The staggering statistic of new businesses that fail within the first few years is a well trodden path of analysis and it wasn’t my intention to repeat the mistake of further over – analysis herein. But the interesting aspect of these failures is how many are caused, or contributed to, by entirely avoidable basic errors. During my career in business management and turn-round assistance I have encountered many times total incredulity accompanied by the question “what on earth possessed you to do that?” 

So here is my magnificent 13-point guide to guaranteeing business failure. Of course if, perversely, you are determined to be successful, then you might choose to avoid all of the points of advice I set out below and do the exact opposite.

1. Plan for success

It’s always a good start to assume that sales and profit will quickly flow following start-up and that you need to plan for it. You need to have the entire infrastructure in place that will support the level of activity that will undoubtedly occur within the first year, whatever the costs. Don’t worry about the massive running costs and the high level of break-even sales you will need to achieve to pay for it; your business is bound to succeed and you need to plan accordingly.

2. You will need a smart office

Rent business accommodation to a high standard irrespective of costs and sign up for a long tied-in lease.

You will need plush offices with a reception service in a high-end technology park for your customers and trading partners to visit.

You can’t possibly entertain visitors in a low rent business park address that is little more than a converted farm outbuilding. And whatever you do, don’t try working from home, even if it’s justfor the first year; it may save a lot of money but it’s tacky. 

3. There’s nothing worse than an uncomfortable office chair

Get an ergonomically designed, leather chair. Ok, it’s going to cost a thousand or so, whereas you could buy a cheap chair in Ikea or Staples for fifty, but your comfort is important. Who wants to work in an uncomfortable environment?

4. A boardroom table is a must

You will need a good boardroom table. A thousand or two should cover it.

5. Business cards and brochures

And you will need good quality stationary, business cards and brochures. Don’t economise on any of the trappings of success. It might be a substantial initial investment but you’re going to succeed  -aren’t you?

6. Don’t waste time on a business plan.

You know what you’re about; you know what needs to be done so just get on with it.

Drawing up a basic profit and loss forecast with a cash flow and balance sheet profile is for the over-cautious; all it does is indicate cash problems before they get unmanageable and that will demoralise you.

In any case, you just don’t really need to keep focussed on cash flow since your undoubted success in achieving sales and income will cover all of your running costs eventually – won’t it?

7. Banks are your friend

Banks are very supportive, they are your friend and exceeding the overdraft agreement or running behind on a business loan repayment schedule will not overly bother them.

They will need to be placated occasionally but banks are understanding organisations that will always want to help you; liquidation of your assets to recover their money is something that they very rarely do. It’s a myth that the bank pulling the plug is one of the most common causes of business failure.

8. Borrow all you are likely to need and use your house as collateral.

Ok, it’s theoretically true that if you raise start-up capital using your house as collateral, you do run the risk of losing it if your business fails. Yes, that would mean that you, your wife and your seven children will be homeless but it probably won’t happen and anyway, you can always go and live with your in-laws and start all over again.

 9. Employ a professional accounting service

Accounting is tricky stuff and it’s better to employ a professional accounting service, whatever the cost, rather than trying to manage with an inexpensive accounting package that claims to do the job perfectly adequately for a small business.  Year-end accounts are difficult and, although it looks well within the capability of an averagely intelligent person, it’s complicated. As for PAYE and VAT don’t even think about doing this yourself.

10. Use consultants

Use consultants a lot – for marketing strategy, IT, advertising etc. Their expert consultants will come and ask you all about your business and your requirements then write it into a report and send it to you. They may charge daily rates that make you blanche, but the report will be beautifully presented and will use lots of word and phrases that are new to you – useful when you talk to customers.

11. Don’t try to set up your own internal computing network.

Get a firm in to do it for you.

12. Your business partner

If you are starting a business in partnership with a colleague. It doesn’t matter too much if you argue a lot. And you don’t really need a solid bond of trust between you. All that stuff about directors falling out being the biggest contributory cause of business failure might be true but it won’t happen in your case – will it?

 13. Don’t work too hard

Look at the examples of the great entrepreneurs across the world that have created international conglomerates – IT companies, airlines, social networks etc.

What do they have in common? Well, they all are basically lazy people who never devoted too much of their lives to their business ventures. They made sure that they always had plenty of time for the other things in life – golf, holidays, gardening, family etc.

Developing their business dream was never the dominant project in their lives. So follow that example; you shouldn’t need to spend too much time starting up a business. It really isn’t necessary to devote all of your energies to your business venture. Starting up a successful business is easy – that’s why everybody is doing it.

