internet investment bubble of the late nineties.
I kind-of agree with this scenario, but things are very different this time around. Web 2.0 can deliver real solutions to real businesses. In the 1999-2002 internet bubble many web based businesses were fighting over a non-existent customer bases. The web is now a maturing business medium and customer bases are proven.
But to be honest none of this talk bothers me. At some point, whether it be by bubble burst or natural shakeout, Web 2.0 businesses will fail because they have been set up without a true understanding of their markets by people that lack the skills to succeed. This is exactly the test I was referring to. The businesses that remain will be spearheaded by entrepreneurs that have started their business with less capital, from a huge diversity of backgrounds, and that represent a truer picture of modern entrepreneurialism than in bricks and mortar businesses.
Geese it's getting heavy around here.
If you want to read further into this, I would rather bizarrely recommend you read my name sakes blog (no relationship as far as I know): Paul Fisher,
The coffee shops of Mayfair who goes into some detail on Web 2.0.
SEOsoftware.net sale heats up
I’m now finalising the sale of SEOsoftware.net. After hundreds of requests for information I have narrowed it down to a handful of serious buyers. I’ve put a deadline of Thursday for bids, and then it will be gone.
I really have mixed feelings about letting this site go. It really is such a great site and it’ll be strange to see it continue to grow under new ownership, but it will free up some resources and allow me to properly focus on the new projects.
I always preach to people that ‘sentiment has no place in business’, i.e. emotional decisions are not business decisions, but it is still difficult to let something go after you have brought it into the world and fiercely guarded its integrity. Yes, I sound like a total sap talking about a website as if it’s a member of the family, and yes, it is only a relatively small site, but when you’re the kind of person that throws yourself into everything you do the outcome will always be the same.
If I'm honest with myself I actually think that there isn’t enough emotion in business, and despite preaching to the contrary I often make quasi-sentimental decisions at work. Perhaps a topic for debate?
Jabberwocky Restaurants December GPM on target for 65%
I have finished the first round of number crunching for December. While sales were not as high as I would have liked, the GPM figure for December is currently calculated at 68%. I know this will come down a little as I am still expecting some invoices to come in, but we should be able to hit our target 65%.
This is excellent news. It means that our price adjustments, buying negotiations and new portioning look spot on – and that we will hit the 65% target for the first time - EXCELLENT!!!
On a negative note, we currently have several thousands of pounds of overdue catering invoices due to us that are starting to cause a real strain on cashflow. Every day I am chasing payment from these (usually) very reliable customers – I desperately need that money in the bank!!
Online V’s Offline Entrepreneurs
Having spent the Christmas holidays with my head firmly in Web 2.0, detailing my new web based businesses, I had a sharp reality alignment today when I took my new little daughter into the two restaurants to meet the staff and catch up with Nic.
Apart from the cooing and inevitable crying, I spent much of my time chatting to the staff about issues and problems that they had, and dealing with mistakes that had been made. It made me realise how different online and offline businesses can really be, and got me thinking about the differences between online and offline entrepreneurs. The web has significantly reduced the barriers into business. Think about it:
- It costs far less to establish a web based business than the average offline counterpart.
- Legal matters online seem to less of an obstacle to business. You can buy an established online business without even dealing with a solicitor / lawyer, and yet the offline business world is plagued by ancient legal practices.
- Businesses can be tested, closed, expanded and sold very quickly with relatively little risk.
- Staffing in the real world can be a nightmare. I would estimate that 30% of my entire productive work time is spend dealing with staff. In my online businesses, most people are paid for what they produce. Freelancing is commonplace, and workforces expand and contract with workflow.
With it being so much easier to establish an online business my guess would be that the range of web orientated entrepreneurs is larger. This is a good thing, as money, status and every other variable are eliminated from the mix. It is a greater test of true entrepreneurial flare, because the many that enter are reduced to the few that succeed.
So another cheer for the web! But alas it’s back to the real world for me. I have a series of phone calls to make to try and sort some of these staff problems before I can get some real work done.
Following Google into the web application age?
