Turning business on its head...

James Murray Wells - Eye eye captain

Wed, 7 Jul 2010 00:01:17 +0100

Some things you just don't see coming. One minute you're happily studying English at a former poly in Bristol, the next you've managed to brass off a fair proportion of the optical fraternity, who are only too happy to take part in an increasingly bitter public slanging match

Most would be forgiven for caving in there and then, but James Murray-Wells, founder of Glasses Direct, appears only too happy to punch above his weight, and slug it out on his own terms. In fact, the company has taken an openly aggressive stance with its high-street competitors, with tactics including taking representatives dressed as sheep into Newcastle's retail district.

They handed out flyers warning bemused shoppers not to get 'fleeced' by high-street prices. The campaign has attracted unwanted threats of legal action from high-street opticians Specsavers, which felt it was being unfairly singled out. Glasses Direct was born two years ago, while James was a student at the University of the West of England.

He needed a new pair of glasses and was staggered by the cost - amazement turned into curiosity, which swiftly became obsession.

He says: "I needed a pair of reading glasses while I was studying for my finals and I was astounded when I was presented with a bill for pounds 150.

"Even though I was supposed to be revising, I became obsessed with the idea that I might be able to undercut the market leaders. I went out and spoke to a number of glazing labs to discover the actual price of making a pair of glasses, but I was just met with a wall of silence."

Eventually, a rogue employee from one of the labs gave James the inside track, indicating that the actual cost of manufacturing a pair of glasses was just pounds 7 and the process took around 20 minutes. At the time, the average price of a pair of glasses was about pounds 150 - a mark-up of some 2,000 per cent. James had done the legwork.

Spurred on by this, James further discovered that once a customer's eyes had been tested and an accurate prescription obtained, there was no further need to visit a high-street optician. And so Glasses Direct was born on 1 July 2004 from a room in his parents' home, with the help of the final instalment of James's student loan!

He employed two leaflet distributors to hand out flyers in Bristol City Centre and began by taking just a couple of orders per day. James undercut high-street sellers - with some pairs of glasses selling for as little as pounds 15 - and still made a profit.

By September, the company had received 9,000 calls. In the first year of trading, he attracted two million visits to his website and sold more than 21,000 pairs of glasses.

James says: "If someone had told me at the beginning that I would be running a company selling reading glasses I would not have believed them. I have no formal business training - I just saw a gap in the market and an opportunity to provide an essential service at a good price."

Are women more expensive?

Sun, 6 Jun 2010 12:32:35 +0100

I like to think of myself as a New Man. Generally speaking, I'm a sensitive, caring guy, prefer red wine to Stella, read and stopped taking my laundry to my mum's for ironing several months ago.

I even moisturise. It's with this in mind that I politely ask the women in my life - or any that may wish to become part of it in the future - to please not hold what I am about to say against me. I'm only doing my job.  The idea that women cost more to employ than men is probably one of the least talked about, but most widespread opinions in business. Few people like to go on the record about it - largely through fear of getting a knock on the door from the maternity police.

But this does not stop the thought festering at the back of the minds of business owners and managers as they try and find ways to minimise the cost to their businesses.
 Employers and employment bodies have traditionally been shy of undertaking any kind of meaningful study into the costs of women in the workplace.
 Despite this, there appears to be a real fear that employing young women can cost a business dearly.   A survey of HR professionals by Croner Consulting suggests that  some four fifths of employers instinctively think twice about employing women of 'childbearing age' - whatever that might be. That means the assumption that women are more expensive to employ could be affecting 8 million women throughout the UK.
 Even removing the subjective from the discussion, leaving out the whys and the wherefores, answering the simple question 'are women more expensive to employ than men?' takes diplomacy to entirely new levels.  I told one (female) business colleague of the frustration of a chemist I had spoken to for this article. He had hired a woman to stack shelves, only to be told when she reported into work on day one that she was pregnant, and couldn't lift anything.

He had little choice but to send her home on full pay. My colleague's instinctive, if not very well-thought- out, answer was 'it's just common sense, why would you employ a woman to do a heavy lifting job anyway?'
 So how does the expense theory stand up to scrutiny?  Women have more time off than men
Perhaps a little surprisingly, they do. According to the latest government figures, women are a third more likely to be off sick than men. Rather unhelpfully, there are no official figures for the amount of time taken off, but there can be no doubt that, on this measure at least, women are more expensive to employ than men. Estimated cost (based on UK median salary of £22,000): £120 per year
 Maternity Allowance costs a fortune  Statutory Maternity Allowance is £75 per week for 26 weeks, paid by the employer - a grand total of £1,950 per pregnancy. However, most businesses can claim 90 per cent of that cost back, and smaller businesses can claim back 105 per cent.  Estimated cost: £195
 And I have to pay holiday pay while they are off  Holiday is accrued while an employee is on maternity leave, at a rate of 1.6 days per month. Don't forget the cost of the company car, and mobile phone. Estimated cost (26 weeks' maternity leave): £1750
 I have to find someone to replace them while they're away Well, not necessarily. Any sensible business owner would try to cope by redistributing work throughout the business. However, the smaller you are, the more difficult this tends to be, and current rules mean women do not need to commit to when they're coming back to work, so planning is difficult.

