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24 Jun 2010
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Emergency Budget – What’s in it for us?

by Sarah H. Filed under: Company

“Tough but fair” and “unavoidable”  are the Chancellor’s labels on this particular bottle of medicine. Ominous words maybe, but what are the active ingredients that will affect small businesses?  We have been trying to evaluate the impact of the measures and have come to the conclusion that, as a small business,  we will be relatively unscathed if not actually helped.

Tax & VAT – main points

  • VAT -The standard rate of VAT will increase by 2.5% from 17.5% to 20% from 4 January 2011. The zero rate for food and books remains in place while the lower rate for other items, such as fuel and power, remains at 5%.  As long as the flat rate scheme for small businesses is still available,  we can swallow that pill.  The flat rate  VAT scheme allows small businesses to apply a single percentage to turnover in a VAT period, therefore saving work recording VAT on sales and purchases.
  • Corporation tax – The rate for small companies will reduce from 21% to 20% next year.
  • Capital expenditure – The Chancellor has put the threshold for the Annual Investment Allowance for qualifying capital expenditure on plant and machinery back down to £25,000 – but not until April 2012. Until then the threshold will remain at £100,000.

There are also plans to increase the personal income tax allowance from April 2011, scrap the proposed 50p levy on landlines and  review the IR35 and small business tax that relates to contractors and intermediaries.

Other measures

small business rates relief scheme

Plans to increase the level of small business rates relief from October 2010. Rate relief will apply to premises valued at up to £6,000 and then tapering to £12,000. Take a look at the Business Link website to estimate your business rates.  You can find the rateable value of a property on the Valuation Office Agency website.

Government backed funding schemes

There will be an increase in the funds available under the Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme.  This scheme is aimed at encouraging banks to lend to small businesses that are poised to grow but lack the funding to do so.  However, the health warning here is that,  although the lending is backed by government funds, the banks will still apply their own commercial lending criteria and will not lend if they do not think the loan will be repaid. You can check your eligibility for government backed funding by using the interactive tool on the Business Link website.

The creation of an Enterprise Capital Fund to facilitate equity finance for small businesses. The government will fund 25% and private investors (Angels) the rest.

Thanks to Anitakhart for image

21 Jun 2010
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Pagani Zonda and Zubworld

by Mark P. Filed under: Company

We haven’t blogged about Zubworld yet… It’s a location based community site, you buy a Zub and create a community around it, with conversations, videos and events.

There’s nothing like a £600,000 car arriving at your office covered in decals of a product that you’ve built to get the motivation synapses firing.

Here’s a few pictures of a beautiful piece of machinery and Tom looking exceptionally happy with himself.

More to come on Zubworld from us soon, case study and new features…

18 Jun 2010
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Getting Started With Facebook Ads

by Sarah Bale Filed under: Knowledge

Following on from the blog about Facebook pages for businesses, we thought it might be useful to tell you about Facebook ads. This is something that has become more and more prevalent recently amongst businesses because of the fact that so many people are on Facebook. Businesses can now instantly reach a massive audience, which they can target very specifically, and they can also test the ads that they are producing and amend costings very quickly and easily.  Facebook ads also enable businesses to direct people straight to the links that they want them to go to. Hence why it is becoming a really effective way of advertising.

3 Steps and you’re away!

The first thing that you need to do is log into your business account on Facebook. Once you have done that, you will see down the left hand side that there is a tab “Ads and pages.”

All you need to do is click onto that and you will see that you can create an advert.  There are now 3 simple steps.

1. Designing your ad

This includes choosing your image, selecting the url you want people to go to and writing the copy.  You are quite limited with the space available so that may require some work beforehand.

2. Targeting

Who do you actual want to target?  What are the demographics?  Is it just for males, is it just for females?  Do you have an age range, do you have a geographic location? That kind of thing.

3. Costings

How much do you want to spend on this campaign?  How much does that work out per day?  Do you want it to be pay per click, or per impression?

Each advert will need to fall into a “campaign” which you label in stage 3.  You can have as many ads in each campaign as you like and as many campaigns as well. This is great for keeping regional campaigns separate or campaigns for different products because it enables you to spread out all the costings and see the statistics for that specific campaign.

More info? Ask the experts!

To be honest, for more information on those 3 steps I think Facebook have the answers! If you go to “learn more” from “ads and pages” you will see “Facebook adverts 101 webinar.” The webinar takes you through all 3 stages; design, targeting, and costings, and is definitely worth watching.

Approval

One thing to mention about the ads is that Facebook have to approve all of them before they can start. So when you have done your ads don’t expect them to start immediately, you will need to wait for Facebook to approve them. Due to time difference, that’s usually about 2-3 o’clock in the afternoon.  The main reasons for Facebook ads being rejected are for things like capitalisation in the wrong places, or incorrect grammar, but most of the time it will tell you if there is something wrong with your ad when you are typing it in in stage 1, in the design.

Once the ad has been approved it will become automatically live so if you want to pause an ad, or even pause a whole campaign, you can do this manually by simply changing the run status.

