The Blog of an Entrepreneur

I’ve been given the opportunity to get involved in another forum with a business owner who I help mentor occasionally. The guy is John Whitehead and he is a club fitter who runs a company called Strike Right Golf.

It came about during a typical coaching sessions (he was giving me some golf tips and I was giving him some business tips), and was mentioned that he gets a reasonable amount of technical queries from his website but not a lot of business. The conversation moved towards building a community about his website, to get people discussing golf and referring to his website on a daily basis. The end result would be people would be looking at Strike Right Golf to discuss anything golf related.

This then created another problem, would people refer to a club makers website to get independant advice relating to golf? So I took a look at Callaway’s forum and it would appear not. They have a forum and it see’s no more action than .. well something that doesn’t see much action :-). The same goes for so many other business websites who try to set up communities around their core product, it just doesn’t work.

We’ve decided that the best approach is to use a lesson I learnt from UK Business Forums, and set a brand up in it’s own right and promote it in it’s own right. His business will then benefit from being associated with it, be that by sponsoring or just being on hand to give professional advice. I know on UKBF I became known as the only choice for company formation and John will become known as the only choice for golf club fitting on these soon to be announced golf forums.

So here we go again, workers for the Royal Mail are sealing their own fate, their own redundancy, and pushing Royal Mail out of business by going on yet another strike.

News on the radio says that many small businesses are at risk of going out of business due to lost trade brought about by the strikes, and the Royal Mail have put measures in place to ensure they cannot be held liable for consequencial losses brought about by the strike.

The whole situation is stupid and the half whitted union pushing for these strikes really need their head looking at. Do they not realise that business owners such as myself and many others are finding alternative mail delivery services? We already use The DX, but not surprisingly The DX are really jumping with joy and courting disgruntled Royal Mail customers and winning.

All this union are going to achieve lost revenue for Royal Mail who are then going to have no choice but to make a load of redundancies. So a large number of these workers going on strike today will be out of the job soon, and it will be their own fault. It is not as if they are underpaid for working half a day!

I moved house last week, and anyone who has gone through this painful process will know just how painful it actually is. Maybe not for your first move, but when your family is a bit larger with 2 kids and all the gadgets, toys and generally extra belongings that go with being married with 2 children it becomes a complete military operation that requires pin-point planning!

Combine that with being self employed, working on two new business projects, and having a key member of staff on long term sick, let’s just say I am ever so glad that it is over … or is it! I’d only forgotten to tell anybody that we were actually moving. The electricity company, the water, the gas, Sky, the bank, TV Licence, the DVLA, no-one knew we were moving.

Do you ever see something and wish you’d thought of it? Well I have, iammoving.com is quite simply a brilliantly simple idea and has saved me hours of time.  All I had to do is click on the organisations I want to notify about our move, fill in my account or reference details with that organisation, and then click Notify. Then depending on whether iammoving.com has an electronic agreement with the company or not it either sends my new address information to that company or creates a PDF for me to print out and put in the post. Best of all, so far it seems to be working!

What I really love about this idea though is not that it actually does save you time, or put everything in one place, but that it is such a simple no-brainer idea. The technology behind the website is extremely simple that any good web designer could knock it together in less than a week, it puts all the control on to the user so that the website actually does very little. The updates are sent to the organisations that are on board most likely by email so a simple email script. It is brilliant, so brilliant by its simplicity.

Let’s hope that more organisations sign up to be notified electronically by this website and then we can save time, costs, and the enviroment at the same time.