An agency like Reed will charge you a finder's fee of about 20 per cent of a candidate's salary. Of course, you could do all the legwork yourself, but it'll probably cost you about the same by the time you've added everything up. Estimated cost: £4,400  Work that out over a 40-year career and that's an extra cost of around £17,500. Or £437 per year. Or £36 per month. Maybe I've missed something out - and if I have, I'm sure you'll let me know - but that doesn't sound like a lot to me.   You factor in the fact that the average woman gets paid 13 per cent less than the average man, and you could even be forgiven for concluding women are less expensive than men.

Originally published in 2006 - www.freshbusinessthinking.com

Figures quoted correct as of original publication date.

The Beermat Entrepreneur - Mike Southon

Tue, 11 May 2010 23:37:06 +0100

I'm sitting across the table from the self-styled 'Beermat Entrepreneur', Mike Southon, and I'm not sure whether I'm being studied, sold to or hypnotised.  
Or all of the above. And he's hardly said a word. 
You know that slightly uncomfortable sixth-sense feeling you get when you think you're being watched? That dull niggle that comes from somewhere between the crown of your skull and the base of your neck? Well, this is the first time I've felt it since the scary girl from accounts was eyeing me up over the dance floor at last year's Christmas party.  Stranger still, I quite like the fact that he's interested. I almost want him to sell me something. Anything. Ice and Eskimos immediately come to mind.  In 2002, Mike wrote The Beermat Entrepreneur with long-term colleague and friend Chris West. The emphasis is firmly on keeping business simple and fun. Ideally, you should be able to write your ideas on the back of a beermat (apparently a fag packet is no longer the done thing) while chatting to your mates in the pub which, if you believe the legend, is exactly how he began his first business. 
Mike's background is unconventional, if varied. Thrown out of his mechanical engineering degree after just a year, he managed to wangle his way into Tate & Lyle's research centre in Reading, working out how to turn sugar into detergent. Soap powder was apparently his speciality.

All that sugar clearly did something to his head, and it was around this time Mike's alter ego Gorgeous Mike Vaseline was born as the frontman of tongue-in-cheek Dixieland jazz band, the Oxcentrics.  
Mike eventually scraped a 2:2 from Bradford in Chemical Engineering (a hark back to sweeter days, no doubt) and Economics, but not before entering the world of entertainment, again touring freshers' weeks and the Edinbugh Fringe in "The Perils of Arnold Hardstaff". Forgive me for not asking him too many more questions about that. 
The most recent of Mike's roles is firmly placed on the stage of business, and stems from the early 80s when he left the training company he was working for to set up his own company, simply because he thought his team could do the job better. 
"All of a sudden, we couldn't understand why we were working for these morons, and not for ourselves," said Mike.
 "We weren't actually enjoying what we were doing, and while it was no get-rich-quick scheme, we reckoned we could earn a living doing what we were doing for ourselves. and The Instruction Set was born."
 Five years later, the company had grown to employ 150 people in the UK and US, with a turnover of ￡7.5m. Soon enough they received an offer they couldn't refuse from Hoskyns - now Cap Gemini Ernst and Young. 
It is this experience that has coloured his attitude to business, and formed the basis of the advice he gives to emerging entrepreneurs and businesses today. His message is simple: get the right mix of people around you and enjoy yourselves. 
"The 'mix' part is very important," Mike explains. "When we were starting The Instruction Set, we were lucky that we were all specialists in different areas of business, and we needed every one of them for it to work."
 Mike suggests three skills that the leadership of a burgeoning business cannot do without. "The sales, finance and delivery roles all need to be there from the beginning," he says.
 "With all three in place, there is a proper balance to the business. But just as important is finding a business mentor - someone who believes in what you are doing, but is far enough removed that he or she can be bluntly honest about a product or service."
 "Business should be fun and it shouldn't be over complicated," says Mike.