Mike

Email Blaster UK

Much has been written about the problems experienced by small businesses dealing with UK banks at the moment. Banks have been driven by the banking authorities to improve their balance sheets, therefore it has been difficult for small businesses to obtain finance – either in the form of overdraft facilities or business loans.  I suppose, however depressing it is for small businesses to cope with a hostile banking fraternity, there is a degree of resigned understanding that you cannot on the one hand publicly upbraid banks for not lending, whilst on the other hand instruct them to reduce their loan exposure – well unless you’re the Prime Minister.

But I’ve got a different take on the whole issue of bank-client relationships based upon my own experiences and those of colleagues within the business world. When it comes to indifferent, lackadaisical and couldn’t-give-a-damn incompetence, I cannot imagine a more user unfriendly bunch of people to deal with than your average British bank (well perhaps Spanish banks but that’s another story). This has nothing to do with the aforementioned problems of getting a loan; this is about the shear aggravation of trying to get your friendly bank to carry out seemingly simple tasks like opening an account – oh dear, have you tried to do this recently?

So here are my lessons in dealing with the modern British bank, with examples from true life experiences. In many cases I find myself driven to quote Littlejohn of the Mail – you couldn’t make it up.

Opening a corporate bank account

The first and most important point to fix in your mind is that, if you’re a small business (SME), banks do not want your custom. They are systemically opposed to having any dealings with SME’s and will use every endeavour to encourage you to just go away – take your custom elsewhere. But of course you can’t because you must have a bank account and all the banks are equally as bad.

So in what ways will the bank you approach attempt to drive you away?

You will no doubt visit the website and try clicking business accounts or similar thinking that this should be fairly straight forward. Quickly you will find that your particular circumstances do not fit the ‘norm’ (I suspect that a lot of thought goes in to creating a template that 99% of applicants will not meet) and you will need to phone.  The person you will speak to will have been carefully selected to ensure that they have absolutely no experience in setting up a business bank account. Eventually you will be asked to fill out forms and provide all the personal details of all directors and owners, who will be required to visit their local branch to have proofs of identity verified (peered at). Try doing this if any of your directors or owners (they may not be the same persons) are not British citizens or are domiciled abroad.

In this process you will experience;

• Forms being misplaced at least once.
• Signatures being rejected for spurious reasons.
• Branches failing to send on proofs of identity which get lost.
• Request to repeat the whole process at least once.

This whole process will take at least 6 weeks, probably longer. However, it appears that not everyone experiences these problems. There was recently a case widely reported in the newspapers of a posted cheque made out to a firm of accountants being stolen in transit, presented at a bank by the thief who opened a business account in the name of the accountants, deposited the cheque and subsequently withdrew the value in cash – all over the counter over two days. Opening a business account quickly and easily can be done then – just not by you.

I was recently commissioned by a non-British (European) medium sized company with sales of over £100m to assist in setting up a wholly owned subsidiary in England. Incorporating and registering VAT and PAYE was simple and efficient (well done Companies House and HMRC).  The subsidiary, for technical reasons, needed a stand-alone UK bank account. With a projected turnover rising to £5m plus by the end of year 1, you would think that banks would be falling over themselves to get the business – wrong. One major bank turned the business away because foreign ownership was too complicated. Remember this was a respected company in an EU country. Another wanted the personal details of all shareholding owners of the parent company – this was a Plc. equivalent company with hundreds of shareholders. We set up the account in the end, but the distinct impression was that we had achieved this by exhausting the chain of obstacles put in our way.

Welcome to your Relationship Manager.

As a valued business customer, you will be assigned a ‘Relationship Manager’ – a highly experienced senior member of banking staff who is there to smooth your dealing with the bank, to get things done and to make sure that any and all of your banking requirements are met quickly and efficiently. He/she will come and see you at your offices regularly to ensure everything is going well in you dealings with their bank.

Er, I’m afraid not. First of all, your Relationship Manager will be a 16 year old boy or girl (well OK, perhaps 21) who has much less knowledge than you do of how banking in general and his/her bank in particular works. They will have absolutely no idea of how to execute anything on your behalf and will generally be treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the various departments in the bank you need to deal with. They will never, as a point of principal answer the phone and will never return a call and as for coming to see you at your premises – unfortunately it’s not in the job description, of course it may be that they’re not old enough to drive.

Changing anything – bank mandate for example

Any change to your details, in particular changes to directors or account signatories, will require a mandated change form. This is in principal fair enough; it ensures that a bank complies with the properly constituted wishes of the company as authorised by the Board. But do not assume that this will be a smooth and efficient process. In addition to all of the requirements of verified proofs of identity  and the three things that will go wrong I listed under ‘opening an account’ above, there will be a few other manufactured reasons for rejection of such a mandate.

