Month: September 2018

BigChange collaboration allows companies to allocate jobs to their partners.

It tracks all the paperwork, monitors issues like health and safety, takes care of billing and scheduling, and updates all parties on the progress of the jobs in real time – giving a sense of control and transparency.

Imagine that you run a plumbing company in Scotland. Your local customers love you and want to work with you on a nationwide basis, but you don’t have the resources to take on contracts in Wales or down in London. Through BigChange, you can now collaborate with other plumbing companies in other areas and sub-contract out the work.

I can’t overstate the potential of something like this. Small businesses can act like big companies – at the touch of a screen. They can reach an almost unlimited scale, bolting on other services and growing their empires. Think of the savings in travel costs if you could sub-contract out work at the other end of the country?

Virtual companies could be created, drawing on the expertise of other firms, using their sales and marketing expertise to grow and thrive.

UK businesses could expand overseas using this system – something that many entrepreneurs may find useful post-Brexit. You could find a contractor in Australia for your customer and watch the job being done in real-time.

In the past, collaboration like this has been bogged down in paperwork, email and endless phone calls. The mist falls over Paper Town and it’s hard to know what’s going on. With JobWatch, it’s all clear and paperless, and your partners appear like an extension of your own firm. Your customers even see the same screen if they log into the booking portal to check which jobs have been completed. Your partner company invoices you, and you invoice your customer as usual – all through BigChange.

It’s that easy.

We don’t charge our customers anything extra to collaborate, but we benefit because we believe that the collaboration feature will encourage more customers to join us. That’s the beauty of a business like this: by focusing on making our customers more successful, we succeed too.

If you are interested in receiving more information on how you can expand your network please email info@bigchange.com for more information.

All The Best

Martin

Martin Port

Founder & CEO

Tel +44 113 4571000

Direct +44 113 4570966

Mob +44 7973 671779

Email martin.port@bigchange.com

Web www.bigchange.com

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

Focus. This is the most underrated term in entrepreneurship today.

Concentrating on your core business – consistently doing what you already do well – may sound easy. The reality is that it’s very hard.

There are always distractions out there. Sometimes, these distractions are disguised as great business strategies or innovative projects. They rarely are. They are follies that suck up time and money and make you and your business less efficient.

I was reminded of the importance of focus recently, when reading about the woes at John Lewis. This is a business that is beloved by customers and employees alike. It’s been going for years, has an incredible track record, and is generally seen as the ‘rock’ of the high street. But suddenly, it’s making losses and posting 1,800 redundancies.

The management has blamed Brexit but I think there’s a different reason. John Lewis has been distracted from what it does best: selling goods that people want to buy to customers who want to buy them.

If you look at John Lewis’ model, it’s become confused in recent years. The business made an investment in Ocado over a decade ago, sustaining losses that – luckily – ended up in profit when it sold its stake in 2011. This once-in-a-blue-moon success seems to have convinced John Lewis that it is a venture capitalist, and it’s been backing lots of start-ups through its accelerator programme, JLABS. In the last year and a half, it has even moved into the service engineer space. It is my opinion that they’ve totally lost the plot there.

Can you imagine British Gas opening a department store? Or Homeserve selling wallpaper? John Lewis has no experience running a home services business. It’s completely foreign to the industry they know.

I think that all business owners, me included, should heed John Lewis’ cautionary tale. It’s easy to get carried away with a new idea. When you have shareholders to please, it’s tempting to keep announcing clever things that lift the share price that day. But it’s nonsense: long-term, the business will suffer.

I do some mentoring through Connect Yorkshire. There have been many times I’ve found myself sitting in front of someone turning over £1.5m, making £300,000 profit, with just 15 employees, who says to me: “I’ve got this great idea to do something completely different with this business.” Why? It’s because we entrepreneurs bore easily, and we love a challenge. But that’s the antithesis of good business practice.

I’m not infallible either. At BigChange, I nearly lost focus recently. A company approached me, offering to add drones to our product set. It sounded so exciting: hi-tech drone deliveries! I was tempted for about an hour but something kept bothering me: none of our customers have ever asked about drones. And I don’t believe in first-mover advantage in business. The pioneers often fail and it’s a later mover that wins the day – the second mouse gets the cheese, as they say.

As an entrepreneur, when you are considering a major move outside your comfort zone, ask yourself three questions.

1.) If the time and money it will require to launch this new idea were instead invested in your core business, listening to customers, and making improvements, would the return be higher?

2.) Have your customers said – explicitly – that they would pay for this new product or service? Not that it would be nice to have, or that it’s an interesting idea, but that they would spend cold, hard cash?

3.) Is someone already doing this better than you ever could?

I’m not trying to squash innovation. We need to be imaginative and keep trying to improve things for our customers. But we need to do that while maintaining focus on the sweet spot: the thing we are good at that customers consistently want to buy.

Right now, we’re selling our software to 25,000 mobile workers in the UK. But the UK market size is an estimated 7m people. That’s our focus, and I shan’t be getting distracted from that.

What’s yours?

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

I’ve had two issues last month that have taught me a lot about the weird and wonderful world of social media.

My first shock came last week, when I spotted a post from a colleague on LinkedIn. To spare everyone’s blushes, I won’t give too much detail but it contained an expletive, and tackled a controversial theme, referencing both me and BigChange by name.

The second post was also on LinkedIn. This one was published by a valued salesperson, who was frustrated after several appointments had been cancelled. This individual was asking if anyone wanted a last-minute meeting, and gave specific times when they were free.

