A trip to Alton Towers?

No, unfortunately not, it just feels like we’ve been on a complete rollercoaster this week! But we’ve come through it and I’m sat here at some ungodly hour on Friday morning (rain woke me up, then mind starting racing, and then couldn’t sleep!) just reflecting on the events of the last few days.

If I can offer anyone some advice as a result of bitter experience, do not, under any circumstances, decide to make a major strategic change to your business, before a crucial event. Does that sound obvious? Of course it does! Let me explain.

We’d decide to change web designer, and hoped to move our site from our old supplier’s server to Fluid’s server by the first week in January. Which would have been in plenty of time for our first preview evening on Tuesday 17th January. In fact, the plan was that Fluid would even be able to make some minor improvements to the site within that timescale.

Well events just dragged on, and for one reason and another, with lots of emails, alleged blame by/from all parties and general stress, by 3pm on the afternoon of the first preview evening, we still didn’t even have a website to show the attendees, who were due to arrive at 6.30pm! The site had been taken off the old supplier’s servers, and hadn’t yet been built and uploaded onto Fluid’s servers. However, after some great work by Lee at Fluid, by 3.15pm we had our website back, and by 5.30pm we also had the ‘back-end’ content management system available to use, so we could enter a few activities into the database, which were of particular relevance for the town we were presenting in, during the few minutes we had spare before delegates starting arriving.
I can honestly say that was the most stressful day in my whole life. I had a pain like a stitch for about 3 days, and I’m sure it was all related, psychosomatic I think they call it. I can see how the human body can’t possibly cope with stress for long periods of time, because it seems to translate into physical pain aswell.

How had this managed to happen, when we’d tried to plan so meticulously for it? Some things are unfortunately completely out of your control, and you’ve got to allow so much more time than you ever think you will need. I was led to believe the site transfer would have happened very quickly, which in theory it should’ve done. But it wasn’t to be.

I think we made a mistake because when we first realised that things were going to take longer than expected, we should’ve just left the site where it was until after the preview evenings, instead of trying to accomplish too much. Of course, at the time, we didn’t think it was too much, and we thought we were being realistic, but as soon as things started to go wrong, we should’ve stopped moving in that direction, and just held fire for a bit longer. We were so close to not even having a site to show, and that would’ve been disastrous for our public relations. We had a backup plan (hastily made on Tuesday morning!), screen prints on powerpoint, but that would not have been ideal by any stretch of the imagination.

However, now back to the positives.

Fluid are currently looking at the site, firstly to ensure they are completely acquainted with the coding and structure. I’ve provided them with a workplan of my priorities, based on changes I’d like to be made before the site is offered to the beta testers to complete our research questionnaire (we have around 20 willing independent beta testers waiting to review the site), and before we allow various members of the media/press to access it.

However, Fluid may alter the priorities slightly, to allow them to work more efficiently, which makes perfect sense. So by mid next week, we should know where we stand in terms of timescale.

We’ve also had some fantastic feedback/emails, both from a press release I issued about our partnership with Fluid, and from requests for regional managers I mentioned in my last diary. In fact, I’m now considering amending the planned rollout we had, because we’ve uncovered some quality people, and it’d be a shame not to be able to use them. So even if you’re not based in one of the regions I mentioned last time, please get in touch if you’d like to become a regional manager with us, because we may well decide to alter the rollout programme. Thanks to those who have already contacted us, we’ll be in touch again shortly.

So back to the supposed focus of this week’s activities.

The preview evenings have been going well. We had 3 so far, and have another 6 planned over the next 2 weeks. We’ve not had massive groups, but that means they’ve been able to be quite interactive, which has given us a much better indication of how users will think, and we’ve also had some good ideas from the attendees, many of which we’ll try to incorporate into the site pre launch. So as focus groups they have been very useful, plus they have really worked well for promoting the site too.

It’s incredibly nerve-racking. I’m normally so confident, and have such a strong belief in the site. But just prior to the start time I got so nervous. Would anyone show up? What would they think of it? Would they tell us something that we hadn’t realised that would make the site useless, or certainly not as good an idea as we thought it was? Etc etc. Your self-confidence plummets, so you have to pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, smile, and wait to see what happens.

On the whole they have been very positive, although we had a real wobble at 6.30pm on Wednesday evening when no-one had arrived. Thankfully that wasn’t the case by 6.40pm. Attendance on that night was certainly down, probably not helped by the fact that Manchester United’s cup replay against Burton Albion was being shown on BBC1 - you just can’t plan for everything!

However that ended up being an excellent night in the end, albeit with a very low attendance, so all was not lost.

Next week brings 3 more preview evenings, and hopefully some progress with the site and a firm timescale for launch. Only 6 weeks to go!

Kirsty

Time to move on

It’s been a real time of change in the business this week. In some cases it’s been quite hard to deal with, but upon reflection I think it’s all been for the best and I’m sure we now have a much stronger outlook, with a committed and capable team.

