Chris A Watkins - Business

It all looks good on paper. Your product or service is up there with the competition, you can fend off new entrants to the marketplace, the demand is stable and your suppliers are solid. Then it happens. Profits start to fall. You may have seen it coming. If you’re on the ball you will have identified the threat. The cause may be legislative changes for employers, or increasing legal protection costs, or the need for increased customer support. The crunch may even stem from something as simple as a key member of staff leaving your employ. Yes, we’re talking about that ever-present bane of business – Overheads. In the face of increasing costs, profit margins can be sustained in only three ways – 1. Increased product price – could be death to your competitive edge. 2. Decrease in quality or professionalism – while the process may take a little longer, this will kill you just as surely as pricing yourself out of the market. 3. Increased efficiency. No prizes for guessing th...

Only four years after Sen. Inhofe (R-Okla) attempted to label Global Warming as a hoax the business world seems to have embraced environmental sustainability so thoroughly that 'green' has become the new 'black' in marketing. Intel, AMD, VMware, Microsoft and many others have developed green facets to their advertising. The motor manufacturers have become so enthusiastic in boasting environmental claims that their advertising is now being labeled as potentially misleading. While it could be assumed that the marketing gurus are more in touch with the public mood than the politicians, it wouldn't do to forget that many of the products being advertised in this manner were under development well before Sen. Inhofe's amazing gaff. That being the case, it may also be assumed that the features so enthusiastically touted as green aspects were designed with completely different motives in mind. Certainly, in computer manufacture, the new quad processors from Intel and AM...

It’s your dream team. Everything is in place, all they need is a little bit more tweaking and they’ll be perfect. Then it happens. Somebody hands in their notice and leaves. And it’s not just the loss of one individual. It’s the strain on the others as they try to make up the shortage. Recruitment takes time. Get by that and it’s followed by even more stress as the newbie takes up more resources in the training phase. Even when it’s all done, you know the adjustments will keep them below peak performance for several months. That’s the period when other team members begin complaining about the extra work load and start to look around at other jobs. Control is easy. You just use the good old disciplinary process. Fine tuning a team is harder with many more plates to juggle. People are just plain unpredictable, or are they? Recent research by Gallup Consulting reveals a pretty convincing case for active engagement of employees, claiming that engaged employees are – More profitable More cu...

Gaining an increase in market share may become necessary for a number of reasons. You may need to shift focus from one product line to another in the face of a declining market, you may wish to expand to fend off a market place squeeze or you may just be growing towards your planned capacity. Whatever the reason, you will need to form an acquisition strategy. There are three ways to obtain an increase in market share – Earn it. Use competitive trading to buy it. Acquire a competitor. Each of the three approaches bring along its own strategy requirements and its own issues. Selecting the best approach depends entirely on circumstance. Outperform the competition. Earning market share by supplying a better product, better service, better support, better delivery is an honorable way of expanding a customer base. It is steady, progressive and undemanding in that production/purchasing is not subject to stresses caused by sudden up-shifts in supply/delivery. Even so, there are issues. Attaini...

Many young companies reach a point in development where growth is seriously slowed by lack of funds. Finding the best way forward can be difficult and a wrong choice can be disastrous. The term angel investor was originally coined in show business where it was applied to a wealthy individual who would take the risk of privately backing a Broadway show when conventional funding failed to materialise. Today the label is commonly applied to describe an individual who invests private wealth in a business. Nearly a quarter of a million angel investors are currently estimated to be providing around three billion pounds to UK business each year. The cumulative pool of investment from this quarter stands at around twelve billion pounds, a figure that exceeds all UK venture capital lending and is equal to a full seven percent of the total UK bank business lending. A very clear indication of just how much UK business craves growth funding sourced from the private sector. As a group, angel invest...

Use of computer movie elements in your training program offers a very significant method of cost reduction. Computer movies – What are they? How can they help your business? How do they work? What are they? Usually in the form a Flash program, a computer movie displays a series of actions on the screen to show a viewer the steps needed to complete a process. The important word here is ‘show’. People extract fully eighty percent of information from the visual and only twenty percent from words spoken or written. By showing the trainee what is required, rather than listing the requirements in an instruction, the lesson is better and more quickly learned. Movies can be interactive, that is they can be made to pause and wait for input from the viewer. This input can cause the movie software to feed back corrective information, or take a different branch down a diagnostics path, or be stored for analysis of user input. In addition to the animation, informational slides or interactive questi...

Every employer has experienced it. You spend time on the selection and recruitment, you take care over the training and grooming, you commit resources and fine tune the individuals to turn them into superb representatives of the company. Answering the telephones just so, supporting their teams and the customers in just the same way you would if you did everything yourself. Then they leave. It’s not that they’re ungrateful, just that someone else is offering more money, better prospects, they want to move away, or start a family. The net result is always the same – You Lose. Okay, the wise employer always builds the cost of recruitment and training into the strategy and usually that helps. Yet too often the parting of the ways happens at the times you least need it. Times when you are already pressed because your competitors have the edge on you, or, when other staff are sick, or when budgets are tight. Even if there were no pressures, unlikely in today’s business climate, you still hav...

