How many working days left in April?

Been a tough ol week trying to fit 7 days work into 4 but I think everybody here is ready for the Bank Holiday weekend....we still have quite a bit of work to go over  and are a little worried about the very short working week coming up but as always we’ll find a way. So little time to enter our fabulous iPod competition – have a go as you never know, we are also looking for a Prize for next month’s competition so if you have a service or product you’d like to cross promote then give me a shout.

We have been playing and looking at some new software this week, for planning and sharing ideas and for a Web to Print solution as well, I have signed up for Hubspot’s service to see how this could help our business and also am looking at other ways to improve our web position for the long term. We know what we ought to be doing but spend so much time doing it for clients we leave our own site to last. The planning issue is becoming a “need to sort” issue for us, our current systems worked fine for us while we were doing around 200 orders a month but now we are running at 400 we really need something more robust for design, web and print production. I also wanted a system that could take over our older job costing system for better reporting.

May I say the above issues are very nice to have, these growing pains I can deal with....it’s the panic that I feel if the phones don’t ring or the emails don’t ping that makes me struggle. Our sales team is doing well, Michael is bedding in fine and James seems to have too much going on sometimes, they are both selling the POD systems really well and Michael has some great ideas for an expanded version – I am now working to create a version as a demo and will keep you all posted. We had record sales last week on the back of a great month so things are looking really good, we are being realistic that this extended period of time off will affect our sales but we think we can bounce back week after next.

The design / web team.......where do I start, they make my head hurt with their acronyms and tech speak, it’s like an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation when we have a meeting but they are doing some great things with our clients sites, we have quite a few projects that I hope are about to come off and so much POD stuff it could last the year. We may be expanding our design and web team some more (wage bill permitting) so they may get a chance to get our own traditional marketing back on track, you know...old stuff like emails and Direct Mail. We are of course still getting help from Lucy Venables with our emergency marketing for which I thank her very much....John Hampson from the Newbury Weekly News has started asking me to get copy over “Before” deadlines and without Lucy’s help we’d be in trouble.

I would like to thank Newbury Round Table for the invite to their AGM 2 this week, was a great evening where I met some great guys, John O Brian MD of Dovetail, Adrian Butler from Abbeyfield and Maurice Franks from MD-Technology – I hope we can continue to work together and also help make the Crafty Craft a great success this year. Also my warmest congratulations go out to Russell Downing who has a new job as Newbury BID Manager....we wish him all the best and look forward to working with him in the new role. Tonight I am hitting Newbury with another great client and looking forward to a great meal at Indigo Bay (also clients), taking my dancing shoe’s just in case.

So that’s about it.....the analytic s I see for my blog tell me a few people are reading it but as yet I have no comments – someone this week should be the 1^st......anything you’d like to know or anything I should know would be a good start. Have a great Easter weekend!