I was reading the
Jason Calcanis blog entry speculating about Google’s plans for 2006. He makes some pretty convincing arguments for the Google-to-desktop-and-office argument.
While I don’t agree that this will all occur in 2006 (think usability, think capacity, think the Google Analytics problems), what interest me is that Google might well be viewing this as a future business model.
One of my secret projects (now was it x or y?) is an online application that would replace a desktop program. The fact that Google and Microsoft are heading their businesses in this direction excites my entrepreneurial mind because the possibilities of this kind of application are almost limitless (think of the number of specialist software applications that could be deployed through the web). OK, this is old news, but it is the thought of Google making this model work that excites me, because they obviously consider advertising to be a viable source of funding.
There are interesting times ahead, but for now there are more mundane things to occupy my mind. New January promotions are need finalising for the restaurants, and I still have the all-important December sales to calculate and study…
I won on Euromillions
How cool. I have NEVER won anything on the lottery before, and then I went and got 3 numbers AND a lucky star on the £58 million EuroMillions lottery (06, 09, 26, 05). My winnings amounted to £16.10 which were promptly spend on a slap up dinner from Sainsbury's. Ahhh to be a winner...
SEOsoftware.net up for sale
It’s only the first week of January but already I’m struggling. There just isn’t enough time in the day for all the things that are currently burning a hole through my head.
Over the Christmas break I decided to sell SEOsoftware.net. Despite enjoying the revenue, the financial demands of two restaurants and a baby mean that I need some short term cash. I also need to free up some time for another couple of big projects I am planning.
Project x and y (let’s imaginatively call them) are both web based b2b applications that I just hear the market crying out for. They are really exciting projects, but I need the time to consolidate my plans and set about finding a team to get them off the ground.
So it has to be good-bye to SEOsoftware. I posted the site on Digital Point and SitePoint forums this week, and have been dealing with a barrage of questions ever since. I am hoping that a deal will be struck by the end of next week, and the site will be completely transferred by the end of the month.
Counting the Christmas costs
So Christmas is a distant memory and the business community is busy counting the costs, and profits, of the festive season. I will have to wait until next week before the final few cost figures are in before I can work out how Jabberwocky performed.
I didn’t escape the pressures of work over the break however. The Christmas post has delayed the payments of some of our larger corporate clients, and therefore some frantic phone calls to the bank were required to keep us on the straight and narrow.
Early signs are that Christmas was a mixed bag for the major retailers. The BBC have reported a pick up in sales
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3422499.stm, but I am more cautious. To me the high streets didn’t feel busy enough, and certainly our shops could have been busier. I look forward to the official stats later in the month.
Although I was expecting to have bumper sales at Jabberwocky, I had predicted that my web businesses would suffer in December. I was wrong. I sold a couple of hundred dollars worth of software on Christmas Day, which is strange considering we only sell b2b software.
Buncefield depo explosion : disaster planning?
Onto the hot topic of the day. Everyone in the UK will have been watching the pictures of the massive explosion and subsequent fires at the Buncefield fuel distribution depot. What an incredible sight of devastation. Even 90 or so miles away I have felt the effects. One of my affiliate programs run by ASOS (As Seen On Screen) had their warehouse right next to the fuel terminal. It looks as though the warehouse has been partially destroyed, and therefore the company has closed their website while they asses the damage. ASOS are a great business, and I do hope that they recover from this disaster. Year on year I read about the high number of businesses that have no emergency or disaster planning in place. The eternally optimistic entrepreneur will often overlook the what-ifs, but events like those at the Buncefield depo can provide a powerful impetus to review your plans.Read more about the explosions at the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4520430.stm
christmas all wrapped up
The end of another gruelling 18 hour day. Yep, that’s right – I was working at 8am and I’ll be finished at around 2am. Same again tomorrow…
But I’ve achieved a lot. Christmas is pretty much all wrapped up. The Christmas corporate catering menus have all been printed and sent, the shop promotions have been finalised and now we just have staff training to attend to (tomorrow). I always find it strange when I sit down in September, chuck on the Christmas music and start planning Christmas. But it’s worth it – a well planned December is highly lucrative.