The most bizarre I encountered recently, in fact with a charity wishing to change its Board of Trustees, was an insistence that the signature of a trustee on his passport did not match the one on his mandate form. In my telephone conversation with the bank’s mandate department representative I commented “the signatures look the same to me, are you a graphologist then?” to which the response was “what’s a graphologist?”

It took me a year to get this mandate change executed.

In summary, as an SME, it is best to assume before any dealings with the British banking industry that you will encounter all of the attitudes I set out above; indifference, incompetence, hostility. That opening and running a bank account will be difficult, slow and frustrating. That your Relationship Manager will be as helpful as a fur coat in the Sahara.

Mike

EmailblasterUK

Time to give your email list a spring clean?

When was the last time you gave your email database a clean?

A recent industry survey found that 49% of email marketeers do not perform regular cleaning of their mailing lists. This is quite a worrying statistic. Invalid and poor data which may have entered your email database will certainly hamper overall email marketing success.

The sun has finally come out in the UK, we suggest that it is time to give your email database a spring clean. Spending an hour cleaning your database can lead to dramatic increases in opens and your sender reputation. Read on for our top tips with how to clean your email database to increase performance.

So where does invalid data come from?

We are all human and make mistakes. When adding a new client to your database, you may have mistyped the email address @hotmail.com could have come out as @hotmail.co.uk or homail.com – its easy to make a mistake.

If you have a newsletter signup widget on your website, without proper anti-spam control, you may be subject to bots inserting dummy data into your website. If you are using the email blaster newsletter signup widget, it’s double opt-in so will stop all bots in their tracks. As an alternative to a double-opt in system, google’s reCAPTCHA module will stop most spam bots from entering invalid data.

Why do i need to clean my email database?

Email marketing is not a volume game, we would argue that you should always follow a more targeted approach.

Invalid data inside your email database will be causing higher levels of soft and hard bounces. Bounces are bad, they are very bad. High levels of bounces will lower your sender score. A lowered sender score will cause future campaigns to your real contacts to slip into junk filters or be rejected completely. ISP’s hate it when their networks are flooded with emails to invalid addresses, it increases their overheads and costs -  therefore they like to do their best to stop it.

For this very reason, we recommend showing your database a bit of love. Lets improve delivery and your sender score.

 How can i clean my database?

To help give your email database a clean for your summer marketing, why not try the following to help remove any invalid data:

 Remove Typos: 

Try loading your email database onscreen or downloading a copy to Excel. Have a quick scan of your email database for obvious typos:

A few areas we recommend looking out for:

• Check the spelling, yahoo not yaho
• Does the address contain an @ symbol?
• Does the domain have a correct TLD? i.e. .co.uk not .ca.uk?
• Check that the record is in-fact an email address and not a telephone number or postal address (it sounds obviously we know, you would not believe the amount of phone numbers and postal addresses which get entered!).

If you are importing a new database into email blaster, List Doctor will automate this task for you. Upon import, the Doc will perform a quick scan of all records and look for invalid data, removing them on your behalf.

 Duplicates:

Know-one likes receiving an email more than once. If you email one of your customers the same message 10 times, you can be quite sure that they will not buy from you again. Removing duplicates is a important house keeping task.

For our own monthly mailer ‘Vibe’. We run a quick de-dupe before each send. We would highly recommend doing this also.

Ok, we appreciate that if you have a larger database – de-duping your list every week would be an impossible task. Unless you are an Excel wiz, it’s going to take you all day. If you are using email blaster to power your email marketing, we aim to automate this for you. Navigate to your mailing list inside the software and click on ‘scan for duplicate contacts’. After making your request, your database will be sent off to List Doctor. The Doc will perform an automatic de-dupe on your behalf, this process normally takes 10 minutes. Once your database has been successfully removed of any annoying duplicates, the Doc will send a report to your eMessage inbox.

 Consider removing all non opens?

This suggestion could be considered a little extreme, but we would argue that you should consider this. If every month a client is deleting your email without opening it, this strongly implies that they are not interested in your products and services. Consider saving yourself email sends and time by removing the user from your database.

There is not much point sending your monthly newsletter to a disengaged customer. Your focus and attention would be much better spent on clients who are regular readers. While this approach could be seen as quite counter productive, it should still be considered.

What are your top list cleaning tips? Lets us know below or Tweet us @emailblasteruk

The number one measure of effective email marketing is the number/percentage of positive responses to an email campaign. A positive response can have many diverse definitions; entering and returning a response form, a link-click to an advertised website, opening a specific response page or simply just clicking and opening the email body. Before any of these measures apply, the precursor is the arrival of an email in the inbox of each recipient email addressee – what percentage of emails transmitted are passed through the recipient’s mail server as opposed to being bounced.  And this measure – delivery rate, is the grand-daddy of analytics; without a good delivery performance, opens, link-clicks etc become little more than a percentage of a percentage.