Graphs & Stats

When your ads become live you will be able to access quite a lot of very valuable data from Facebook. For example, the number of impressions you have had compared to the number of clicks.  Facebook will give you a recommended range for your cost per click bid (i.e. £0.41-£0.52) and it is up to you to decide how much you are prepared to pay for every click generated.  Every ad could have a different recommended range as a number of factors influence this. If you aren’t within Facebook’s  recommended range, you might not get as many impressions as you want.  That being said, if time is on your side, it may be worth bidding lower than Facebook recommends to start off with and making adjustments upwards if the requirement is there. It is easier to go up in cost than down!  The recommended bids and impression numbers will fluctuate depending on who else is trying to bid in that space, so it is worth keeping an eye on.

Testing! Testing! Testing!

From all the data Facebook give you, you will be able to modify your adverts to try and improve them.  So for example, you might want to use the same copy but put different images in to see how much that differs the click rate %.  Or you could leave the image the same and vary the copy a bit, or just the title, to see which attracts the most attention. One thing I would say is that it is really important to have an action at the end of your ad so that people are encouraged to actually click on the ad. If you want people to buy tickets you say “Get your tickets here”, if its free sign up “free sign up here” at the end of it.

Conversions

Facebook do make it really easy for you to not only see how well your ads are doing but also let you follow through on the conversion rates as well.

You can also use a tracking code that Facebook provide you with to measure conversions on the website that you have linked to.  Select “Ads and pages” from the home page and you will see “Tracking.” Click here and you will see a code that you can copy and paste into your website that will enable you to track the conversions. So, for example, if the aim of your ad is to get people to sign up for something, then you can take the tracking code and paste it into the page that people see when they have signed up, and then track it on Facebook.  Once the code is active if you go to “Tracking” it will say “Data received” on the right.  You can then click on “View conversion report” to see a breakdown of results per day.

Reports

You also have “Reports” on the left hand side. If you click on this you can generate a number of reports. You can choose from Advertising performance, responder demographics, conversions, as well as choosing the date range, time summary and format. You can then generate your report and export it.

In summary, businesses across the world are using Facebook ads for a reason. The way you can target specific demographics from an enormous population is second to none. Add that to the fact that they are very easy to set up and edit, and you spend exactly how much you want to by the day, and it seems to be a winning combination. It may not suit every small business and it does require some attention and perseverance, but overall you cannot argue that the likes of Facebook ads, and not forgetting Google Adwords, are adding a new and interesting dimension to the advertising space.

15 Jun 2010
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Quality Management – preparing for tenders

by Sarah H. Filed under: Company

Of course one thing leads to another – so once we had our Health and Safety policy in place, we tackled what we thought would be a bigger hurdle:  How to demonstrate to the world that this company is a quality operation in terms of our services,  our management  and our ethos – without going for ISO9000.

What pushed us into doing it?

Sheer ambition!  We wanted to be able to bid for more work, some in the public sector.  Such contracts, as well as those related to the 2012 Olympics, are perceived as difficult to win and we do not disagree.

However, without being fit, we could not even reach the starting block – let alone the winners podium.

Where to start?

What we really wanted was an example or template to follow that we could use as a check list and make into our own policy.  With a bit of digging, and we found the Chartered Quality Institute’s Small Business Standard

This gave us the basis for our own Quality Management Statement and the systems that we needed to put in place to live up to it.

So what exactly is a QM system?

It is a bird’s eye view of all aspects of our business management, underpinned by corresponding good practice measures.  The broad headings, cover everything from the responsibilities of management, financial processes and HR policies to customer service standards and quality measures for service delivery.  In short, we had to think systematically about all the things we do and how we do them. Our Quality Management Statement sets out the standards and practices by which the company operates and can be measured.

More pain or more gain?

Gain! Now we have done the thinking and writing, there is a clear structure in place on which to build and improve;  All staff have a clear idea of the company’s working practices, ethos as employers and aspirations; Life is easier for new starters with an induction process;   And it means we are already on the starting block when evidence of quality systems is a pre-requisite for bidding for a contract.

But there’s always more!

As we established our QM systems,  the need for other policies emerged.  Next in line were environmental and equal opportunities policies. Both crop up as elements of our QM systems and will always be requested when bidding for public or 2012 Olympic tenders.  But by now, we were on a roll and able to put them in place quite quickly.


11 Jun 2010
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Conversational blogging (who are you?)

by Mark P. Filed under: Knowledge

Blogging can sometimes be hard. What’s your “Tone of voice”, “who are you talking to?”, “what am I trying to say?”, “opinion or fact”, “formal or informal?”, the list goes on and on.

Blogging is about conversations, but most blog posts (ours included) sometimes don’t feel like it. Somehow an air of formality creeps in and smoothes off the rough edges turning what can be an interesting piece into something a little more preachy or arrogant than perhaps intended.

We see it a lot.

So… Sarah and I are experimenting with recording conversations and transcribing them. We’ll pick a topic each and basically talk to ourselves, recording the ensuing madness.

We’re both going to do a post each next week and we’ll see how we go. It may well be a disaster. It may not…

Will it be obvious which posts we’ve transcribed? I think it will.

{Photo courtesy of Levork}