We’ve seen some really good sales in both shops in the past week, so things are looking up…
high street trouble
More bad news for the UK high street. The Times (Saturday 5th November) reports that: the retail sector has been hardest hit by liquidations. In the second quarter total business liquidations were up 14% on last year, and that retail collapses were up 17.5%. The third quarter rise in liquidations was slightly higher, but the likelihood is that the proportion of those that were retailers was even higher.
Because I have been seeing this very real problem every day since January I am not taking the news lightly.The first step we have taken to safeguard Jabberwocky against economic downturn is to again focus on margins. It is tempting to slash prices when sales are falling to try and stimulate demand. To me however, this is very bad business. Not only do you run the risk of triggering a price war, you are locking yourself in to requiring more customers to cover your overheads. If customer numbers continue to fall, you are left unable to increase prices again, but unable to cover your costs. The proverbial rug is pulled from under your feet.Instead, we actually increase some prices, dropped a few low margin products and launched some high margin alternatives. This helps to ensure that even with a reduction in customer flow the better margins would enable us to cover spending. We have also re-focused on product quality, so that we don’t loose customers to those businesses that do choose to slash prices.We’ve also taken some larger decisions in order to consolidate our position. I have started the process of shedding some assets in order to clear the majority of our debts. Eliminating loan repayments and interest charges is a major factor in this decision, although the majority of the funds will be used to expand our higher margin operations.I really feel for retail business owners at the moment. There is nothing better that watching your sales increase, and nothing worse than watching them diminish. All I can say is that the shoppers will return, eventually, and we just need to knuckle down and ride it through the best was we can. This is not the time to be making rash decisions and silly mistakes, so think clearly – and for the longer term!
UK affiliates hit £1 billion
SEO Software produces me a nice little income from affiliate commissions, but someone is doing REALLY well! I picked up this story from the Success Alert blog. According the an E-Consultancy Report the total sales generated by UK affiliates in 2005 will reach £2.35 billion.Now at my average commission rate of 25% per sale, I make it £337.5 million owed to me. Deduct tax at 40% (in the higher rate tax band ) and I'm left with £202.5 million.Yes please...
left brain | right brain
Being a Psychology graduate I’ve always been in what psychological traits make up the a-typical entrepreneur. Now I know that it takes all kinds of people to fulfil all kinds of roles, and that entrepreneurialism can take many guises, but what I’m interested in is the person who risks everything in pursuit of a dream – and actually makes it happen. I don’t consider board room type suits to be entrepreneurs in any sense of the word. To me an entrepreneur is someone creative, someone with vision, someone who can deliver, and someone that doesn’t let anything get in the way. So many people have asked me what kind of salary I earn from my businesses. My reply is “what salary?”. I take what I need to survive, and the rest grows my business. Anyone who is motivated by a nice healthy pay packet when drawing up a business plan should chuck it in the bin and go work for IBM.Back to the point. So I was looking at Stephen Davies PR Blog this morning (http://www.prblogger.com) reading about the Right Brain Left Brain online checker. What a cool little tool. So I took the test and found that my left brain is severely defective. Here’s my score:Right Brain 76% Left Brain 18% I am right brain dominant. To be honest I knew this already, but this tool confirmed it nicely. The site described me as:Right brain dominant individuals are more visual and intuitive. They are better at summarizing multiple points, picking up on what's not said, visualizing things, and making things up. They can lack attention to detail, directness, organization, and the ability to explain their ideas verbally, leaving them unable to communicate effectively.
