The challenge is to get the new business up and running and producing a salary for you before the money runs out.  Solutions may include finding a suitable business partner to spread the risk; borrowing money; taking another job to support the growth of the business; inheriting wealth; and many others. One preferred method of starting a business often chosen by those who don’t want to end up in debt is to start from scratch very modestly.  The problem with this is that by the time it is paying you enough to live on, there is a second challenge to bring the business up to a critical mass where it can start to realise its potential.

There is no one easy answer, unless of course you do inherit money at the opportune moment.  If you are in the west London area around Richmond upon Thames, we may be able to help to launch your business idea.  As a business development agency we have the know-how and the infrastructure to accelerate your business start up.  We can offer a package of benefits worth up to £5,000 per year to get you started.  In some cases we can even pay you a salary while you set your business up.

If you would like to discuss this in more details and hear about our successful track record in this area of business hothousing, email to contactus@salesnet.ltd.uk with the subject Starting a Business; outline your business idea and a consultant will contact you for a confidential chat.

Most business-to-business audiences for high-end products and services are counted in the thousands, rather than tens of thousands.  The justification for buying the same companies over and over again across the years seems lacking, when these records could be updated and validated, creating a valuable asset.  If universe data was in endless supply this would be a different proposition.  It would then be possible to buy data to fulfil a target objective and go back for more the next month without duplicating the previous set.  Consumer data can be thought of in this way.  We don’t mind who buys the household products and services we may have on offer because there is always someone else who will do the same, tomorrow, next week, next year.  We don’t need to know anything about them, whether or not they have changed their names or moved house. But the companies that represent our future business partners should be seen in a different light. Business-to-business data should be farmed rather than quarried; carefully tended to form a valuable source of future business revenue.

In the past companies would often turn away from the task of developing in-house lists in favour of the short-term approach of buying-in yet another batch of names from a variety of providers.  But change is afoot.  Could it be that harsh times have brought a sea change in data practice?  More and more marketing and sales directors are seeing the value of building and maintaining data lists as an investment in future sales.  It matters not whether these details are kept in a complex CRM system or in a simple database programme for sales and marketing use.  The importance of this changing attitude to data is that it represents a real engagement with target markets, with long-term objectives that will underpin economic recovery in the business-to-business sectors.

To call a company in the UK is often to be met by an automated switch with a circumlocution algorithm that Dickens would have marvelled at.  If we are lucky, we engage with voice recognition software which at least causes merriment in the office even if it doesn’t get us any further with our goal.   If we do get a human being on the end of the phone, such reception staff are often guarded and suspicious.  Their job seeming to be to make sure that telephone calls into the organisation never reach their destination; when logic suggests the reverse must have been the original intention. Maybe they are targeted on this by their management and rewarded on the basis of the number of thwarted calls they can generate?  There is only one situation that is worse and that is the company that is fronted entirely by a customer services call centre.  These operators are to be sympathised with rather than castigated, because they have been set up by cynical senior personnel who have put them in the firing line but not given them access to the correct information needed to satisfy any non-customer related issue.

The cost of this in wasted time must be ferocious.  The extra time needed by suppliers to reach their future customers creates a higher than necessary cost of sale which is ultimately born by the very same perpetrators of the diversionary tactics when they final buy!

The curious thing is that after obtaining contact names and numbers through a complex process of desk and phone research, these same contacts, jealously guarded by their switchboards, are often revealed to be welcoming and ready to engage with messages that are relevant to them. I have experienced this so many times that I wonder whether they know the extent to which they are being deliberately isolated from the rest of the business world. They must wonder why so few people call them.

The other curious thing about this behaviour is that it is, one the whole, largely British.  Calling into similar companies abroad does not lead to the same avenue of abuse.  Senior contacts in Europe are often readily available on their mobile phones (numbers obtained from the switchboard), a short conversation deciding whether or not the opportunity on offer is of relevance.  Of course no-names policies do exist outside the UK but they are generally conveyed in polite terms by able, multilingual receptionists.

I conclude that the power to deflect a business-to-business telephone call whether by software or by so called gate-keepers has become a compensatory behaviour that suits the British psyche.  What ever else goes wrong in their lives they can at least make sure the George Dickinson in Operational Risk has not received an unsolicited inbound call since the clocks went forward.  But is it good business?