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.

One of the challanges here is getting the staff to remember to get the customers to fill in the bit of the form, that we give people when they book in for rooms, which says ” Where did you hear about us ?? ”

It is something that you have to remember to do when you are busy doing other things and you have to remember to look at that specific part of the form and make sure that it is answered.

Sometimes you just have to remind the customer gently and help them to fill it in - not that it is complicated it’s just that they often skip it. ( Note to self - maybe put it at the top of the form and maybe add an incentive !! ).

So anyway, now to the results:

Approximately 30% of our room bookings are unknown for the reasons outlined above but I suspect that a lot of them are internet based bookings.

Approx. 30% definately come from the Internet.

Approx. 30% definately are Word of Mouth.

Approx. 10% are repeat customers.

We definately get the odd few people who see the roadsigns and come up ( or down ) the lane to find us. We also get a few bookings from The Good Pub Guide.

In short the efforts that we put into Internet Marketing and ensuring that people have a great experience when they visit The Glan pay off.

then St Leonards House in Wychnor ( near to Alrewas, Lichfield, Barton under Needwood and Burton on Trent ) has a resident Registered General Nurse and Registered Midwife who provides these services by appointment for residents and non-residents.

Included within the Facials are facepacks and massage and the Swedish Body Massage is offered.

Telephone 01283 791077 and ask for Pam.

Website: http://www.st-leonards-house.co.uk/default.html

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.

As a former Royal Navy Officer ( Weapons Electrical Engineer ) and with my father and stepfather in the Royal Air Force and mum’s brothers in the Welsh Guards it seemed appropriate to be able to offer rooms, bed and breakfast to people attending the National Memorial Arboretum at St Leonards House ( http://www.st-leonards-house.co.uk/bedandbreakfast.html ).

As it happens the National Memorial Arboretum has been massively successful - if successful is the right word for a place of mourning.

St Leonards House is just across the A38 from the Arboretum, not quite walking distance - although you certainly could do it - but a very short car ride.

No doubt visitors to St Leonards House will also be interested in the information that we have about HMS Barham and the story of Harry Dooling, a stoker, second class whose mum worked at Wychnor Hall and who went down on the Barham at the tender age of 18 and who is buried in Wychnor Church next door.

There is a beautiful view from the Church yard over to Cannock Chase.

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.

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.

http://www.birmingham-airport-guide.co.uk/