Networking Tips
Lynette Green

Networking Tips

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It’s been an exciting week for me.  My book, 101 Networking Tips was finally completed and went on to Amazon last week.

Writing a book is something I have always wanted to do but I never really knew what I wanted to write about. I had always imagined that I would write fiction but after several years of waiting for a fantastically witty and inventive story to come to me I decided to take the non-fiction route instead.

Networking is something I have been a passionate advocate of  myself for years and since we started running the Office Drinks networking events 5 years ago, it’s something that I have been asked about a lot.

Clearly on the part of the first time networker there are a lot of nerves to overcome.  Many people are apprehensive about networking because they see it as selling, rather than relationship building.  I wanted to write something which would first of all make first time networkers feel less intimidated about attending these events, partly by making it clear that it’s not about selling and partly by providing a step by step guide to researching, attending and following up after events.

Networking is important for small business owners.  Not only is it about promoting products and services, but it’s also about finding suppliers you can trust, bouncing ideas of people, being supported and generally keeping abreast of what’s going on in the business community.

Many small businesses will start up with just one person, or just one director anyway and trying to do it all by yourself can be lonely and you can wonder if you’re heading in the right direction.  Networking helps.  It makes you get out there and meet people.  It keeps you focussed on what you are doing and it does bring in business.

Whether or not you have read the book I urge you to give networking a go. (If you’d like to take a look inside the book click here). There is everything to gain and nothing to lose.

I’d be interested to hear what your experiences of networking have been.  Have you got some advice you’d like to pass on to our readers?  What do you think has been the greatest benefit of networking?  Please leave a comment below.

Pay As You Go Telephone Answering
Lynette Green

This Week – Pay As You Go Telephone Answering For A Start Up

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We’ve fairly recently started working with a new business, who are using our pay as you go telephone answering service.  The company are brand new having just started trading at the beginning of the month.  The three owners of the business are all employed full time currently and are looking to build up the new company to a certain level of turnover before they actually go full time in the business.

Initially this business team are going to work during the evenings and weekends, perhaps taking the occasional day off from their day jobs as they want to retain the income that they currently have.

They wanted to have the appearance to the outside world of being open for business throughout the working week and wanted to look at the most cost effective option.  Using pay as you go telephone answering they will only pay for the calls they use, so for them as a start up it allows quite a lot of flexibility.  The majority of start up businesses that we work with don’t have huge volumes of calls in the first instance, they tend to build up gradually over time.  Working on a pay as you go basis means that they don’t pay for large bundles of calls that they don’t yet need.

Their calls are answered by our team here, who are handling the callers enquiries, taking messages which are then sent on via email and they call back at their convenience, this allows then to carry on without interruption to their day jobs, as they can just check their messages when they are on breaks.  So far we’ve only answered a couple of calls for them, but it’s nice to be able to share in the excitement of our client when they get their first business enquiries come through.

Pay As You Go Telephone Answering

Virtual Office
Lynette Green

How to find the right virtual office for your business.

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So you’ve made the decision to use a virtual office.  How do you then go about finding the right virtual office for your business?  It’s important to make the right decision as you could be partnering with your virtual office service provider for a number of years to come so spend some time in advance carrying out your research to make the right decision from the start.

There are a number of factors to consider and you should weigh up all of them.

 

Location

Location should be a major consideration for you in deciding on your virtual office.  The business address plays a crucial role in the impression of your business to the outside world.  You need to weigh up both the prestige factor that your business address will give as well as the likelihood of picking up business in that area.

Think carefully about who your ideal clients are.  Would they be likely to do business with a company in a more upmarket part of town or is something more modest appropriate?  Do your clients want to see you as a local business or is that not important.

 

The Premises

Although you will not be based from the virtual office it’s still important that the premises themselves, not purely the business address play a very important role.

Ideally visit the premises yourself, or if not at least take a look on Google Places to see the building and what sort of impression that conveys.

Again, just as you considered for location whether the location and address give the right impression for your business, think too of the premises.  Is the building smart, presentable, on a nice street?

Is it obviously a virtual office building or could it be conceivable that your business is actually based in there?

 

The services

Think carefully about the services you require from your virtual office.  Is it purely telephone answering and a virtual business address or do you require other services too, such as a virtual assistant service?

Make sure you clearly understand the services that the virtual office does offer.

Telephone Answering

What are the hours of business?  Do you need 24/7 telephone answering?  Most businesses don’t need this, but be clear when the opening hours are.  What happens if there is a call out of hours?  Is there a dedicated voicemail for your business?

How will messages be sent to you?