Now many of these skills are great for an entrepreneur, except for the lack of attention and communication bits. It would certainly fit the description of many famous serial entrepreneurs, but I wonder whether it is a more general thing. Are entrepreneurs right brain dreamers?Who knows? I’m sure there’s some study that’s been done but frankly I'm board already :)
strange behaviour
You never know what strange things people are going to do. I drove past one of our shops today and saw that it was closed. Thinking that the staff had forgotten to change the clocks, I immediately pulled over and called them.Oh no, it’s just they were breaking down boxes out the back, and so they decided to lock the door while the shop was unattended.?Talking about strange behaviour at work reminds me of a post I read on the Monster Blog. I've always liked Monster as a company. Maybe it's because both they and Jabberwocky have a monster for a logo. Ours is a little more stylised, and theirs is a little more realistic, but I'm sure they're cousins none the less. Today I have been chained to the pc. My first task was to sort out the design of this blog – I’m getting there. We’ve also had a load of buffet orders in for the shops, and I’ve been going through the sales from SEO Software.Also, last night I added Google AdSense to a select number of pages on SEO Software. I was please this morning to see that I earned $2 yesterday – not a bad start!It’s funny how small numbers like that can excite you! I’m a regular at the SitePoint Forums, and the guys there love to compare daily profits. In fact it’s a pretty inspiring place to chat. Tyler Cruz is an interesting guy to read up on. Take a look at his latest major posting here, or take a look at his personal blog
october retail sales woes
Views are mixed about how retail sales performed in the UK during October, but consensus is that it still isn’t looking pretty. As a very small business I thought that retail sales trends would have little effect on us. Was I wrong! I now keep an ear to the floor and my eyes on the official stats to give me an idea of where our sales will go.One of our shops is located bang on the high street. Our core customers are the retail staff, and when retailers are slow they don’t need as many staff! A poor sales trend set in last December, which turned out to be a pretty dismal Christmas across the board. In the 10 month since sales have been down. In a survey by Bloomberg, 42% of retailers have seen a fall on sales on October 2004 (). This certainly reflects what we have experienced with our high street store.However, analysts Footfall have been recording increasing numbers of shoppers. Last week they recorded a large rise in the numbers of shoppers – although still not beating 2004 figures. Strangely we have experienced exactly the same patter. Last week our high street shop saw the strongest sales since March – still not quite at the level of 2004 but getting close.
Moral of this story? National statistics and trends are generalised but can be a valuable tool to help a small businesses to plan ahead.
Let’s all hope for a busy Christmas! That reminds me, must get Christmas menus to the printers...
a bit of history
I’m 28, and have been since April. In my 28 years I’ve managed to start-up and sell and website marketing business, opened two small sandwich bars, settle down and marry a beautiful woman and father a shiny new baby. Not bad, but there’s much more to come!OK, let take it right back. I’m at University in Northampton studying Psychology (yes, it IS a science – my degree says BSc), but I don’t know what I want to do. I get this vague idea that I’d like to open a fast food restaurant – because I’m a vegetarian and no fast food places at the time were very welcoming to my kind!So I graduate, it’s 1999, and the first thing I think my planned restaurant will need is a website (because the internet was BIG news back in 1999!). So I register a domain name, and then set about learning how to make a website.Over the next few months I developed my restaurant business plan, and developed my free webspace alongside it. In fact, I got pretty good at html coding, but more importantly at how to get visitors for my new site. For about a year my website was at the top of the search engine result pages for a ton of keywords, and soon I began receiving requests from businesses on how to optimise positions for them.So my first business was born, and the restaurants hit the back burner. Traffikka only ever employed two people from the back room of a rented house, but was a cracking business. I learned many fundamental business skills back in those days, such as the importance of cashflow, but despite having some household names for clients, my heart wasn’t in it. I strung out the sale of the business for over a year, selling off chunks of clients at a time. This was a mistake, and for my efforts I only walked away with about £15,000, but by then I had raised enough money and won sufficient support from the bank manager to open my first restaurant in the glorious midlands city of Leicester. It was September 2003, I was 26, and life was great!So there I was. We had hired our manager and our staff and were ready to open. We started on day one with a zero bank balance – just waiting to receive those millions.Shock! Within one