This is unfortunately the case that a poor deliverability score is a very common problem that bedevils pretty well all users of email marketing.

Deliverability score can range from unacceptable to 99% plus. i.e. 99% plus of the emails transmitted are passed through by the mail server to the local PC. Although not a robust industry measure, in general a good deliverability score is anything above 90% and a poor score is anything below 30%.

So what are the factors that affect deliverability and what measures can be employed to achieve and hold a good score.

Originator reputation.
Originator reputation is an obtuse way of defining something which is actually quite specific. The originator in the first instance is the name of the company or organisation that appears in the ‘sent from’ box and is not referring to the server or IP from which the email has been transmitted (that is the email marketing service provider’s server/IP). Reputation does not (usually) refer to the general perceptions of the company/organisation but the specific email originator score – either the cumulative number of times that this particular email sender has been spammed by recipient’s mail servers or whether or not the originator name has got itself on a black list (see below).  So how does a poor originator reputation come about?

There are two stages to filtering at the receiving end of an email;

1. The mail server via which the email is served to the end user’s PC provides the first and most important line of defence against spam. This could be at the ISP’s server centre (eg BT, hotmail etc) or could be a local mail server for a more complex internal network within a larger company for example. Either way, the mail server will subscribe to an email filtering or firewall network, which continuously assesses and marks the ‘spam’ score of all email origination sources. Every-time a recipient hits the spam button and sends a received email to the spam folder, chances are that this is controlled and monitored by the mail server and in turn the subscribed email filtering network service. The result is a steady deterioration in the originators ‘spam’ score to the point where all emails coming from that source will be auto-blocked by ALL mail servers subscribing to the particular firewall network (ie black listed) – and that could be many millions, and you end up with a poor deliverability.

The problem for the user of email marketing services, is that although the address list may comply with all double opt in regulations and all recipients have signed up to receive your emails, users that get tired of the same old format or content of your emails just hit the spam button instead of going to the trouble of unsubscribing.  Our statistics show that over 60% of users who don’t like the content of emails from a particular source send it to spam instead of formally unsubscribing.

2. The second line of defence is the local firewall in the end user’s PC. It is more difficult to measure deliverability at the receiver PC as this does not show up on standard analytics which record bounces from the mail server only. But much the same issue of spam versus unsubscribe arises. Users will prefer to send to spam than open the email and unsubscribe. The former damages your deliverability score, the latter doesn’t. Usually, this generated spam classification is only applied at the end user’s PC and there is no general networked black listing issue but it is always possible that local spam designation will be networked.
What about the email marketing service provider’s score?

Unfortunately for email marketing service providers, suspected spammer classification will often also be attributed to the server/IP from which the email campaign originated as well as the actual originator. So it is not only the user that suffers the consequence of a high spam rejection score arising from an email campaign. Add into the mix a small number of other users of the service that have also developed a poor reputation with one of the international anti-spam firewall organisations and the result is a degraded server score for the email marketing service, effectively knocking out that server and possibly a whole IP range – a risk that has to be rigorously controlled by the service provider. It is for this reason that email marketing service providers are paranoid about email address list provenance when vetting incoming customer lists.

What do email marketing service providers do to control delivery reputation?
Poor deliverability is probably the biggest cause of customer complaint following an email campaign. So what measures do service providers take to protect their delivery reputation and that of their customers?

The email broadcast market has grown exponentially and is likely to continue so doing for some years yet. During this market growth, the standard defence against spamming reputation has been to deny service to all potential customers who cannot guarantee the purity and provenance of their address list. And it’s true, as we have said before in these series of articles, that a good address list is the silver bullet of email marketing.

As an example, if a school bars entry to all potential pupils with an IQ below 125, they will achieve a high exam performance pass rate. So just the same, if an email service bars all potential customers who cannot guarantee the purity of their address list to a high standard, the prime cause of poor server/IP delivery reputation will be significantly reduced. Not to say that this eliminates the cause because there is still the problem of recipients just getting bored with poor received content and clicking the spam button, resulting as explained above with a degraded deliverability due to deteriorating reputation.

So what’s the answer?
Spam or unsolicited email traffic is a huge problem – it is the background noise that threatens to rise to a level that effectively blots out legitimate emailing. The industry fights back by progressively raising the defences with technology that identifies sources of spam and blocks them – raising the bar in step with the problem.

The cure is near deadly itself and as the spam defence level keeps rising, the water is lapping at the feet of all legitimate email marketing service providers. Raising the customer entry bar by requiring more and more stringent address list requirements merely provides a false palliative – it is the service providers who have learnt to swim that survive whilst those that keep moving up the mound are delaying facing up to the problem.

