Chris A Watkins - Business

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...