month we were £6,000 overdrawn. The shop was loosing over £1,000 per week, and something had to be done. Our immediate reaction was to go on a sales drive – which worked! Sales soared, but over the next year the restaurant continued to loose money. After a year or so we had all worked our fingers to the bone – and yet we had nothing to show for it. Something wasn’t quite right, and I set about uncovering the problem. Our customers loved us – of course they did, we were selling our products too cheaply. The fact was that out of every £1 we earned in that first year, 60p was going directly to our suppliers. A restaurant should make a gross profit of at least 60% (that is profit after food and packaging is taken away). We were making 40% - leaving too little money to pay the staff, rent, rates, electricity etc…What a culture shock. With Traffikka I never had to worry about maintaining margins, but now margins became my life. Every cost had to be reduced, every item of food, drink or packaging had to be at the lowest price possible, and every sale price had to be calculated correctly. I will be going into more detail on the points in the coming months, because these things occupy many of my working days, but for now let’s just say it was one steep learning curve.It began to dawn on me that even when the margins were correct, we weren’t going to be making much money. After the wages were removed our profit would be (at best) around £4,000 per year. I needed a way to reduce our costs further, while at the same time increase sales.Answer = shop 2. In the summer of 2004 we found the perfect shop for sale. It was much bigger than the first premises, had a small bakery attached, a flat above that could be rented, and plenty of space to base our newly formed corporate catering business from. Perfect! So in October 2004 I embarked on a second fund raising episode that would finance our expansion and create the beginnings of our restaurant chain!
and so we begin...
Why on earth am I setting up a blog page? I have a restaurant business to run, an online business that I need to keep afloat PLUS a six week old baby and wife to take care of! This is a serious question. Am I being selfish, vain, insane? Well, for some time now I’ve been reading a US blog that has inspired me both inside and outside my professional life. This blog is written by company CEO who has just sold his business for $25 million, and it is an absolute inspiration. Take a look for yourself. Now, his industry is quite different to mine, and so I set about looking for a UK based blogger who might talk about things closer to home – namely the food business, internet businesses as well as general life stuff.I drew a blank.So I thought why not. Maybe I will help someone. I’ve always wanted to help people to make the leap into business, but always thought I was too young and inexperienced to be of value. Perhaps by documenting my trial-and-error approach to learning and development I might help other to avoid making my mistakes.Making this information available to the world at large is a pretty sobering prospect. Yes, my competition can read about my exploits but that doesn’t really bother me. I'm better than them, period.On to my blog mission / manifesto.1) For a period of 12 months I intend to post my daily activities and thoughts. I am hoping to post at least 2 or 3 days per week. If I make 12 months, then I might never stop!2) My posts will be honest. They will reflect my life as it is lived. I will not embellish or conceal.3) Sometimes I get pissed off, I judge people and things, and act irrationally. This is just my opinion – and I might be WRONG!
Every project reaches a do-or-die moment. Has the venture gain enough support? Are the figures looking viable? Is it time to pull the plug?
So its official, we people in retail land had a bumper Christmas – the best since 2001. According to the British Retail Consortium, like-for-likes were up 2.6% on 2004, showing the biggest monthly gain since May 2004.
Onto the hot topic of the day. Everyone in the UK will have been watching the pictures of the massive explosion and subsequent fires at the Buncefield fuel distribution depot. What an incredible sight of devastation. Even 90 or so miles away I have felt the effects. One of my affiliate programs run by ASOS (As Seen On Screen) had their warehouse right next to the fuel terminal. It looks as though the warehouse has been partially destroyed, and therefore the company has closed their website while they asses the damage. ASOS are a great business, and I do hope that they recover from this disaster. Year on year I read about the high number of businesses that have no emergency or disaster planning in place. The eternally optimistic entrepreneur will often overlook the what-ifs, but events like those at the Buncefield depo can provide a powerful impetus to review your plans.
Because I have been seeing this very real problem every day since January I am not taking the news lightly.
Views are mixed about how retail sales performed in the UK during October, but consensus is that it still isn’t looking pretty. As a very small business I thought that retail sales trends would have little effect on us. Was I wrong! I now keep an ear to the floor and my eyes on the official stats to give me an idea of where our sales will go.