Of course it remains imperative for email marketing service providers to carefully vet incoming customers to ensure that premeditated ‘spammers’ are denied entry,  but it is vital to recognise that a huge mass of potential customers do not have IT departments 50 strong with large incumbent customer bases from which a high quality email address list can be extracted and maintained.
The key skill now required with the ‘swimmers’ – those email marketing services that deal with the issue rather than avoiding it, is the development of highly complex technology and algorithms that scan and cleanse address lists. This technology is developing all the time and provides a means for small/medium companies to access email marketing services without the need for the IT and marketing overhead that larger companies can afford. Technology leaders in the email marketing industry today focus on working with their customers to hone the quality of email address lists rather than simply saying – “sorry we can’t accept you as a customer.”

Relying on a high rejection rate of otherwise valued and legitimate customers simply because they cannot accommodate stringent address list verification proofs, cannot in the end present a viable business model. I for one, regularly hit the spam button when I receive the same boring email offering a meal for two or 25% off deal from an otherwise perfectly legitimate blue chip company that had used full double opt-in to obtain my email address.

Let’s be honest, it’s quicker to hit spam than to open the email and send an ‘unsubscribe’ that works only rarely in my experience. So I’ve compromised their delivery reputation with the anti-spam filtering organisation I subscribe to – oh dear. Perhaps they should subscribe to a more technologically advanced market leading emailing service that would have identified the signs in my responses and removed me from their list at an earlier stage.

Michael Peters
Email Blaster UK

Well, an experienced campaigner anyway, who has made some classic errors over the years and (hopefully) learnt from them as well as a few successes.

Like the old saying – everybody has at least one good novel in them, we all have a least one good start-up business in us but very few people can turn a good idea (a novel or a company) into a successful source of income and wealth. Are there any secrets to making a successful business, any do’s and don’ts? I think that the answer is a heavily qualified yes – qualified by a dose of good fortune and good timing. A well thought out business plan plus a lot of effort will survive bad fortune and timing and ride the wave of good fortune and timing.

The obvious converse applies in spades – a poorly thought out plan and execution will fall as soon as times are hard and will not fully achieve a successful outcome in good times.
Here are a few of my thoughts and tips.

1. Having a good idea is not enough.
People tend to overplay the importance of having a good business idea and underplay the need to set out a clear business plan. Many times I have been confronted with a business proposal based upon a product idea – a ‘Dragon’s Den’ idea, without too much thought about the how, what and when of the critical first year of a new business.

Now the programme Dragon’s Den is all about entertainment of course but where the programme does reflect reality is the interrogative approach of the dragons towards market analysis, sales and profit forecasts, business plans etc. And how often are the applicants found wanting? So the key need is to develop a sound plan, fully costed, which addresses how the market will be served, the product made and the whole thing funded. Start-up really is about lots of planning and effort overlaying a good idea – 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration as the saying goes.

2. Plan, plan, plan.
There are so many aspects to a business start-up plan; many absolutely critical to survival, that are so often overlooked. Financial considerations are of course the front and centre core factors in a plan. The conflicting consideration between the desire to plan for success with heavy up-front investment in infrastructure – offices/premises, manufacturing plant if appropriate, advertising, staffing etc versus the absolute necessity of strict limits to expenditure and debt is the aspect of greatest financial risk. The essential components of a plan are; a realistic income forecast, cost of sales and overhead costs. Included in the overhead charges will be staff costs – usually you. Will you be relying on income from this business for your own salary, if so how long can you survive without an income?  What unavoidable costs are associated with marketing and (if appropriate) manufacturing costs? What will be the payment terms in and out – cash flow is everything in a new business.

3. ‘Sales’ is vanity, ‘profit’ is sanity, ‘cash’ is reality.
A common mistake (not one that I’ve made of course!) is to grossly underestimate the true cost of providing the goods or services and therefore underachieving profit. But even if you have got this about right, profit is in reality a notional measure of performance; it is a business measure that dates back to the Venetians I believe (the inventors of double entry book-keeping) and it is essential not to confuse profit with cash. Companies fail due to a failure in cash flow – not having sufficient funds to pay bills.

It is therefore a matter of prudence to factor into the planning stage a realistic cash flow forecast. This will be founded on the invoice-receipts cycle bearing in mind that some creditors (the VAT man or HMRC) don’t generally take kindly to delays in payment whereas corporate customers see payment to small suppliers in a timely manner as a voluntary exercise. The best customers are those that pay at delivery of the service (or before is even better) so if your proposed business is a service to the retail market you should allow delays in payment.

