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Building Customer Loyalty Online

Customer loyalty has always been a key component of marketing a business, but for internet businesses this can pose an extra challenge. With so many companies vying for custom and consumers having an abundance of choice offered by the internet, businesses are having to work smarter to get noticed, and for customers to stay loyal. […]

68. Social Media for Small Business and PEST analysis

I attended some time ago an advanced social media workshop which is run for the St Albans Enterprise Agency by two of its licensees: FL1 Solutions and Cerco Communications. The social media offer a wealth of opportunities for small businesses and it is such a fast-moving and dynamic area that any business these days has to […]

66. Leadership thinking for small business (part 1)

We have been looking at some of the motivational theories and how they apply to small business. In the area of leadership, the gurus come by the pile, with lots of theory and not much evidence. What it is critical for a small business to know is that leadership is not the same as management, […]

65. Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y for small business

McGregor published his book, The Human Side of Enterprise, back in 1960, and it has been influential ever since. He suggested 2 approaches to management. Theory X managers believe that employees do not like work and have to be managed with carrot and stick to get anything done; Theory Y managers believe that people get […]

59. Management by Walking Around for small business

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are not just famous for their computer company – they named the concept of Management by Walking Around, which had a period of popularity and prominence some decades ago – and perhaps its a bit of a shame that it has been somewhat forgotten these days. In large corporates its easy for […]

49. Tom Peters Thriving on Chaos for Small Business (part 11)

Tom Peters’ book, Thriving on Chaos (1987), which overthrew or updated his thoughts in In Search of Excellence, comes up with 12 keys to success in the new world he saw as emerging in the late eighties, and these are particularly relevant to small business and are still relevant now. Some of the ideas recently […]

41. Tom Peters searching for small business excellence in tough times No 3

Tom Peters’ and Robert Waterman’s second precept for successful US businesses was: Stay Close to the Customer. Rocket-science it definitely is not, but it is very important and quite easy for large businesses to lose sight of, as Peters well knew. In large and mid-size businesses sometimes the senior executives insulate themselves from the customer. […]

17. Long Tail example in the Sunday Times

Some years ago I was reading the Sunday Times over the weekend and came across an article which was the perfect example of what I had been writing about the Long Tail, both as a reality and how the idea has become sufficiently established for it to help mould – or at least express – business views. The article […]

16. Long Tail Lessons for Small Business

Summing up all the ideas in ‘The Long Tail’ by Chris Anderson into a series of do’s and don’ts for small business is pretty straightforward as he concludes the book with 9 Long Tail rules for web-based businesses (and some of these rules are also relevant for non-web-based businesses that use the web in some way). But […]

15. The economics of Anderson’s Long Tail for small business

Anderson puts very well, I think, the nature of the Long Tail when he says: “In the tyranny of physical space an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all” and then goes on to show how the web has changed all this. The new economics is that demand keeps on […]

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