"There is no reason for it to be anything else. For me, business is about going to work with people you like and trust, enjoying yourself while earning a living.
 "At the beginning, that's what it is like for most entrepreneurs. They will build a good idea into a business which grows to a decent size, where it sits quite comfortably for a couple of years until someone decides - or gets pressured into thinking - it has to grow further."
 Mike has seen the scenario played out hundreds of times, and it is not something he understands. 
"People need to realise that after businesses get to a certain size, usually past 20-25 people, they turn into completely different animals," he explains. 
"All of a sudden, directors have a bit less control over what is going on, they complain that no one tells them anything anymore, and that they receive too many internal emails. All of a sudden, they are working in that big organisation they left to start working for themselves.  
"Put simply, it stops being fun. There is absolutely no reason why you can't choose to remain at the size you are - turn away work if you have to, and charge a premium to clients - a premium because they know they have your full attention all the time." 
So how do you know which way to take your business?  
The same way you should be making all your business decisions - by gut feel. "Intuition doesn't get a lot of space in business literature," says Mike. 
"Maybe because it's impossible to draw over-complicated diagrams of it, complete with triangles, cut-away cylinders, more arrows than Custer's last stand and word 'synergy' somewhere.  
"But intuition is highly valuable, especially in dealing with people. Its lack of definability makes it hard to measure, or to improve once you have made an assessment of it.

"This might appear to be bad news, but my experience of intuition is that almost everybody has it to a very high degree, and that people who make bad judgements are the ones who override it in some way.  
"If you make a run of bad judgements, ask yourself what you are putting in the way of your natural talent for spotting fakes and phonies."

Originally published in 2006 - www.freshbusinessthinking.com

Bandwagon jumping...

Tue, 4 May 2010 20:16:30 +0100

London Design Agency, Further has claimed today that the main political parties have broken the rules of branding with their current design materials.

The company has - quite rightly - used the news hook of the general election to successfully fight for some space in the news pages of a respected communication magazine. http://bit.ly/byiZsB

Except I can’t see that the accusation holds water - and here’s why. The article’s first suggestion is that “the Liberal Democrats have adopted Labour’s red colour for their news sheets in Hackney and Islington.” When quite plainly they’re borrowing more from the traditional red top convention than they are Labour.

Its second suggestion is that “the Conservative Party produced a campaign newsletter in Watford entitled ‘NHS Matters’ using NHS branding. The newsletter was actually a Conservative note defending its position on hospital cuts.”

But if you compare the real NHS logo with the masthead of the alleged offender, there are few similarities. The rather large Conservative party logo makes it pretty clear everyone reading it is pretty clear who the message is coming from. Passing off my arse...

The comments from legal expert Tom Lingard are spot on, except he’s not actually talking about the examples quoted. Instead he says if a political party used another party’s trade mark unfairly could amount to trademark infringement.

Can’t blame a decent PR team for getting some coverage, but where’s the story?

That said...maybe I just got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning...I’m sure I’m not usually this anal...

For me, the biggest sin here is not the two publications that are quite clearly selling somethings, but rather the serene faced Islington Mirror and Hammersmith News.

No branding here (begged, borrowed or stolen) but propaganda in its rawest form parading as real news. Unforgivable.

Bob Geldof - Business is a means to an end

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:55:11 +0100

Business appears to be a means to a practical, rather than a financial, end for Geldof.

It was his business sense, for example, made sure he kept financial control of every aspect of the Band Aid single's production, manufacture and distribution, which meant charities it supported received more than 96p from each of the ￡1.35 retail record sales.

The idea for The Big Breakfast, one of Planet 24's first hits, came after his kids had nothing to watch on TV before school. Deckchair.com, Geldof's holiday booking website, came from his frustration at booking his own family holiday.

Geldof says: "The Deckchair.com idea came about when I was trying to get tickets to take my kids to Disneyland in Florida. The prices were completely outrageous, and I just couldn't understand how a normal family could afford them.

"This was right at the beginning of the whole dot.com thing. I understood the basics of how the internet worked, so I couldn't understand why you couldn't just go somewhere online, find the cheapest flight to a particular destination on a particular day and book it there and then. It made no sense to me, so I set about doing something about it."

Geldof eventually sold the site at the height of the dot.com crash in 2001 for some £9m.

"Using technology either works or it doesn't. It's one of those things: technology always arrives at the most appropriate time in response to need, whether you look at the telephone, TV or Stephenson's Rocket. If a technology doesn't succeed, its time either hasn't come or it's just a load of crap."

The majority of Geldof's business time is now dedicated to Ten Alps, his production and PR company which grew out of Planet 24, embracing Thatcher's deregulation of the broadcast industry. Its core business sees it producing factual documentaries for TV channels across the world.

But Geldof continues to look at newer, smaller projects that manage to grab his attention. At the top of this list is Groupcall, a technology designed to combat truancy in schools using mobile phone technology. "Again," he says, "this is a product using technology that is so good, you'd have to be a complete idiot not to do it.

It's simply superb."Of course, the real challenge in business is persuading everybody else that the idea is as good as you say it is."

Originally published in 2006 - www.freshbusinessthinking.com