4. Keep break-even sales to a minimum.
The running costs of your business, factored into you plan; determine what sales you need just to keep the doors open. Sales above that level – the break even sales level, generate profit. So think in terms of contribution –accountant’s terminology, which means that all sales income above the break- even point, less the actual cost of delivering these sales is direct contribution to profit. So every sinew in your body should be geared to keeping any unnecessary expenditure to a minimum, you should not commit any expenditure that does not directly contribute to sales. Sorry, that means you can’t have your fancy office, you can’t have your posh stationary, you can’t have the mahogany desk with the designer chairs. I once chaired a board meeting at which the only remaining thing we could think of to generate some cash was to sell the solid mahogany board room table we were sat around – which we did for over £1000.

So there you have my introductory course in start-up businesses;

• Having a good idea is not enough by itself. A thought through means of achieving successful exploitation of the idea is essential.
• Build a decent plan around your business idea that addresses financing and service/product delivery at the very least.
• Cash flow is everything. Get the cash in, don’t spend any money.
• Keep the break-even point to a minimum. Again, only commit to expenditure that is essential to furnishing sales

And once your business has achieved a plateau of performance you can get the board room table.

Mike
Email Blaster

This weekend we will be running planned maintenance on the email blaster network.

Saturday 16/03/2013 maintenance:

• Migration of all database servers to our new super fast network. 
• DNS server updates.

We are expecting up-to 1 hour downtime between midday and 1pm (GMT). During this time we will also be making DNS updates. Depending on your ISP DNS propagation may take a few hours to filter through before we can restore service at normal.

Sunday 17/03/2013 maintenance:

• RAM Upgrade. We will be adding extra ram to a few email servers. During this time we expect no downtime as we will divert traffic to alternative email servers.
• Cooling upgrade. We will be replacing some cooling fans on several servers. During this time we expect no downtime as we will divert traffic to alternative servers
• Master Switch Migration. We will be moving our master switch over to our new network. Users may experience a few seconds downtime.
• Firewalls Migration. We be moving our firewalls to our new network. We expect no more than a few seconds downtime.

Sunday network updates will start at 11am. On sunday we expect no more than a few seconds downtime.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. This is the final stage of the email blaster migration to our new faster network. After planned maintenance, users should expect faster page load times.

Kind Regards.

Chris

We are today very pleased to announce the go live of List Doctor Version 2.0.

List Doctor; the free email list cleaning tool integrated directly inside your email marketing software. Inside Version 2.0 we re-written the core and added some great new features.

Whats new inside List Doctor Version 2.0?

Along with all the great tools inside Version 1.0; auto de-dupe, suppression lists, bad domain removal, we have added 3 great new tools inside Version 2.0:

Invalid Email Address Check

We have made some drastic improvements to check for invalid email addresses when importing new data. List Doctor’s new algorithm will now scan for a much wider range of common typos and mistakes which would cause the email send to fail.

When entering your customers email address, you may have accidentally hit a comma instead of a full stop. Missed off the domain TLD or @ symbol. New checks in Version 2.0 will automatically clean invalid data.

Hard Bounce Check

At the stage of import List Doctor will check for and remove all hard bounces.

A hard bounce is defined as an email address which no longer exists; the domain registration may have slipped or no valid email server is associated with the domain name.

To help save email sends Version 2.0 will now automatically check every email address imported, hard bounces will be removed for you.

Scan Report

When importing a new email database, your List Doctor scan will start running within 10 minutes. As with the previous release, this runs in the background, you can carry on using the mailing list during this period.

Once the List Doctor Deep Clean scan is complete, you will be sent a handy eMessage with a full report. Please see the screen below for a preview:

Summary

We would like to thank everyone who participated in providing feedback for Version 2.0. We really hope that you enjoy using the List Doctor free email database cleaning service.

The new release is now live inside your Email Blaster cloud software.

In my previous blog – ‘So what’s all this about business strategy’ I discussed the most effective way to produce a strategic plan – a POST plan, an acronym for Position, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics. This is the process I have developed over many years setting up and running businesses and developing successful strategies for stakeholders. But it is undoubtedly the case that, in most small/medium organisations, little thought is ever giving to the structured development of a strategic plan – a business plan. In many cases this is entirely understandable – what strategic planning would be required for a sweetshop for example. But, perversely, there is always a justification for a little time being spent in setting down a structured business plan – yes even for a sweetshop. And if ever you need to raise investment capital from a bank or VC, just try doing it without a plan.

