Crashing around!

Yes, I’m still here! The weeks are flying by, and things are getting more hectic now as we build up to hopefully the busiest time of year for us, the run-in to the school summer holidays.
I’d planned to write this diary earlier on in the week, but an altercation between my car and a Saab (my car came off worse!) meant that I wasted virtually all of Wednesday trying to sort out insurance, arrange for a (decent!) hire car, and re-book all of my appointments.

One of the ‘joys’ of working on your own means that if anything like that happens, you don’t have a PA or admin team to do all the legwork for you.

So apart from that, what have I been up to?

Well in terms of PR we’ve been quite busy. We’ve secured quite a few articles in consumer magazines, regional press (I was on my way on Wednesday morning to a photo-call for one of them) and even the national press.

I’m pleased to say that, when I look at the figures, I can see it’s all working. And gradually we are building our profile through word-of-mouth. It’s just so time consuming!

But when I look at the unique visitor numbers, the signed-up paying members, and our rankings on the search engines, they are all showing a very positive picture. That makes it a lot easier to keep going through the hard slog, because we’re now starting to see some results from all our efforts.

A couple of months ago, when we were still only a couple of months’ old, it was hard to keep that adrenaline going. You had to maintain your self-belief, even though you couldn’t prove anything, and you didn’t know whether the decisions you were making were the right ones.

The results take a while to come, and that’s been hard for me because I’m not the most patient of people!

We’ve been planning to do this for ages, and we’ve finally just added an email sign-up field to our home page. This means we can capture data, even if someone doesn’t join up when they first visit us. Then they will automatically receive our monthly email newsletter, and hopefully we will convert them at a later date.

I’ve generally been networking quite a lot, both at formal networking events, and also by contacting some well respected industry names. We’re actually looking for a non-exec chairman, who in particular is going to be able to provide contacts for us in a certain aspect of our planned future strategy.

It’s quite difficult, because we want to do something that I don’t think has been done before, and so there’s no single person who will have all the knowledge we need. But hopefully if we can find someone who’s high profile, has a good understanding of e-commerce and B2C marketing, and has plenty of contacts, then we’ll be delighted.

Unfortunately headhunters don’t generally charge on a results basis, they work on a retainer. And so that avenue has been closed to us, simply due to lack of available cash to finance that huge cost. Recruitment consultants, who do generally charge on results, don’t appear to have the right calibre of candidate for us.

And so it just comes down to lots of networking, ‘putting the word out’ and asking people if they know of anyone. We’re in contact with a couple of people – but if you know anyone, please pass their details onto us! In the true entrepreneurial spirit of start-ups, we’re offering a share incentive to anyone who comes on board.

Until next time, when the summer holidays will be upon us..!

Kirsty