< Previous20 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk PUBLIC RELATIONS By Greg Simpson, founder of Press for Attention PR and Enterprise Nation Champion for Nottingham No, not PR, although it has its moments, I'm talking about a chap at the property next door to me on Friday trying to earn an honest bob. Now it's not often one gets to quote George Formby in a column about PR and Marketing but today is that day so I will cast him in the role below and I hope it gets you thinking. I have a running battle at the rear of my house due to various 'interesting' decisions made by the previous occupants and whoever installed the guttering. Long-story short, I need someone to clear them out and have a good look. I could also do with a regular window-cleaner but there is never anyone advertising these services in or around our village. Missed opportunity 1. So imagine my joy when I spot a chap up his ladders next door doing that exact thing. I waited until he was safe and shouted up to him, mere feet from the ground at the time. Greg: “Could you pop over and look at mine after you're finished there at all?” Formby: “Morning. I probably can but I might have to shoot off.” Greg: “Ah, do you have a business card?” Formby: “No.” Greg: “Err, can I take a mobile number and I'll drop you a text then?” Formby: “Tell you what. I'll come over now.” Now, I didn't expect him to abandon one job or really want him to at that stage, but he was a lovely chap and we soon got chatting. He was actually a window cleaner, but he adds gutter 20-21.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 09:51 Page 1www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.ukEast Midlands Business Link 21 PUBLIC RELATIONS cleaning to his services as he already has the ladders out. If we look at his marketing in terms of the 4 Ps - Product, Place, Price and Promotion, he's really struggling with the latter as he has no card, no branded van, no local advertising or website, no social media channels, not even a branded t- shirt but he has the Product/s. He also has the Place as he told me he has a very fixed radius which he moves around to keep things fresh. When I asked him about Price, my initial thought was that he was actually TOO CHEAP which made me worry about quality, safety and reliability a bit but it wasn't going to cost me much to trial him so that has opened up a prospective client for him. So we agreed he'd pop over once a month and he'd send me his BACS details so we could set it all up. That WAS a smart move. He gets a regular guaranteed job and gets paid on time, no delays and I get a feeling of certainty. As he went back next door he suggested I could tackle some of my patio areas with a pressure washer: “it's what I use.” Well...I COULD but maybe he could charge me more and do that for me too whilst he's over. I decided to 'leave that on the table' as they say in sales but he didn't bite, probably because he was halfway up a ladder again next door. I wonder, how many of you miss opportunities to diversify your offering or make it easier to buy from you as you are too focused on doing the day-job 'stuff' and not looking at the marketing? By the way, he still hasn't sent me the BACS details, I'll text him again now. 20-21.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 09:51 Page 222 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM / NATTANAN726 22-25.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 09:54 Page 1www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link 23 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Scouting suppliers Scouting suppliers Business services keep a company running, but they should not be a fire and forget solution. Choosing the wrong service provider can cost in the long run. Business services keep a company running, but they should not be a fire and forget solution. Choosing the wrong service provider can cost in the long run. When one thinks of business services, they perhaps think of a wide range of different things, from legal to financial advice, telecommunications, office supplies, recruitment and more. Simply put, business services are those companies that take care of the minutiae of running an office, all the little details that may seem small at first but which, if we went without, would make functioning as a company all but impossible. With many different aspects to consider and there probably being over a hundred companies for each that would like to do the work for a business, choosing the right provider can be a daunting task. Some take the approach of picking based on the lowest offer, but this is an inevitably flawed way of doing business. While organising something like a phone or internet line might not seem as important as the latest piece of manufacturing machinery that will cost upwards of two- hundred ties the cost of the former, a business can be crippled if the phones or internet goes down. Similarly, a legal or financial service provider who is hired on the cheap may be of a lower quality, failing a company when it most needs them. The old saying is that to buy cheap is to buy twice, and for many in business this is not just good advice, but the advice they expect their own customers to follow – picking their high quality, individualised and guaranteed product over inferior copies. It is therefore quite ironic that these same companies who espouse quality over cost will neglect to apply said ethos when it comes to choosing their own business services. A better way to do things is to spend time analysing and comparing each provider to see who the better fit for a company would be, but again this is perhaps too idealistic, suggesting that a business owner, manager or 24 Á Á 22-25.