Let me expand upon this point. No-one is likely to argue against the need for a fully detailed strategic plan for a large corporation or organisation. At least I hope that this is the case because producing and executing such strategic plans for big corporations has provided me with a comfortable living for the past few decades. In any case, it’s been my experience that big corporations and in particular, local and national government organisations are absorbed to the point of obsession with strategic planning – quite often ineffective. They have to resolve issues of delivering the objectives of the shareholders, the owners or the governmental officials. However at first site for a small start-up, if you’re going into hairdressing for example, you won’t initially be too bothered about a strategic plan. Why would you? But the key elements of the POST plan require consideration exactly the same in this example as with a multimillion dollar corporation.

Position -What is your financial capacity? What skills do you have? What’s the competition in your proposed market area.

Objective – To make a living? To develop a chain of salons?

Strategy – To offer a simple mobile service? To open a salon in the high street.

Tactics – When, How much. Staff requirements. Investors pay-back.

All of this leads to essential considerations such as; what equipment to purchase,  what premises are required, what staff requirements etc.

Some Case Histories.

Here are a couple of case histories from my own experience. I hope they illustrate my main point – that planning is a better option than not planning.

I was invited by one of the big banks to take over as an interim CEO of a medium sized company that manufactured domestic electronic components and industrial components mainly for the electricity generation, distribution and domestic control markets. The bank had provided investment funds over the previous 10 years, based upon a vastly over egged business plan and the company had reached serious default in meeting repayments – to the point that the bank was considering its options, of which liquidation was the most likely.  Using the trusty POST format, the management team were invited to develop a new plan.

The position was dire. The business was virtually bankrupt and its bank had lost confidence in the management team. There was a much greater level of overhead and non-income generating activity than could be sustained by sales revenue. But there was a good engineering skill set with a developing product that offered much potential.

The objective was easy – To generate sufficient revenue to pay off the bank’s investments, which realistically meant reconstructing the business to achieve a sale as a going concern.

The strategy to achieve this could only be based upon an ‘earn-out’ plan –(ie to develop the business rather than liquidate it, as the liquidated value was nowhere near enough to cover the outstanding debt) and to sell the business as a successful going concern. This flowed down into a strategy for developing sales and reducing costs and a single product development strategy was focussed on – an industrial component that served the newly emerging smart energy market.

Tactics (operational plans) were developed that focused engineering and marketing resources on the key product and divesting all of the activities that did not support this strategy. This involved shedding staff and investing exclusively in the marketing and development of the key product.

The result was that the business was reshaped in line with the strategy and, after a period of 4 years, was sold to an overseas competitor who wanted to get into the UK smart energy market. The bank recovered all of its investment, the business thrived under new ownership, I went off to my next assignment (with a bonus – a nice little earner in the words of Arthur Daley).

My second case history is a much smaller enterprise. Whereas the business above was a £100m enterprise, my next example is a business with a turnover much less than £100k – a hairdressing and beauty therapy service. This was more a helping hand assignment than a paying job but nevertheless involved the same trusted POST approach.

The position was interesting. A very experienced and popular hairdresser and beauty therapist who wanted to retire from salon work and branch out as a sole trader. Not a lot of money to invest. Need to hit the ground running with minimal start-up income gap.

The objective was to provide a good income for the ‘entrepreneur’ (I use the term in its broadest sense) as quickly as possible. This was not a business development undertaking but more a deliberately low-key objective.

So the strategy was easy, but worth being very clear on. Keep operating overheads to a minimum by ‘going mobile’. No investment in a salon – it could not be justified where the objective was limited to creating a regular albeit good, income for one person. Taking the service to peoples homes meant minimal overheads, minimal equipment, nearly all income was straight to the bottom line – ie profit/income.

The tactics dropped straight out from the above strategy: get a suitable car that doubled up as the family car, purchase home-suitable equipment. Advertise by letter drops and targeted email marketing.

The result of this plan was a very successful little business that generates a very good income. The problem now is that there is a great opportunity for expansion with additional staff and cars on the road – but that’s the second POST plan.

Mike

Email marketing just got much better..

We are pleased to announce that our new ‘get social’ social media integration app is now live.  Email Blaster now offers complete unison with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, allowing all three platforms to work as one.

You can now post copies of your email marketing newsletters directly to your Facebook wall or Twitter feed. Each post will automatically generate a web link, allowing viewers to click and view your design inside their web browser. You can also add your favorite hash tag or @address

Set up is quick and easy, it takes no more than a few clicks to follow the set up wizard and sync your accounts.

Please watch the video below for an onscreen walk through of where to go and how to set it up inside your account:

It’s a great time to join the growing community of Email Blaster software users, our new ‘get social’ app makes the software even more of an incredibly powerful marketing tool.

