4178 days ago
Jonathon Straight is CEO of AIM listed Straight PLC (STT). He is a reader of this blog, a good man and the owner of the most amazing moustache. He wrote about how the banks and the big 4 accountancy firms have done their utmost to roger his firm on his personal blog a week or so ago. That post has now disappeared. Odd that. His tale is shocking and shows that all the Government huff and puff about forcing the banksters to lend to small businesses (SMEs) is sheer poppycock. Jonathon writes:
I haven’t posted anything to this site for almost a year. The truth is I haven’t felt much like writing. I have been dealing with a problem for the past 18 months or so which has taken all of my time and energy. At times I have not believed what I have been seeing or hearing. It feels like a bad dream that I have just woken up from. The way that our bankers and their advisors have behaved has left me dumbfounded.
None of us in business has any protection from this coterie and it is high time that effective regulation was applied and that the cosy relationship between the big four audit firms and the big banks was properly dealt with.
4294 days ago
The latest article on Small business tips from me in SME online website 24n.biz is live:
It was a rather humbling experience. Our restaurant has an enormous flag above it. It is painted a bright red. Even Stevie Wonder could not help but notice it. Or so we thought. And so we strolled into the local printers shop 300 yards away from Clerkenwell’s Real Man Pizza Company. restaurant and asked if they could drop off the posters back at our place later. Where are you? Really? I had never noticed you?
Jeepers the restaurant has been there for 45 years. Under its current name and design it has been there for two years. And there is a potential customer – an admitted lover of Italian food – working three hundred yards away who does not know that we exist. We joked about it but it is a very serious point.
It is all very well for you to plan to grow your business by tapping into new markets or reaching out to potential new customers but those should be steps three and four. Step one is ensuring that your existing customers are happy and trying to tap them for a bit more business. In the restaurant game that means persuading the odd extra one to have a coffee after the meal or perhaps to have a pudding – surely our new spaghetti all chocolate must tempt you? But it is the same in every business: you easiest sell is to an existing customer.
4313 days ago
My weekly Small business (SME) tips column from 24n.biz starts, as ever, close to home. There are some who dismiss Facebook and twitter as a complete waste of space when it comes to marketing. There are others who swear by new media. I wonder. For what it is worth I offer a few observations based on my own experience of trying to persuade more folks to try to come to the quirkiest Celtic Italian restaurant in Clerkenwell, London – the Real Man Pizza Company.
