Liverpool Fans are Making a Crisis Out of a Small Drama
They love crises in Liverpool and the drama over the ownership of Liverpool Football Club is typical of the city. They even wasted an hour or so, talking about this subject on Radio 5, yesterday morning.
Ipswich fans could complain about past messes that their club has got in, but to us, there are more inmportant things in life.
So perhaps Liverpool fans should get a life outside of football.
In truth these dramas will go on and on until the most successful clubs in the UK have some form of community ownership. I doubt it will be like that of Barcelona or Real Madrid, but then who’s to say what will happen?
Saucy Postcards Make a Comback
In a recession or time of adversity or austerity, humour always does well.
Even Bamforth’s saucy postcards have found a new champion to develop their totally British institution. It’s all in The Independent.
Winning a Queen’s Award
Metier Management Systems, the company behind Artemis, won two Queen’s Awards for Export Achievement. I think they were in 1981 and 1982. There is surprisingly little on the Internet and all I can find at present is this page from the London Gazette. There isn’t even a list in Wikipedia, which shows how much we celebrate success in the UK.
I don’t even have any photos of either the presentations or the parties at Buckingham Palace, where I met the Queen.
And Now The Good News!
BBC Breakfast yesterday carried the story that small businesses were starting up at an increased rate. The full story is here , under the unlikely title of “Explosion in Number of UK Entrepreneurs”. Here’s an extract.
The number of small business entrepreneurs in the UK has increased by 117% in the last five years, fuelling a 41% increase in the total number of firms in the UK.
Business data collected by global information services company, Experian, has found that one or two man band businesses have managed to maintain the lowest insolvency rate over the last five years compared to other types of businesses.
Charlotte Hogg, managing director of Experian UK & Ireland, said: “Our analysis reveals that the UK’s smallest businesses have been surprisingly resilient during the economic downturn and have also seen their population skyrocket in the last five years.”
Hogg explained that the recession would have been an underlying factor in the increase of micro businesses. She said many start-ups were the result of changed circumstances where people found themselves unemployed, and needed to look for alternatives.
There are so many gaps in the market and it would appear that people are rushing to fill them. As an example I’ve told many of my friends about Tommy Miah and his Raj Hotels. Some will try him and all the others said it is what is needed, as they are fed up with paying too much for inadequate hotel rooms in places miles from where they want.
The CEO’s E-Mail Address
It has been reported that the CEO of Nationwide has been forced to shut his e-mail address, because of protests, that they are charging for overseas cash withdrawals. Apparently, it has now been changed to something like ceo@nationwide.co.uk and you now get through to one of his assistants.
Apparently, there is a web site call ceoemail.com, which gives many of the e-mail addresses or those that run companies and organisations.
So if I was running a large company, how would I organise it?
The e-mail address would be obvious like ceo@megacorp.co.uk and this would then go through a strong spam filter to remove the real rubbish trying to sell me worthless fakes and then pass the rest to my assistant or one of a group of assistants, if the company was large enough or I was getting a lot of e-mail. The assistants would have software, which by just clicking a button would take action on the e-mails. Actions might include.
- Forward to Customer Services or other Departments. These would also go into an e-mail tracking system, so that it can be traced that e-mails have been acted on.
- Put on a block list as it’s abusive. The sender would be told and why!
- Reply with a simple and appropriate e-mail.
- Phone the sender and say something appropriate.
- Send them a nice postcard. I’ve always found that this is a good thing to do, as people won’t throw away a nice picture. But they may pin it to their notice board.
Obviously, you can think of a lot more responses you might use.
The important e-mails would be sent to me for personal action.
Now some companies manage to do this with letters and I can remember receiving a phone call from Sainsbury’s after I’d written in with a complaint to the CEO.
But one thing no company does is to analyse all of the messages and count the occurences of various issues. So to return to the Nationwide example, if the CEO was getting a lot of complaints about withdrawal fees, the CEO would know about it and could take action.
So in fact, if you get the system right, it’s a very powerful way to find out what your customers are thinking about and satisfy their needs!
Line-Up the Dinosaurs
It would appear that the TUC’s response to the country’s enormous deficit is to do nothing!