Over the length and breadth of my career in business and business management, I’ve been engaged in and involved with the development of strategies for businesses of all sizes and shapes. When parachuted into a company that is in some sort of difficulty (that’s usually the reason why I’ve been engaged), the one thing that is always presented to me as the ‘root of the problem’ is the absence of, or inappropriateness of ‘the strategy’.

And this is where the interesting and frustrating run-around starts. At the fundamental level, what should a business strategy do, what should it look like, what issues should it address and how should it be developed? The problem is that so much has been written, so many hours of seminars, so many business studies degree modules all devoted to this subject that to an extent, a point of saturation has been reached. Eyes glaze over. Yawns are stifled.

But the fact remains that a business with a clear direction and sense of purpose that comes from a well thought through business strategy will usually outperform a business that is lacking such direction. I am as cynical as anyone, possibly more so, when strategic planning is on the agenda but this arises from a complete misunderstanding of the needs and means of delivery that a business strategy must address – too much talky talky and not enough walky walky as the saying goes.

So here’s my two pennyworth on the subject which I hope makes more simple sense than many articles, books and lectures that I’ve read or attended over the years.

What should a business strategy do?

It should address the state of a business as it is, identify what the stakeholders (owners) of the business want from it, how in broad (strategic) terms this can be achieved and, most importantly, how these strategies can be turned into a clear action plan – the what, when, how, of the plan. I call this last part of the strategic plan the tactics section as I expand upon below. The point that cannot be over-emphasised, is that delivery and ensuring that delivery, is the most vital part of a well engineered strategic plan.

Here comes an acronym; POST – Position, Objective, Strategy, Tactics. And this acronym summarises the methodology I have developed and used with some success over the years. It sets out the structure of a strategic plan that leads through to the most important section – tactics (ie the delivery mechanisms), in a naturally logical manner. I summarise below;

Position.

Before any thought can be expended on the details of a plan, a realistic assessment of the state of the business must be reviewed and set down. This need not be overblown with SWOT diagrams (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), market analysis, perception plans etc but should identify at the very least; the financial position (we’re broke, we’re secure, we’re going bust etc), the position in the addressed market (dominant position, insignificant, growing, shrinking etc), any structural or staff issues and the salability of the product or service offered. The reason why this is the first section of the plan is that it’s pointless setting out objectives that are plainly unachievable within the limits of the position of the organization as summarised above.

Objective(s)

Can be singular or plural – there may be more than one objective, but setting the objectives should be a simple statement of what the stakeholders want. I’ve often been invited in to prepare a company for sale, or more unfortunately, for closure. These are objectives. They state what the stakeholders want and therefore what a strategic plan should aim to achieve. Most companies want to improve the financial position in terms of profit/loss but some may be looking for a simple stable income stream – a cash cow objective, whereas an alternative and common objective may be to achieve a high growth in market share, sales and eventual income – a rising star objective. It is vital to understand and set out what the stakeholders want from the business in the same way that an investment consultant would need to know whether a long term low risk income generating investment is wanted as opposed to a higher risk capital growth investment. So ask the stakeholders (you?) – what do you want to achieve from this business?

Strategy

The how. How do you achieve the objective(s). Remember that the tactics section will address the means of delivering the strategy so it’s important to set out in this section what the overall plan is. The most common problem to mix up strategy with tactics; the easy distinction is to think in terms of the tactics flowing from the strategy, not the other way round.

Strategic statements are usually single sentence word forms. It should be possible to say to a friend our strategy is to….. as a single sentence.

Tactics

I use the definition ‘tactics’ because it naturally flows from strategy in an identical manner to military strategy and tactics. In the business sense, it can be more correctly defined as the operational plans that deliver the strategy and therefore the stake-holders objective.

This section is the most important section of the plan since it should aim to set out exactly what organizational, financial, operational, developmental plans will be put in place – and when.

At the very least, the tactics section will have a timing chart that sets out every operational plan in the time domain. Monitoring performance against this plan then becomes much easier by including milestones, achievement measures, reviews etc.

Lessons Learned

• Make sure that the objective is clear and agreed.
• Keep the strategy simple and avoid market speak.
• Base the objective and strategy on the strengths of the organisation set out in the position section.
• Monitor measure and correct the tactics (operational plans) as you proceed.

I like to use the example of the naval engagement between the British navy and the French/Spanish fleet at Trafalgar. The strength of the Royal Navy was the quality of its gunnery; in terms of fire rate and accuracy. The objective was to destroy the allied fleet for good, the strategy was to quickly get to close quarter and rely on superior gunnery to achieve the objective.  The tactics were; every ship will get alongside an allied vessel and maintain close fire until the opponent was destroyed. So the famous ‘Nelson touch’ was to sail as fast as possible straight at the allied fleet without any fancy maneuvering – as simple as that.

Mike