Firstly I had to deal with the change of our webdesigner from accsys, to our new supplier (& shareholder) Fluid Creativity. After many emails back and forth, I think we have resolved the issue now, and hopefully by the time you read this, Fluid will have control of the site on their servers. We, (Lee, Ross & I), are trying to draw up a hitlist of planned work, once they’ve had chance to review the site’s files and coding.

There are still a few things I want sorting before Tuesday’s preview evening (yes, that’s tomorrow!), so that we can show the site in the best light at that stage.

The timing of these preview evenings now work perfectly for us, because we can use them as focus groups and see what other changes users would like to see. Again, there are certain other things that need changing before we send the media packs out to the journalists for review, so we’re going to have to consider our workplan very carefully.

In the end it was obvious that accsys didn’t have the necessary setup for our requirements, and I think this is a positive move, although probably long overdue. Unfortunately it’s going to be more stressful now, due to the timing of this handover, but it wasn’t really something that could’ve been done before. Negotiations, meetings, reviewing legal documents, more meetings etc all take time, and it’s not surprising that, although Fluid and etk first starting discussing the possibility of this relationship in mid November, it’s taken two months for it to actually happen. Of course, the break at Christmas, which inevitably probably loses businesses about three weeks of effective working time, hasn’t helped with that timescale.

The second change this week has been the appointment of a new regional manager for Greater Manchester. It became obvious that our existing regional manager couldn’t provide us with the commitment we needed.

I understand that we are really asking a lot of anyone who comes on board with us, because the bulk of the work is always going to be up front (to get the regional content researched and entered), and yet the reward is always going to be longer term, as we are providing share incentives, instead of salary. Hopefully this will change when we start trading, and we’ll be able to use a more conventional method of remuneration, but at this stage it’s a big ask.

I’m also really aiming to get the team so enthusiastic about the possibilities of this business, and I want them to as excited as I am, a very big ask!

It’s therefore only suitable for certain people who have a lifestyle that can accommodate it. And it became apparent that our first choice of Regional Manager couldn’t commit to the hours we needed, especially at this crucial stage in the business when there’s an awful lot to do in a (now) short timescale. She’s now working a 40 hour week, plus has a home business herself, and has a little girl and house to look after.

It’s been quite traumatic dealing with this over recent days, and whilst we have both finally agreed to part ways on a business level, it hasn’t been without some heartache, as we have been good friends for years, and confrontation with a personal friend is not pleasant.

However, I think this is best solution for all of us. We’re out of her hair and we are one less commitment in her life, and we can find someone who has the time and energy available. Which I’m delighted to announce, we have done!

Pauline is actually someone I met whilst at ante-natal classes, and we’ve kept in touch ever since, so she has a 2 year old boy too. She helps in her husband’s business, but hasn’t a full time role, and has the time and energy to get stuck in. So, I’m going to temporarily take over the Greater Manchester role until we can get Pauline trained. But as she was so enthusiastic, she’s already received a lot of information on email to get her immersed in who we are, what we do, her role, and our future plans.

When I was training our other regional managers, I set up a pack of information, which I can just update as each new regional manager comes on board. So this was ideal because it meant I could get the information over to her quickly and quite succinctly. The power of having systems in place! It always seems a pain to set everything up at the beginning, but it always pays dividends later when it saves you reinventing the wheel every time. In our RM pack we have:

Mission statement, first year objectives & USPs
Regional structure & planned rollout programme
RM’s role & characteristics
Overview of task
Instructions for task
PR activities – successes & planned
Share subscription letter (the legal docs)
Company structure
Copy of latest team newsletter

Which brings me onto this, we are now looking for Regional Managers for our 3 planned October launches in Herts/Beds/Essex, West Midlands and North East England. So if anyone knows any potential regional managers (preferably a mum who lives in that area) please get in touch!!

I’ve also been busy preparing the media packs which we’re starting to send out in a couple of weeks, I’ve recorded an audio cd in a recording studio (quite surreal!) and I’ve been entering content as fast as possible! Luke is going to be in nursery for an extra day a week, and will also be at one or other of his grandparents for probably half a day a week aswell, so I can dedicate as much time as possible over the next few weeks to getting us over this crucial time.

By mid February things should start to calm down and we should (in theory!) just gracefully arrive at our launch. Ha! What do you reckon?

Had a comment posted to me about last week’s blog where I was lamenting about the lower than expected % uptake we got from our promotional work. It was very useful, from someone who says he is a successful website owner himself, and all his income is derived from advertising. He stated that £2,500 spend on ‘well targeted online advertising’ should reach about 100,000 people in a year, with at least 10,000 click throughs, and that should generate 7-10% of members. This was really useful information so I thank him for posting that, and we’ll certainly be considering online advertising when we do actually launch.

