Sorry, no blog this month – we’re working on our new website!

Posted on November 3, 2020 by nigeldavis

Thanks for checking in again, but we’re sorry to say that there’s no blog this month as we’re carefully busy preparing our new website with lots of new information about the extended services that we’re now beginning to deliver for our current and future clients. We’ll have so much to share when the new site goes ‘live’ in the next few months. There will be news about our latest commercial business relationships that are sure to help you develop your business from seed to sale, advice on strategy and planning, corporate governance, non-executive and consultancy advice, mergers and acquisitions, marketing technology suggestions (and let’s be honest, there’s still plenty of businesses struggling to get to grips with this), news oh how you can … Read More >

Pond Skater or Deep Diver – which type are you in your businesses growth?

Posted on October 2, 2020 by nigeldavis

Every business employs people who want to come to work but as a result of the hidden concerns many face, most employees only get to enjoy that experience when the boss is away. Unfortunately, most SME’s don’t have the time, understanding or expertise to see what’s going on below the surface of a business as other challenges take precedence. So, if you’re the boss what can you do to change it? There’s usually a host of things that contribute to this malaise and whilst many of the staff will be only too well aware of the majority of problems within the firm e.g. a lack of engagement, openness, motivation, job satisfaction, responsibility, belonging, trust, ethics, and poor internal communication that negatively contributes to … Read More >

Too little (Business & Marketing) planning, will lose your business tomorrow

Posted on April 23, 2020 by nigeldavis

As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc around the world, I thought it would be useful to share this blog post from 2017 that more important today than ever… I’m fairly sure I work hard to develop and safeguard my business, my children tell me this regularly – my wife has given up telling me. But this blog isn’t about how I work because I really don’t see it as ‘work’ as I get paid to do something I really enjoy, helping other business owners to see their businesses in a different way (cliché I know, but true). What I wanted to do in this blog was to show how others can benefit the same way. You see it’s not just … Read More >

Detailed market intelligence reports come as standard!

Posted on May 23, 2019 by nigeldavis

There’s a saying that, ‘nothing in life is free (if it has value)’. Of course, there is one obvious exception that we humans value every day which is the very air that we breathe. Sure, put us on a rocket to Mars and it’s feasible some large corporation might want to charge for it when we arrive to cover the cost of our ticket, but right now air is definitely and thankfully free. So, with that in mind I wanted to see if there was anywhere else I could apply this theory, that, ‘nothing in life is free (if it has value), and disappointingly I couldn’t think of another example, so by all means let me know if you can. … Read More >

Policies – Just don’t drop the ball!

Posted on July 27, 2018 by nigeldavis

We live and work in an age where the freedoms you may have once had in building your business have become increasingly tied to regulations and legislation and they permeate every discipline. Most are robust and are designed to leave no room for manoeuvre, whilst others may allow a difference of interpretation that doesn’t immediately lead to a financial penalty. Either the difficulty you have is that the policies you produce on the back of these should be clear and unambiguous and act to position the relationships with your stakeholders, be they customers or employees. Yet despite this (obvious) understanding, mistakes seem to be made from the very largest of organisations to the very smallest. A few months ago, the … Read More >

‘Revving-up’ Customer Engagement in the Automotive Sector (Event)

Posted on December 1, 2017 by nigeldavis

According to internationally acclaimed journal Automotive News, the automotive sector accounts for 20% of the World’s largest 100 advertising companies with an ad spend of approx. $47bn, and included seven automotive manufacturers within the World’s Top 25 advertisers in 2015. This resultant expenditure highlights just how much manufacturers needed to spend in order to compete for a share of the 88 million vehicles sold the following year (Source: PwC). Volkswagen spent $6.6bn and was the largest ad spender but they still failed to appear in the Top 10 automotive manufacturers on brand value after the emissions scandal hit the news in 2015. So, we can’t underestimate the importance of automotive marketing to the consumer which will be the subject of … Read More >

Just Good Old Fashioned Customer Service

Posted on March 27, 2017 by nigeldavis

Businesses, particularly those in very competitive industries will often be encouraged to focus on the elements of marketing’s 7P’s model in order to stand out from the crowd. These 7 P’s are: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence; but each of these can be very complex areas that require a lot of examination and subsequent investment. Just twelve months on from the purchase of my wife’s German car we’ve returned it to the main agent for its first service. It was bought from a very large brand whose franchise is owned by a long-standing British firm which can easily ‘tick the boxes’ on five of our seven P’s. But the problems we have encountered with the remaining … Read More >

Shared objectives require defining for success

Posted on February 18, 2017 by nigeldavis

I’ve been running my consultancy for many years now, 14 to be precise and during this time we’ve been lucky enough to work with many wonderful people. I used to think that this was just good luck on our part until recently when I started to question this element we refer to as ‘luck’. In fact I recall one business owner saying to me during a car journey that “the harder he worked, the luckier he seemed to get”. I hadn’t heard this before and so it struck me as being very insightful. But since that time I’ve thought about this even further. Take for example my comment about being ‘lucky enough’ to work with many wonderful people which really … Read More >

It’s time to treat your data much more seriously

Posted on December 9, 2016 by nigeldavis

In October I wrote a blog about the introduction of new data regulations that will come into force for UK and EU businesses on the 25th May 2018. If you’ve not read it and you don’t know what this is all about, I’d recommend that you do as it should help to reassure you what needs to be done to limit your risk as a business and as a company director/data controller. It will also help you appreciate the associated risks of buying in any consumer data, namely fines imposed of up to 20 million Euros. I for one am personally delighted to see the new regulations coming into force, but I can also see that it will be quite … Read More >

GDPR – Ignorance is no defence

Posted on October 28, 2016 by nigeldavis

If you’ve heard about this and are already preparing your business congratulations, if not then you really need to be aware of the changes coming our way that will most likely affect all businesses in the UK in 2018. So what is GDPR? It stands for ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ and it is designed to bring all European countries into line on matters of personal and commercial data protection enforcing such policies on all member states (surprisingly not all have robust policies). Of course it’s long overdue bearing in mind how much has changed with managing personal data since the Data Protection Act of 1998 was brought into being in the UK. Many consumers are in the dark about how … Read More >