The dinosaurs are saying we need a few strikes to stop the cuts. If there is anything, that will put as back in recession, it’s that, as people won’t be able to get to work and will have difficulty living their lives.
On the other hand, strikes would probably be counter productive, as the general public seem to be very realistic about the need for austerity. I also think that a lot of Union leaders and members know this, so they would actually suggest cuts that are sensible and worthwhile, as it’s better to have a job rather than no job.
Do Blackburn Rovers Want This Man as an Owner?
The BBC has been doing some investigating into the prospective new owner of Blackburn Rovers Football Club.
This an except from the report.
Records show Ahsan Ali Syed has failed to pay a county court judgement of £61,500. Other debts include £7,800 in unpaid rent and nearly £1,000 in unpaid council tax.
Mr Ali is also listed as director of two UK companies which were dissolved for non-compliance.
We mustn’t let dodgy characters ruin our national game, by being able to buy clubs. I’m going to Portsmouth next week, where they know all about people who live on a different planet.
An Alternative to Toll Roads
A report today, says that toll roads are not the answer to Britain’s crowded roads.
But is an alternative here already?
The A14 is one of the UK’s most crowded roads. A lot of the traffic is trucks carrying containers to and from the docks in the Haven Ports (Felixstowe, Harwich and Ipswich).
Over the next two years, Network Rail are upgrading the railway from Felixstowe to the East and West Coast Main Lines, so that large amounts of this traffic can go by rail. Network Rail are also upgrading the rail network to Southampton and other places to put the heavy freight where it belongs and the traffic figures are now showing that rail is carrying more freight traffic of this type than a few years ago.
The problem is that rail needs depots to transfer the containers for the final collection or delivery and planning permission for these is often difficult to get, due to local opposition from those same people, who will benefit from less freight traffic on the roads.
We may not have space in this country for a new motorway, but there is often space to fit in another rail track or two alongside an existing line.
Boxing Clever
Boxing Clever is the title of two articles in September’s edition of Modern Railways magazine. They detail the works being done to upgrade the major freight lines of Felixstowe to Nuneaton and Southampton to Birmingham, so that they can take the larger 9 ft 6 in high containers (boxes) from the ports to and from industrial centres. In times of austerity and climate change, it is interesting to see how these projects which will cut out hundreds of thousands of lorry journeys are being carried out and managed using some very innovative solutions. So much so,m that it appears that the second project might be £10m under its £70.7m budget.
It is an example of very good project management and shows how by spending money wisely to remove freight bottle-necks is to the good of us all. You could argue for instance that Felixstowe to Nuneaton enhancement might be the equivalent of adding extra capacity to the A14, which is a road, that really can’t be widened too easily, as the Orwell bridge was only built for two lanes each way.
I particularly liked the way that the 1847 Southampton Tunnel was made larger. Rather than use the traditional approach and closing the tunnel for two to three months, as they did when they upgraded Ipswich Tunnel, they did it a track at a time closing for only three weekends and over Christmas 2009, saving a year on the project.
It is my belief that we can save a lot of money on infrastructure projects, like roads, railways, hospitals ands schools by thinking things through with a great deal more innovation, enterprise and by borrowing good and proven ideas and methods from other countries and industries.
The Madam On the Train
Taking the train up to Ipswich today reminded me of a chance meeting going the other way.
I was going up to London on business and as my company was paying, I decided to have a full breakfast in First Class. C always used to have kippers! It’s sad to think that you can’t do that now!
I was sitting opposite a well-dressed lady in a formal blouse and dark skirt suit in perhaps her late forties or early fifties. You’d have thought she was a high-powered lawyer or accountant or perhaps the secretary to the chairman of a company like Shell or Lloyds Bank.
As we ate, she constantly questioned me about my business, but gave little away about what she did! I told her how we sold project management systems all over the world, how we did a lot of business in the Middle East and how we had become one of the fastest growing companies in the United States.
She then asked a surprising question. Did we ever need special services for overseas clients? I said that I didn’t know and she replied that all her girls were attractive, clean and many were public-school educated. We then chatted in a more general way about business and how you made it flow smoothly.
As we left the train, she wished me good luck and left me a card! I never used it!
The Anonymous Widower 