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 09:54 Page 2© SHUTTERSTOCK.COM / DAVID SPATES director will have all the time in the world to do so with any degree of accuracy. There will never be enough hours in the day for such and there is always something else that demands Perhaps the more realistic option is to delegate responsibility for individual aspects to those in charge of given departments, allowing them to make the choices which will best affect them, to a fixed budget of course. Ideally, if the people who will be using or relying on the new software, hardware, CRS system or other service, are the ones to make the decision, then they will make the one that offers the best efficiency for the company. An important aspect, however, is that this should not be a fire and forget process. We all know that to get the best deal on car insurance we need to shop around, which is why it’s so unusual to see that the same logic 24 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM / TSYHUN 22-25.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 09:55 Page 3is often not applied with business services. While a loyal supplier is a benefit all to themselves and disruption can be a problem, sitting with the same supplier over and over without once putting a little pressure on them will only lead to complacency, and may cost a company in the long run. Competition helps keep prices low and service high, something a business won’t appreciate in its own competition, but should in introducing it among their The other choice is whether to hire local or national. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, but the long-held belief that nationwide companies based in London are better than local equivalents is thankfully something that has started to fade in recent years. Globalisation, the internet and competition has led to many local accountants, solicitors and IT consultants being just as skilled as there London counterparts, and much more available due to being local. Another advantage is that, traditionally being smaller, local business service providers are likely to be much more attentive to the needs of a customer, where as larger competitors will have to split their focus between more customers. When it comes to fixing a crucial system that has gone offline, it’s often the case that speed is more important than anything else – even cost or good customer service. Ultimately, business services are crucial to the running of a company, from an office to a manufacturing plant or distribution centre, but a provider is only as good as the effort put into choosing them. Companies in our region would be advised to spend a little more time vetting their suppliers. www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link 25 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Work on your business to increase growth potential Amanda Glover, Marketing Manager at Economic Growth Solutions, part of Oxford Innovation, explores how working on your business is a means to bolster growth potential. Senior managers of small businesses find themselves working in the business day-to-day instead of working on the business from a strategic point of view. Time is something that no business with ambition can get enough of; even manufacturers. Unfortunately, we can’t simply just ‘make time’, which is why we work in a way which allows companies to continue their day to day operations, while help to furnace the appropriate action plans for the growth of their business is vital. The Manufacturing Growth Programme (MGP) gives senior officers of SME manufacturing businesses the chance to review their business and engage with the rest of their team through GROWTHmapper, an online diagnostic tool, opening up the opportunity to find out what their biggest barrier to growth truly is. Between October 2016 and April 2019, 15% of MGPs 3611 improvement projects identified that ‘Continuous improvement’ was the biggest barrier to growth identified. This would include a range of barriers from managing risk and problem solving to encouraging ideas and creativity to developing an innovation culture. Resource can also be difficult to find and afford. The growth projects the programme creates are designed to take this factor into account and aim to grow the business in a way that can then sustain the need for extra employees. Ad-hoc feedback from manufacturing businesses also shows that some of the biggest barriers for growth for SME manufacturers often revolves around cash flow, time and resources. We often receive feedback from our clients saying that if it wasn’t for the grant, they would struggle to complete such an improvement project on a high- quality level, admitting that without the grant, their attempts at growth would lack quality, effecting negatively the impact their growth effort would actually have on their business. Accessing external support to be able to work on your business is never a negative, you just need to allocate some time and resources to reach the maximum potential from your business and the team. To find out more, visit www.manufacturinggrowthprogramme.co.uk, email, enquries@egs.live, call 01664 501301, or visit Twitter @MfgGrowthP. 22-25.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 09:55 Page 4East Midlands Business Link spoke with Martyn Knox, Managing Part- ner at Hopkins Solicitors, about the firm’s longevity, the variety of legal support and services it offers and what the future holds. 