Could wind power be a viable alternative to conventional methods of power generation? The UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair has recently said - "We are not going to be able to make up through wind farms all the deficit on nuclear power," Yet, if looked at from a slightly different perspective, wind power may already be a viable alternative - the link below is a web page where you can buy your own domestic wind turbine. http://www.diy.com/diy/jsp/bq/nav/nav.jsp?action=detail&fh_secondid=9414908&fh_location=%2f%2fcatalog01%2fen_GB&fh_search=wind+power&fh_eds=%c3%9f&fh_refview=search&ts=1180379362679&isSearch=true It produces around 1Kw at moderate wind speeds and costs around 1500GBP. Okay, so it’s not cost effective, but it is a step along the road. The manufacturer and retailer must believe they have a market. If they have, the unit cost will fall as sales rise. Once competition gets hold, the performance of equipment from alternative suppliers will i...

A question asked on a business forum recently set me thinking. The question was – Your thoughts on the best invention of the last ten years? Try as I might I can’t come up with any single thing that fits the bill. Many other people suggested Broadband, Mobile telephone developments and improvements in the personal computer, some even suggested that search engines were of the highest order of importance. The problem is that none of these were invented in the last ten years. Probably the biggest single step has been the availability of Broadband access, but while the services to provide this are new, the technology certainly isn’t. DSL (as in ADSL) has been around since nineteen forty-eight. Up until around ten years ago it was just too expensive to deploy on a large scale basis. At that point in time a major step was made in the advancement of Very-large-scale integration (VLSI). This is another technology that has been around for a considerable period of time, but the late nineties saw...

Founded circa 300bc, the Great Library of Alexandria was the most famed literary repository of the ancient world. In the U.S., In 1731, Ben Franklin and others founded America's first free-lending library, the Library Company of Philadelphia. Today, it is asked, would the concept of establishing (not maintaining, but establishing) a library pass the muster of local municipalities. Would municipalities be in favor of buying tremendous quantities of books, tapes, CDs and newspapers, and lend them out at no cost through facilities scattered throughout a widespread geographic area? I hesitated for a long time before starting to try and answer this question. I don’t think that the establishment of libraries at municipal level is equal to the task. I believe that municipal branches of a national, or better yet, a world library would do a much finer job. Knowledge dissemination is a function we humans excel at. It alone places us apart from any animal species with which we share this plan...

On an environmental note. Are there any generally available alternatives to the petrol powered piston engine? There are many viable alternative fuels for the piston engine, but non are generally available. Since the sixties automotive manufacturers and independent engineers have developed and tested prototype alternate fuels, many with really encouraging results. One alternative, hydrogen, has gained some stock reasons for its failure to gain support and acceptance. No distribution network. Fear of explosion. At the time of automotive industry testing of this fuel, tests were similarly carried out with LPG. This fuel also had no bulk distribution network and was also more volatile than petrol. For safe handling both of these fuels require a robust fuel tank. In Europe LPG gained acceptance and promotion and is now widely available, hydrogen didn’t. Interestingly, LPG is produced by the same companies that produce petrol and diesel as it is a by-product of that process. More interesting...

I was recently asked – “Why aren’t you selling your knowledge?” In fact I’ve sold knowledge for more years than I care to count. Usually the sale is in a form where the knowledge is a part of the package I bring to bear in the course of fulfilling a professional role. Through the offices of ffox Software Ltd, I have also traded services as an advisor based on my knowledge and experience. How knowledge dissemination is delivered always depends on the needs of both the seller and the buyer at the point of the trade. Other than day to day purchase of professional advice in areas of accountancy, law, medicine and (in some cases) IT, my experience is that the purchase of knowledge is often a course of action pursued by buyers who seek a ‘magic carpet’ solution to an issue that has not been clearly identified or defined. The thing I find strange is that the purchase of knowledge is often fuelled by fear. So what fears drive the potential purchasers of knowledge to the point where they seek s...

Knowledge – the ultimate resource? I can’t argue with that. As a writer I’m in the business of providing knowledgebase elements. I take my own experience and that of others, I then turn it into some form of written document that may be understood and acted upon by the intended audience. Quote from Wikipedia - Human-readable knowledge bases are designed to allow people to retrieve and use the knowledge they contain, primarily for training purposes. They are commonly used to capture explicit knowledge of an organization, including troubleshooting, articles, white papers, user manuals and others. The primary benefit of such a knowledge base is to provide a means to discover solutions to problems that have known solutions which can be re-applied by others, less experienced in the problem area. · The most important aspect of a knowledge base is the quality of information it contains. The best knowledge bases have carefully written articles that are kept up to date, an excellent information ...