Mail Forwarding

Does the business offer same day mail forwarding?  If not find out how quickly any mail will be forwarded on.

Can you collect the post if you want?  If you do collect will you be informed if you have any mail to be collected?  How will they make contact with you? Will the mail be stored securely?

 

The size of the company

Think again about the impression that you are trying to convey of your company and choose an appropriate virtual office service provider to partner with.  A larger company with a bigger telephone answering team are likely to convey the impression of your business being considerably larger and busier with more of a call centre feel.  A small business answering service may be able to offer a more bespoke personal service.  Staff are more likely to get to know the businesses that they are working with and will often just know the information about the clients who they are answering the telephone for without having to look up information and may even get to know some regular callers, therefore becoming a convincing part of the team.

 

Make a phone call

Ring the business yourself and see how they answer.  A phone call to your company may well be the first contact a caller has with your business and it’s absolutely crucial that you make a great first impression.  Is the receptionist’s tone clear and well spoken?  Are they friendly, welcoming and professional?  Above all, ask yourself “Would you be happy if this person was answering the phone for my business?” – if the answer is no then go no further, but if the answer is yes give this company a big plus point as you continue weighing up your options.

 

Costs

Weighing up the costs is an important part of any business decision and this is no exception.  Are there pay as you go telephone answering options or are there virtual office packages available?  Think about how you are likely to use the service.  Are you likely to want them to answer every single call that comes in to your business, or just the overflow calls?  It can be difficult to estimate the volume of calls that come in to your business if you’ve never used a service like this before.  Try keeping a tally over the course of a week of the number of calls that come in to give you a rough idea.  Are you likely to experience periods of higher volume at certain times than others?

Pay as you go telephone answering will provide you with an accurate bill based on the number of call units you have paid – you are only ever going to get charged for what you use.

Virtual office packages offer bundles of minutes, and if you can reasonably accurately forecast the volume of calls you are likely to get this can work out cheaper, but not if you get it wrong.

Find out if the service can change and grow with your business.  If you are just starting up, the chances are you may not receive huge volumes of calls in the early days, but this may well increase as your business becomes more established.  Can you change your plan if needs be depending on your business requirements?

Find out if there are set up costs and what realistic monthly charges may be.

Cost is important but maybe not the most important factor.  If you estimate that one company may cost you £5 per month more, but the address is more appropriate and the telephone answering service is better it is probably worth paying the extra for.

 

Can you use the business as a both a trading address and a registered office address?

If your business is a Limited Company by law you are required to state your registered office address.  This is an address to receive formal correspondence from HMRC and Companies House.  Check if the price for the virtual office includes both trading address and registered office address if this is what you require.

 

Can you publicise the address?

Usually you can publish the address of your virtual office, but it is worth checking.  If you want to use this for marketing campaigns, listing on Google, your website, your business cards, any other marketing material do check that this is allowed.

 

Check the terms of the contract

Are you tied in for a particular length of time or does the contract work on a rolling basis.  If you are confident that you are going to be staying with your virtual office provider for some time there are often cost savings to be made by signing up for longer periods of time and paying up front, but paying monthly offers the opportunity for you to move on should you wish to.

 

There are quite a lot of factors to be taken in to consideration, but this is an important decision.  The address of your business and the way the telephone is answered is so influential in determining how the outside world views your business and you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

 

Unsure if a virtual office is right for you?  You might like to read this article on whether to work from home or an office to weigh up the pros and cons.

 

Do you use a virtual office?  How did you find yours?  Any knowledge you would like to pass on to our readers if you have been through this process yourself?  Please do let us know.

 

Business Address
Lynette Green

This week in Virtual Head Office…a business address for an online retailer

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Not all of our clients take up multiple services, some will use just one or two.  This week I’ve decided to talk about one of these clients, an online retailer that we provide a business address service for.

We’ve worked with this busy home based business owner for about two and a half years and have got to know him pretty well over this time.  As is often the case it’s getting to know our clients personally that often makes our work all the more rewarding as we get to find out what a difference our service means to them.

The first time we met the business owner, he arrived at our office seeming rather troubled, the night before his garage had been burgled and some of his stock had been stolen.  He explained that he had been looking at taking up a business address for some time as he was aware that having his home address on his website, as all websites are legally obliged to do, was a bit of a security risk.  Although his home address was not where he stored the majority of his stock he was worried that the outside world would perceive his stock to be held there and he felt that this put him at risk.  The burglary, unfortunately had been the catalyst for him making the move to actually finding a virtual office to work with.