26 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk HOPKINS SOLICITORS Q&A Can you tell us a bit more about this firm’s hundred year-plus history and how your promise to provide the best personal client care has informed this journey? Our firm was founded in Sutton-in- Ashfield in 1913 by Elijah Samuel Buxton Hopkin, he then expanded into Mansfield and had significant growth during the 1980’s while supporting the miners and their families. We aren’t interested in growing into a large corporate city firm, as we want to ensure our purpose and values stay firmly rooted in our local communities. Over the years we have strategically expanded throughout the north of Nottinghamshire and have five offices in Mansfield, Sutton, Kirkby and Nottingham. Through our ability to adapt to our clients’ needs and expand our areas of legal expertise, we can proudly say we are now one of the strongest firms in Nottinghamshire. We know walking into a solicitor’s office for the first time can be extremely daunting, so we want to make sure our clients feel comfortable enough to tell us their story, trust and confide in us about the truth and their concerns, and listen to the honest advice we give them. We choose our staff not only for their legal expertise, but for their ability to build strong lifelong personal relationships with our clients that often span over generations. Can you shine a light on the legal support and services you offer for businesses? Over the century we expanded our services and have experts in almost all areas of personal and business legal support. We can help our local residents with buying property, family issues, later in life estate planning and probate, personal injury and medical negligence, employment issues, professional negligence and general disputes. But more often than not, a client will come into our firm for personal matters and then uncover that we also support a large number of local business, from independent contractors to family owned SMEs to some very large national companies that were founded locally. We become part of their ‘silver circle’ as a trusted advisor working alongside their accountants and financial advisors. Our growing commercial law team, which now accounts for almost 1/3 of our staff, are highly experienced in commercial property, contracts and agreements, debt collection, disputes, mergers and acquisitions, and employment law. How does your price transparency promise enable businesses to make more informed decisions? When our regulatory body, the SRA, announced in 2018 new requirements for law firms to make pricing more transparent, we were actually very overjoyed that this was finally happening. Not giving potential clients the ability to view, at least ballpark, costs to legal services, is an immediate barrier and immediately evokes a feeling of mistrust. It reinforces the stereotype that solicitors are arrogant and money-hungry liars. Hopkins ethos is about breaking down those stereotypes, so the reality is that we’ve been publishing many of our service prices years before it became a requirement, and even today we publish significantly more service prices than the SRA asks us to. We want our potential clients to understand what (if any) costs may be involved in legally supporting them to resolve their matter. Most importantly it allows them to budget for these costs. How many small businesses think they aren’t large enough to afford employment law support? When the reality is that for a small business, a single tribunal claim could bankrupt them. So we put together an HR retainer service that is billed monthly based on the number of employees starting at £150./month if they have less than 10 employees. The service Q&A Hopkins Solicitors 26-27.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 14:36 Page 1www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link 27 HOPKINS SOLICITORS Q&A includes reviewing existing employment contracts and handbook for any holes (and patching those holes), quarterly site visit meeting and unlimited telephone support with our employment team, not a national helpline. Most importantly it includes employment insurance, so if an employee did make a tribunal claim against them, at the cost of the claim is covered so business can carry on as normal. We confidently publish our fees on our website, in detail, so people and businesses can not only price shop but also understand if they are comparing apples to apples. How do your free seminars help to guide business owners and directors through their full business life cycle? We wanted a way to be more productive with the guidance we give, not only to our existing business clients but also to other local business owners that we may have not met. We know the best way to earn trust is to give potential new clients a chance to meet us face to face, to get to know us personally and to offer them some truly useful free advice. But we didn’t want to do a typical single topic seminar on property or employment. Being problem solvers, we know the clients that need our advice the most, are also likely to be those that are too busy juggling demands and putting out fires during the stressful phases; namely starting up, growth, mergers and acquisitions and eventually succession planning for retirement. So we decided to focus on those phases and offer advice on all the issues that we see over and over again, that can simply be avoided with a bit a planning and advice. The seminars are 2 ? hours early in morning so our guests can get back to their day-to-day responsibilities as quickly as possible. We bring in speakers that can offer insight and advice, from “how to avoid bad debtors and what to do if you have them” to “the importance of setting up your company structure in a way that is secure and financially right for you”. Our attendees have found the seminars extremely insightful, and most attend all 4 chapters so they could feel prepared for future phases. We will definitely be rolling them out again during 2020, this time not only in Mansfield but also in Nottingham. Business owners can visit our webpage on business seminars to register their interest. What plans are in the pipeline for Hopkins Solicitors? We are currently going through another large and successful growth phase, due to two recent acquisitions of other local law firms. To ensure we maintain our high service quality standards, across all of our offices and departments, we are taking this year to consolidate and maintain. To find out more, visit www.hopkins-solicitors.co.uk email info@hopkins-solicitors.co.uk or call 01623 782 080. © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM / WK1003MIKE 26-27.