then please give me a call because I know some great accountants in the Midlands area who provide services like BC Stockford do.
If you are looking for advice on things like Taxation, VAT Returns, Payroll Services, Business Services and Inheritance Tax I have considerable experience in this area and many contacts in the Midlands.
Call me direct on 07881 500002
then please give me a call as I am now looking at the future strategy of both companies and would like to talk directly with all customers and prospects.
It is vital that we get our future strategy right and to do that I need to talk directly with you.
Please call Chris on 07881 500002
Who is Chris Windley, multi-millionaire entrepreneur and Mergers and Acquisitions specialist.
Chris wants to get in touch directly with all customers and explain his strategy for the company for the future.
Under Chris’s guidance Aardvark Engineering will set on a new course and before this strategy is outlined he wants to talk to all Aardvark customers.
Call Chris directly on 07881 500002 as he is keen to hear your views.
When I started LanSwitch ( which became Voyager ) in the early 90’s I set aside a bedroom for an office and on my desk I had a telephone, a fax machine and a laptop ( initially not connected to the Internet , later connected with a dial-up connection ) with Office and a Contact Manager application and a printer. Luxury, I thought because it was the same as I had at Fibernet and much better than I had at Memorex.
My target market was basically: Companies that had busy Local Area Networks; that were in either The Midlands ( where I lived ) or London ( where I could easily commute to and knew people ). So, I basically targeted a combination of London based Financials and other general companies in London and the Midlands. I think I bought the Computer Users Yearbook as my basic database. ( Actually a very comprehensive and detailed source of information ).
I went through the process of identifying a target market and building a database of prospects and suspects many times over during my sales and business start-up career.
Typically now I will segment by horizontal ( size of company ), vertical ( type of company ) and geographical ( location ) and then various other factors eg structure of company, people within that company eg IT Managers etc etc.
Then a database can be purchased which is targeted and therefore typically lower cost than purchasing 1000’s of contacts many of which are not within your target market.
There are many database suppliers these days so it is possible to get some great offers on targeted data.
The equipment side has obviously come on in 17 years but not incredibly so - broadband and wi-fi; scanning software and fax software; CRM versus Contact Management; softphones ( eg Skype ) and video conferencing ( Skype, Webex etc ); standalone traditional and IP phones;printers.
Where there has been enormous progress has been in Internet search and Social Network Marketing.
If you know what vertical you want to concentrate on eg Lawyers in Staffordshire you will find much of the information that you need online via Google or some other search engine.
With great timing ( !! ) I have just been reading this article about Linkedin
http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/24/technology/linkedin_social_networking.fortune/
that I picked up on Twitter ( posted by Jon Besag who is in sales at Linkedin 
This is well worth a read for many reasons.
This article includes comments about in house and external recruiters using Linkedin to find the people that they/thier clients are looking for . There certainly are a lot of recruiters on Linkedin - in fact when I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is a Linkedin trainer he told me that there were about 68,000 people on Linkedin who called themselves recruiters ( I just did a Linkedin search for ” Recruiters ” and got about 48,000 ) and that there were probably about 100,000 because a lot of recruiters did not call themselves recruiters.
I used this fact recently to help a company that I am working with, who are selling multi job board posting software, to target recruiters. From a small, personalised ” mailshot ” to selected Linkedin recruiters we got a few very positive responses and made a proposal to one within a week and got an order from it.
Recruitment is an obvious thing to do on Linkedin but as said in the article ” The obvious one is jobs, but it’s not just jobs. It’s also clients and services.”
For me the goal is to make a ” personalised ” approach to potential clients and ” personalisation ” requires research. The difference between what you can do now and what you could do 17 years ago is that you can gather far more information on people and companies before you make any approach whatsoever.
If you combine a targeted database with internet and social media search then you have a fantastic tool to help you personalise your ” intelligent ” marketing and sales approach.
If you are a member of eg Ecademy, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed,Skype or MSN then each of these have thier own search facilities - some more sophisticated than others.
Just today I was asking someone how they prospected on the Internet and they said Linkedin, Skype and MSN.
Using a combination of Internet search and Social/Business networks you can find out an awful lot about people and companies.
I was just Googling around when I came apon this link:
http://www.fasttrack.co.uk/fasttrack/leagues/dbDetails.asp?siteID=1&compID=675&yr=1998
If I remember correctly Voyager was in the Fast Track 100 about 3 years running.
Having acquired Spider Networks in 1996 we were growing at a phenomenal rate with 1998, 1999 and 2000’s turnover getting up to around £13 Million.
By 1998 we were heading for an exit in around 1999. Of course this turned out to be one of the best decisions of our lives because of the dot com crash in March 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
Whilst Voyager was growing in the period of the dot.com Boom it never was a dot.com company. Actually it was what was referred to at that time as a ” Bricks and Mortar ” company. That is to say that we had real revenue and real profits and we provided the infrastructure for what we called ” Large and Medium Sized Businesses ” ( LAMBs ). Voyager Networks was a Corporate Value Added Reseller ( V.A.R. ) and Voyager Internet was a Corporate Internet Service Provider ( C.I.S.P. ).
