Customer service and Royal Mail

The current programme of postal strikes is giving many businesses the opportunity to discover that alternatives are available, sometimes at lower cost. This can't be good news for the future of the Post Office or its employees. It's also giving some the chance to demonstrate their commitment to customer service by overcoming problems regardless of how they originate.

I subscribe to 'The Economist' which is mailed to me each week and should arrive on a Saturday. Unsurprisingly, last Saturday it failed to turn up. This could be annoying, but I could hardly blame the magazine.

They had emailed me on Friday to say that 'The Economist' would be distributed on schedule but they could not guarantee when it would arrive. So they reminded me that it's available online to subscribers, that I could also download an audio version or I could buy a copy at a newsagent, let them know and they would extend my subscription by two weeks.

Good to see someone taking advantage of another business's appalling industrial relations to demonstrate their commitment to their own customers.

Today, Britain stands alone!

Not for the first time, Britain today stands alone.

With the news that the US economy is out of recession, the UK is the only major economy that is still shrinking. George Osborne, shadow chancellor has suggested that this means that Gordon Brown’s claim that Britain was "best placed" to emerge from recession now "lies in tatters", with the rest of the world moving on and leaving Britain behind. He does seem to have a point.

Blogger Guido Fawkes has today published news that Labour had prepared a campaign against Osborne in the expectation that last Friday's figures would show the UK economy to be back in growth. But the numbers did not oblige.

Even once the magic 'out of recession' headlines can be dusted off, we will have a long way to go to get back to where we were - and worse, there's all that debt, both government and personal, to be repaid. As I blogged here it could take us four years for the economy to climb back to the levels it reached in 2008.

Maybe next time we're promised "no more boom and bust" instead of D:Ream's demonstrably untrue 'Things - can only get better' we'll be humming The Who's 'Won't get fooled again'.

It's all about the people?

It's been fascinating listening to comments about our new brand visuals. Fascinating because launching new visuals is a bit like a new haircut - except that we had kept the same style for 13 years. So it was a big change - at least it was for us.

It's probably one of the well known afflictions of age that we become too comfortable in our own style and therefore worry unnecessarily when we feel the need for a change. But we all worried about the spectre of change. Would our customers understand the logo? Would referrers of business recognise what we had done and why we had done it? More importantly would they like it?

We were all kind of bored with the design we had and felt that what had seemed elegant, stylish and unexpected in 1996 had become "spidery" and a bit staid in the design led "noughties". We went through a design process which took months and agonised over detail, colour and wording. And the birth was painful; not the blood-letting pain of an injury, more the nagging pain of toothache - a constant reminder that the process hadn't been completed, that we still needed to make the final design decision.

Then it was done, a glorious, cathartic moment. Freedom from the nagging indecision and excitement about the launch. A marvellous chance to redefine what we do and how we do it. Apart, that was, from the "will they all like it question".

But we'd forgotten that this was all about people. The fact that we all wore a new logo T-shirt for the party was largely irrelevant for those that came to chat, network, gossip and drink some wine. It was even more irrelevant for those on the end of a phone call or receiving an e-mail. Yes, there were some comments about letters with "smart new logo's" and "nice signs" but for most, it's been business as usual. Same people, same name, same great attitude of wanting to help, to deliver something outstanding and to leave our customers with progress towards their goals.

The fact that we feel better about how our brand looks means that we feel more positive about what we do. We all have a natural desire to be liked, a yearning to be needed but we need to feel comfortable in our own skin. And we do.

I'm off to get a nice Mohican!

Government admits more regulation bad for business

In a carefully spun press release issued yesterday the government said:

"A new package of measures cutting the costs of new laws that will benefit businesses both immediately and in the longer term, was announced today by Business Minister Ian Lucas.

"Businesses will benefit by timing the introduction of 26 regulations to take account of current economic circumstances. This will save them £3.5 billion in new costs with a longer term commitment to cut a further £6.5 billion from the ongoing costs of regulation.

So the benefit, in fact, comes from delaying the introduction of these regulations because of the current economic climate.

Costs won't be piled on businesses (and hence consumers) now, but later. Good news, of a sort. But a bonfire of regulations would be better. How about a requirement that every new regulation had to be matched by the withdrawal of an old one and that an old quango had to die before a new one could be born?

Accidental entrepreneurs...

Recessions lead to a surge in unemployment. The challenge of finding work can lead many to take a chance on self-employment, but the talents needed to succeed with your own business are quite different from those required to hold down a job. Perhaps this is why so many new businesses fail to reach their second birthday.

The following article, published in the USA, provides some insight into how 'accidental entrepreneurship' can happen - and what can follow:

A month after he was laid off in October, 38-year-old Marcus Ronaldi realized he was facing the toughest job market he had ever experienced. “I had been out of work before, but this time I wasn’t getting any calls,” said Ronaldi, a high-tech job recruiter.

In November, as he despaired of landing a full-time job, Ronaldi started taking subcontracts from other recruiters with hard-to-fill vacancies in technical or executive fields.

“At first I did it just to keep busy and to help pay the bills, while I continued looking for a job,” said Ronaldi of Daly City.

But as he got more contracts, Ronaldi began to consider himself self-employed, a conviction that jelled a couple of weeks ago when he got a tip about a full-time job.

“I turned the tip over to a friend because I was happy doing the contingent stuff,” he said

Ronaldi is an example of what Bay Area business analyst Carolyn Ockels calls “necessity-preneurs” – people who become self-employed because regular jobs are so tough to find.

“I think a lot of people are trying to fill the income gap with any skill or service they can find,” said Ockels, managing partner of Emergent Research in Lafayette.”

A July report from the Small Business Administration documents the self-employment surge nationwide. The SBA said the number of self-employed people grows about 2 to 3 percent a year when the economy is good. In 2008, the most recent year on record, the number of people working for themselves jumped 8.1 percent.

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Change is coming

It's not only Labour and the Conservatives that can borrow Obama-esque soundbites because change is indeed coming, and from all directions.

Later this week we are having a launch party for our 'brand refresh'. Going through the process of preparing for that has led us to some careful thought about just what we do now, how we do it and how that will need to change in the future.

These, of course, are questions that every business manager has to ask herself at regular intervals. But it's all the more important in our present state of economic turbulence.

In our debt-laden country we have just received from George Osborne a glimpse of the pain that we will have to endure in correcting the mess we are in - and repaying the excesses of government borrowing. Just how that will affect us all we can't know. Bad as it will be, failing to tackle the problems head on would be worse.

How will it affect us all? To borrow a thought from Douglas Adams, "it's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply".

Business life? Stressful, worrying, uncertain, carrying the constant risk of failure, always full of surprises. And we love it.

VAT next?

Next week at the Conservative Party conference it is likely that the Cameron team will reveal some of their plans for tackling the public sector deficit should they win power next year.

There have already been rumours that they would increase the standard VAT rate to 20 per cent.

Alistair Darling cut the rate from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent in his pre-Budget report in November 2008. This reduction, for a thirteen month period from 1 December 2008, was designed to boost the economy and is due to end on New Year's Day 2010.

After the cut was announced there were rumours that when it ended the rate would rise beyond 17.5 per cent - the Treasury had been considering options for doing so.

Speculation that the Conservatives would raise the VAT rate to 20 per cent should therefore be no surprise.

When VAT was introduced in the UK in 1973 the rate was 10 per cent. It has been 17.5 per cent since 1991; the average standard rate across the EU is currently 19.5 per cent.