So what do we do for him?  Quite simply, we provide a mail handling service, which means we let him use the address of our building as his business address.  He can use this address on his website, on his business cards, his headed paper, his marketing material, wherever he wants to use it.  The address is a realistic one as we are in a multi-occupancy building with lots of small businesses based within it.  It’s also a lovely Georgian building on a very nice street.

We receive his post for him and as he lives locally to us, he chooses to come in and collect the post rather than have us forward it on to him.  His post can be anything from usual correspondence to items that have been purchased via his website being returned.  We receive it all here, store it securely and then let him know he has items to collect and then wait for him to call in.  In the meantime, he carries on working from home, enjoying the benefits of being near to his young family, having no commute and in general having a good work life balance

We always enjoy seeing our clients face to face when they come in to collect post from their business address and especially nice to see the smile that is always on his face these days.

Small Business Brand
Lynette Green

How To Reinforce Your Small Business Brand Without Spending A Penny

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Everyday Ideas To Promote Your Brand Without Spending Money

It’s difficult to measure the value of your company brand, but one thing is for sure if you have succeeded in developing a strong brand it will engender confidence in your business and help you win and secure clients. If you don’t really have a brand to speak of it will require more effort to develop business.

As small business owners, many of us will be convinced of the importance of a strong brand already, yet the challenge is often how to reinforce that brand on a budget.  Here are a handful of small ideas that everyone can do to reinforce their small business brand.

  1. Your brand is about so much more than your logo. If you haven’t already, ask yourself what kind of values your small business brand stands for and then make sure that you reflect that, in your actions, in the way you treat your customers, in the way you dress and present yourself in general.  If you employ staff make sure that you convey your message to them as well so that they emulate you and your business brand.
  2. Tell people. Get out there and network.  There are many low cost or even free networking events happening all over the country.  If you haven’t already attended any then get out there and start spreading the word about your brand.  It’s important to note here that whilst it’s important to get your message across you should always be polite and respectful to the other people you are networking with, listen to what they are saying and take a genuine interest in them.  Talking over other people or hogging the conversation will not do your brand any favours so take turns appropriately, you might also find some other great businesses that can help you out too.
  3. If you’re brave enough to get out there in to the world and network face to face why not also try social media? Promoting your business through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or any of the other vast number of platforms is free and a great way to get your message out to a sizeable audience.  As with face to face networking be friendly and unselfish to be remembered for the right reasons. Post content that is relevant to your audience and true to your brand, reflecting standards appropriate to your business.
  4. Keep everything consistent. Assuming you have a logo, which every business should, make sure you are using it everywhere, not just on your marketing material, but on all your documents, on your email auto signature, your invoices and for any communication you have with anyone outside the company.  Make sure that your website, business cards and other marketing material all use the same version of your logo and that further than that you have a consistent image, for example always using the same font and overall style.
  5. Make sure your name is known. Just as ensuring that the logo and style of the business is across the board so should your name be.   This may sound obvious, however, businesses with long names may sometimes find themselves abbreviating the name, this is fine if that’s what you’re going to go with, but choose one or the other and stick with it and make sure that that name is known.  For example brief everyone who answers the telephone in your business to answer the telephone professionally using the same company name.

Do you have any other ideas to help small businesses, either in terms of branding or helping businesses to work smarter?  We would love to hear if you do.

Virtual Mailing Address
Lynette Green

What is a virtual mailing address?

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As our business is a virtual business we are sometimes asked ‘What is a virtual office and what is a virtual mailing address?  Does it mean that the building doesn’t exist?’

The use of the word virtual is really to indicate that you don’t actually have to be based in the office yourself, but a virtual mailing address, is very much a real physical address, staffed by real people! Virtual office services and providers of virtual mailing address services will be based in real office buildings, somewhere that your business could conceivably be located.  To the outside world it will seem as though your business is based within there.

You and your business can be located in a completely different area, you could be based anywhere in the UK or even overseas.  Mail will be forwarded on, scanned and sent, or if you are local it will be held for you securely until you choose to collect.

Many people wishing to use this service will use a telephone answering service as well in order to have a full virtual office service but it’s equally possible to just have a virtual mailing address if that’s all that is required.

If you’re looking at taking up a virtual mailing address service, it’s worth taking a look around to see if you can find images of the building and the vicinity if you don’t already know it.  You may not be physically sitting in this office every day, but is this an office that you’d like to give the impression of being based in.  Is it going to convey the right impression for your business?

You can usually use a virtual mailing address to receive anything that you would normally expect to receive by post and can normally use as the registered office address for your business as well.