In the above Wikipedia description of the Dot Com Boom it is interesting to note the difference between what Cisco did and what Nortel did. ( Voyager was almost solely a Cisco reseller and a Gold Cisco Partner ) Not only did this ensure the survival of Cisco after the dot com crash but also it’s survival and prosperity through the recent recession
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-2000s_recession
At the outset of the recession I believe that Cisco had about $28 Billion in cash reserves.
The mentality in the 90’s for most dotcom’s was expanding their customer base as rapidly as possible, even if it produced large annual losses. It was:
Think big, Start big ( Spend loads ), Move fast.
The mantra for today, post the dotcom crash and the recent recession is:
Think big, Start small ( Spend as little as you can ), Move fast.
John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco has another mantra aswell:
Visualise, Strategise, Execute.
This was actually how we did things at Voyager in the 90’s - We thought very big ( as Nigel used to like to say ” Punching above our weight ” ), we strategised about how we could achieve our goals, we executed our strategy in a low cost way and we moved very fast.
That, for example is how we built The Voyager National Network and became a Managed Network Services Provider long before it was fashionable to do so.
Nostalgia is actually pretty well what it used to be - to me anyway.
Cisco phone systems provider Poundbury Systems ( http://www.poundbury.com/ Telephone - 01305 259849 ) is providing futuristic phone and video conferencing systems for Dorset based Small and Medium Businesses under the banner ” Futureline “.
Awareness of the installation of High Speed Fibre Optic networks in Dorset has been raised by eg http://www.dorsetforyou.com/broadband and http://www.teamdorset.org.uk/Business/Broadband-Survey?pgid=153 and Poundbury Systems is building on this awareness by offering local businesses low entry cost phone and video conferencing systems from Cisco Systems
( N.B. BT and Cisco are sponsors of the 2012 Olympics ).
Poundbury Systems are offering a package that will provide Small and Medium Businesses with a phone and web conferencing facility starting at
only £99 per month.
Cisco and Poundbury are thinking ahead to the time when Dorsets roads will be full of people heading to and from Weymouth and Portland and the Sailing Olympics and also thinking back to the recent winter months when snow prevented travel around Dorset.
For many reasons we need to ensure that we can conduct business irrespective of whether we are physically at a place or not. Of course there is always a need to meet people in person but many of the business discussions that we have can be conducted via email, phone, video conferencing and the Internet.
If we prepare for extreme road or weather conditions then this is a basis for a high speed, resilient, reliable communications system.
It is also the basis for a ” Digital Dorset ” which will encourage inward investment and migration.
Poundbury Systems phone and video conferencing systems is flexible and scalable - phones can be added incrementally - one or two at a time and at very low cost.
Call Clare on 01305 259849
to discuss your requirements in more detail.
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Hot on the heels of Andrew Sage, VP Small Business Systems in the U.S., tweeting that Cisco and Wholesale Hosted voip provider NGT had been awarded ” Product of the year ” from Internet Telephony magazine “ for Outstanding SMB Service Innovation in Collaboration with Cisco “
http://www.ngt.com/news/?presspager=104&arc=&yr=2009&my=
it was announced that NGT had been acquired by Comcast for an ” undisclosed sum “. ( The announcement was in the small print of the first release aswell )
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/att/comcast-does-wholesale-voip—buys-ngt.html
There’s a number of interesting aspects of this:
1. Some time ago Cisco started partnering with Hosted Voip providers in the U.S. and the U.K. Some of these partners used front ended Call Manager at the core but Cisco also partnered with ” competitor ” platforms. This seemed a little strange until you realised that a lot of Cisco endpoints were getting shipped by these customers - in NGT’s case ” 150,000+ IP endpoints under management ” and the bundle provided used “ Cisco SPA 500 Series IP Phones “. ” NGT is ( ??? ) the largest provider of wholesale hosted IP Telephony Communication solutions in the U.S. and NGT enables leading VARs, MSOs, Service Providers and Agents to provide nationwide, managed IP communication services to their customers through its proven channel ready solutions “. So NGT had an indirect model. It had sold to a number of ” Telcos “.
2. This might kick off a bit of a ” land grab ” as Telco’s realise that they have to have Hosted Voip in their portfolio. This applies to the U.S. and the U.K.
3. There are a number of Hosted Voip players in the U.K. - a couple using front ended Call Manager; others using a ” competitor ” core but Cisco endpoints and others using neither.
Watch this space because it is going to get pretty wild !!
This article in The Times on Saturday
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7043146.ece
shows how much progress Cisco Systems has made during the global downturn.
Although it’s market capitalisation is well down on the boom times it’s market share is up to 85% !!
Many of it’s old competitors are virtually dead now - Nortel, Lucent etc etc
Having just provided the network for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics it is now gearing up to do the same for the 2012 Olympics in the U.K.
A friend of mine Evert Bopp is pulling together a team and equipment to help re-establish communications in Haiti.
If you know anyone that can help here is the list of equipment that they need:
http://haiti-connect.org/what-do-we-need/
Please pass this on to anyone who you think may be able to help or may know anyone that can help.
Thank you.