However, his final comment was really interesting. He said that a website business shouldn’t be advertising offline, as ‘almost no one who is not online already will become your customer’. Is that really the case? Would appreciate to know what other’s think about this aswell.

So our preview evenings start tomorrow evening….eek, lots more opinion no doubt. Marvellous!

Kirsty

Break, what break?

Happy New Year, and I hope you all had a relaxing time over Christmas. Although I think if you run your own business it’s so hard to stop working for such a long time. For us, it was very busy indeed.

After our promotional work outside the CBeebies concerts in Manchester, we then spent days on end collating address lists, stuffing envelopes, and sticking stamps to send out a 7,000 mailing which was finally finished last Friday. This mailing is to invite those who work with children (nurseries, kids clubs, childminders, football clubs, primary teachers, tutors etc) to our preview evenings which begin in mid January – which will be another massive milestone for us.

We also found out that we’d not won the MEN Venture Awards, but we have been asked to reapply next year when we have some trading under our belt, and we wrote our first newsletter which we distributed to the team. We’ve also been designing the media packs which we’ll be sending out to the press in the next couple of weeks too. So you see we’ve had quite a bit going on!

Some excellent news is that our proposed ‘mentor’ has agreed to work with us as a shareholder in our company. So here is his first introduction….Lee Turner, MD of Fluid Creativity (www.fluidcreativity.co.uk) who Ross and I have both known for some time, and is someone we have a great deal of respect for. So we are delighted that we effectively now have our own in-house new media company, which is going to provide us with massive strategic benefits. Can’t wait to get working with him over the next couple of weeks, to take the functionality, the look of the site, and the e-marketing onto another level. Now I’ve just got to sort out our incumbent web design company, hopefully without leaving any bitter taste. I’m sure they will understand that this was just too good an opportunity for us to miss, and their experience and skills just seem to far outweigh our current supplier.

Now, back to the promotional work at CBeebies…..

I think if any other business is going to benefit from what we have experienced, then we have to be brutally honest about what happened, because we were so frustrated, when we were initially discussing this event back in Sept/Oct, because we couldn’t get any answers to our questions, and felt we were completely floundering around in the dark. So I promised I would tell you the costs and what we actually achieved, so here goes.

First of all, the costs:
Crayons 1,098
(10,000 packs (min order) – although we probably only used 7,000)
Business cards detailing competition (7,500) 510
Promotional staff (6 staff x 4 hours x 2 days) 675
10 Bags (to put the crayons and cards in for the staff) 50
Total (excl VAT) £2,333


OK, so nearly £2,500 is a lot of money to us, so what results did we get?

Well we reckon we handed crayons/cards out to around 6,000 adults with children, so we hit our target market perfectly. We have raised our profile and begun to introduce the brand to our market. Now exactly how that translates into actual members, I can’t say. And this is where it is so difficult to establish how effective marketing is.

But in terms of how many email addresses we captured (we asked people to enter a competition to win a free membership, by going to our website and entering their email address so we can email them when we launch), well we just about had enough email addresses registered for the number of free memberships we were offering as prizes – 50! So virtually everyone who registered actually gets to join for free. Therefore in terms of potential paying members, we more or less got none. 50 email addresses as a percentage of 6,000 is only 0.83%, not even 1%, when I was expecting around 5% and hoping for 10% or more. We asked them to register over the Christmas period, so that could’ve had a bearing on it, as they may have forgotten or not had access to a PC, but I don’t know.

So would we have done this work if we’d known the numbers? No, probably not.

However, we are hoping that we are still going to benefit from this work because we are now offering those members the chance to attend a preview evening, and use the site immediately, as we want to use them for market research, almost as beta testers. If they were keen enough to register then they must be interested, so let’s use that to our advantage, and see they can help us improve the site, along with the others we’ve invited to the preview evenings.

And of course there’s still that elusive question of how many will join when we launch because they’ve already heard of us once before, from a pack of crayons they received at the CBeebies concert. I fear that no-one will ever be able to measure the success of ‘profile raising’ events. It’s purely guesswork.

Just one other lesson we learnt from the promotional work, is to make sure you have all the necessary permissions you need, from the various authorities. Our (ex) PR agency were frankly terrible with this advice or information, and the promotions agency just said it was our responsibility to sort out. And whilst we thought we had spoken to all the necessary organisations, and didn’t need a licence because we weren’t trading, in fact there were many more than we realised and it caused us undue stress on the day to try and resolve these issues. If you want to know more, read my blog of 24th December because I rant on about that in there.

However, it’s all done and the money’s been spent now, and now we move onto another exciting phase of our launch with the Fluid partnership and the preview evenings. This week I concentrate on the media packs and content (again, still, I’ll get there eventually!) and also plan the final bits of the preview evenings. This year has started off as hectic as the last one ended!

Kirsty