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 14:36 Page 2We recently spoke with Adam Rhodes, founder of Rhodes Wealth Management, and Jason Hale of Hale Wealth Management, about the recent merger between the two companies. 28 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk RHODES WEALTH MANAGEMENT Q&A Tell us how the merger between Rhodes Wealth Management and Hale Wealth Management Consultancy happened. Adam Rhodes: Since we moved into our new premises at Luke Lane in Brailsford, Derbyshire, we have been looking to ways to maximise our offering, possibly by joining forces with experienced wealth managers who offer complementary services to our own. Jason Hale has been established in the financial services industry for over 20 years and has built up a loyal client base but he and his team were working from smaller offices in Littleover and we can provide the strength to support his client base further with our company infrastructure and large back office team. Jason Hale: I first met Adam at Hart’s restaurant in Nottingham, in 2007 when he had recently founded Rhodes Wealth Management, and since then we have kept in contact as our businesses have grown, sharing best practice and supporting one another along the way. By pure coincidence we share the same personal trainer at the gym, and after several meetings at the gym began to discuss the benefits of merging into one single business and team. In terms of client numbers Hale Wealth Management was doing very well but, because we had a small team, and small offices, we could not always offer the wide variety of services which are offered by Adam Rhodes and his team. Examples of this would be the Rhodes Wealth Management mortgage offering, specialist pension planning and their regular market update events for clients, helping keep our client base aware of important changes to the global economy. Rhodes Wealth Management also Q&A Rhodes Wealth Management 28-29.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 14:18 Page 1www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link 29 RHODES WEALTH MANAGEMENT Q&A benefits from a substantial administration and paraplanning team, and a dedicated marketing and events function. This collaboration will ensure that our clients receive the highest levels of service and experience possible. What difference will the merger make to the two companies? AR: As a result of the merger, we now have three additional staff with all the added energies which new starters bring but benefitting from years of industry experience whilst with Hale Wealth Management. In Jason himself, we have someone who is steeped in the financial services industry with more than two decades’ experience. The merging of the two businesses brings together the knowledge and experience of two practices under one roof, leading us to have one of the strongest adviser teams in the Derbyshire area, thanks to their cumulative experience and specialist qualifications. JH: In purely logistical terms, we will be able to work from more professional surroundings with plenty of space to meet clients. In common with Adam, I believe in financial advice with a personal touch and we are looking forward to strengthening this together over the coming years. We are delighted to have effectively doubled the number of clients under the Rhodes Wealth Management umbrella overnight and are happy to be a part of such a knowledgeable and friendly team. How will clients spot the merger? AR: The Rhodes Wealth Management approach and ethos remains the same but strengthened by the addition of the Hale Wealth Management team. Our mission is to help our clients make the most from their money. Different clients have different aims, but we have the expertise to help everyone achieve their goals. Our bywords will remain quality, integrity and excellence. With clear guidance, we cut through the complexities of the investment world, helping clients fulfil their personal and professional visions. We will be holding more events in 2020 to ensure our large client base is kept up to date, engaged and aware of relevant current events. A bigger team only serves to further enable us to consistently deliver excellent levels of service. JH: The clients of Hale Wealth Management Consultancy will become clients of Rhodes Wealth Management and be able to take advantage of the superb meeting rooms at the new offices in Brailsford. They will have an enhanced client offering with the opportunity for more frequent reviews of their finances, market update events and an array of digital services. Rhodes Wealth Management Ltd is an Appointed Representative of and represents only St. James’s Place Wealth Management plc (which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority) for the purpose of advising solely on the group’s wealth management products and services, more details of which are set out on the group’s website: www.sjp.co.uk/products. 28-29.qxp_Layout 1 29/10/2019 14:18 Page 2Next >