Neither of these were major issues. They weren’t defaming the business. There were no sexist or racist comments. There was no nudity. Yet they both worried me, and I asked for both to be deleted.

Social media can be a brand wrecker, and I haven’t spent five years building a business I love to see its reputation tarnished by a thoughtless remark. The first post contained a swear word, which could really put off some of our clients. It was also being purposefully controversial, in a bid to get more views. That’s fine, but it wasn’t BigChange’s battle to fight, and as I hadn’t been asked permission, I was deeply unhappy about it.

The second post made us look like some small, flighty outfit just at a time when we are looking to win enterprise clients. August is always a tricky time because so many people go on holiday, but salespeople should never moan publicly about that, or tout for appointments: it just looks desperate.

I don’t monitor my employees on social media, and never will. It’s not my business what they post about their private lives – unless they reference BigChange or circumstances related to their employment. You just trust that people will use common sense, don’t you?

I’ve started questioning myself too. I recently posted about Love Island on LinkedIn – who I would hire from the show. It was a light-hearted commentary on a topical issue but again, I have to ask myself, does it show BigChange in a frivolous light?

This has all been a major wake-up call. I have enlisted the help of my employment lawyer Richard Parr from Blacks to change our terms and conditions to ensure that social media concerns don’t keep me up at night.

We now have an eight-page document that outlines what we expect from our people. It’s all pretty straight forward: no defamation, no bullying or harassment, no misuse of company information, and nothing that could damage our reputation. But having a document like this protects both BigChange and the employees, because we all know where we stand.

A few years ago I met a man called Gerald Ratner at a health farm. He became famous after calling the jewellery sold by the Ratner Group “total crap” at an Institute of Directors conference. After the speech, the value of the Ratner group plummeted by around £500m. This was back in 1991 but imagine how much faster a faux pas can spread on social media today.

I feel like we’ve just had a watershed moment at BigChange, and luckily, we’ve acted fast enough to prevent doing a Ratner ourselves.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO

We’ve just moved office – BigChange’s third move in five years.

Each time has been more painful and expensive than the last but this latest relocation – a stone’s throw from our last site – is more than just a new address. It’s a new chapter for BigChange.

We’ve invested in a lot more space, giving us the room to grow from 80 people to 150. The building is bright, painted white, and tastefully decorated. It’s the kind of place I’d been happy to invite any customer – from a small business owner to the chief executive of a FTSE 100 company.

In total, I’ve spent nearly £250,000 on this move, which has taken about three months to arrange. Having survived this hugely stressful process – which is second only to moving house – I thought I’d share a few lessons that I’ve learned along the way.

Negotiate your heart out

If you are signing a five-year lease, you should be able to negotiate for 20pc off the rental price. This will cover all the money you’ll spend on the fit out and relocating all your employees and IT. I think this is pretty standard, and most landlords are willing to offer this as a rent-free period at the start of the lease.

Call the council

When you are moving office, you could be entitled to a rates holiday of up to six months. We have now vacated our last building, although we still own the lease till January. So we called the council and took advantage of the rates break, which means we’re slashing that overhead by half. We’re also deferring rates on the new building until we’re fully moved in, which will be towards the end of September.

Never commit for more than five years

There are two reasons to avoid long-term leases. First of all, you don’t know how quickly your company could grow over the next few years. Five years is probably the maximum you can plan for with any accuracy. Also, a long lease is a liability that weighs down on your business. If you want to raise or borrow money, a 10-year lease could make you less attractive to backers.

Invest in great chairs – but buy second-hand

I want my people to feel comfortable at work. It’s important to me that feel their best. That’s why I decided to buy in top-of-the-range Herman Miller chairs to ensure that everyone is sitting comfortably at their desks. But these chairs are not cheap… they can cost £1,000 a pop. This is why we found a company to source them second-hand, slashing the cost by at least 75%.

Consistency looks professional

We have created an open-plan office here, which means all our desks are on show. We’ve invested in new desktops for the whole team but used the same second-hand sourcing partner to get the bases for us. An added bonus: these desks are adjustable so that my colleagues can choose whether to sit or stand.

Create a space that works for you

The new office has been crafted around the needs of our people. It is open plan but has secluded pods for when individuals want to call customers without being distracted. We have bought in two amazing coffee machines, and created a chill-out area, which feels a bit like our own Starbucks. We have also invested in frosted windows. We’re on the ground floor and the new rules around GDPR mean that we have to ensure there is no way passers-by could glean customer data through our windows.

Remember to budget properly

We opted for a move that was about half turnkey solution – managed by the landlord – and half sorted by us. It was the best way to ensure that the office looked and felt exactly as we wanted it to. About a quarter of our budget went on technology – sorting out the internet, installing the right cables etc. Another quarter went on desks and furniture. A quarter went on partitioning and painting the walls. The final quarter was spent on presentation, everything from the signage to our video wall, which will be used for demonstrations. A local artist, created our signage. It’s cool but understated and we love it.

Stagger your move

We didn’t try and move everyone to the new office overnight. We moved one department at a time, starting with the teams that have the least direct contact with customers. It was incredibly important to me that BigChange’s day-to-day business was not disrupted by this move. By the time we moved our customer service team, we knew there were no glitches, the wifi was up and running, which meant there was a seamless transition.

We’re all moved in to the new premises now, so why not stop by for a coffee and a look around? We’d love to see you.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO