In my opinion the second half of the recession kicked off today. After a brief rally in confidence on the day the banks get bailed out by the Government (they need €22 billion to cover losses on property!), Quinn Direct and Quinn Health Care were appointed a administrator on the back of an application from the Financial regulator. Basically public confidence went down as fast as the bank shares did today.

With prices in property still being held up by the hope that they could ride out the down turn and banks increasing their charges to normal people on stupid things like current account fee’s to circumvent the income from not issuing enough new loans, things are looking grim. Think of it like after pulling on a bandage called the recession since 2008, today they finally just ripped the last bit of bandage in one fast pull and although there will be more stinging in the coming weeks and months. It’ll soon be done with and things can finally return to normality.

So whats does this mean to Joe Public?

Well a few people have been heard that they wouldn’t be receiving their wages on time from businesses who are struggling to meet payroll, other SME owners are telling horrendous stories about selling family treasures to meet payroll things look fairly bleak for some businesses of yesteryear success. Business like all living creatures die naturally or get eaten, if they didn’t the appreciation of living wouldn’t be matter so much and people would expect rather than enjoy or earn success.

But there was always going to be a rally before the final drop, this is fairly standard graphing on stock market trends. People see the light and run for it, others pull back with rational and take some of the capital off the table and catch out the short term gamble investors.

Its unfortunate but things are going to get a lot worse in the coming 6 months, many businesses will close, more jobs will be lost, I hate to say it but increases of suicides from people who’s personal measurement of worth was measured in Euros and cents, but not sense. While all this is happening however the buds from the flowers that never had the opportunity to take control of their destiny and launch a business will begin to emerge and with it once again an age of adding value in exchange for reasonable compensation.

Tonight as I ordered take away i came across an enlighten concept from an unlikely source – My local Chinese takeaway. As i finished ordering the phone operator informed me that i should collect the food from the competitors take-away and gave me directions. I was a bit surprised and she explained how the restaurant I had called was closed for renovations and they had agreed to sever their clients during the interim.

So was this a good or bad marketing strategy?

Effectively they were giving the customers to the competition was my first reaction. But then I realised I would have gone to the competition anyway, the restaurant was closed and they were the obvious second choice. So why forward on the number and encourage the competition? Well I only have one take away number in my phone and this is now still the case. I surely would have looked up and saved the alternative if this were not the case. When they reopen i will still call that number when the need arises. Also they could / should have monetarised the customers by forwarding to a traceable phone number to get commissions.

They have a now strengthened a healthy relationship with the competition and even shared staff to help them with the increased business, keeping the staff in wages during their closure.

So by passing the sale to the competitor they lost the sale and kept ownership of the customer. By putting the customers needs first they conceded a battle and won the war, in my opinion at least.

So how can you apply this to your business? Can you establish your firm as the one that your customers turn to for all their answers? Do you make friends or foe of your competitors?

I’m was really annoyed (and slightly worried) this evening.

I got a call on my private mobile this evening, a gentleman wanted help from customer service at one of my businesses. As its outside of business hours this gent decided he’d call me on my mobile… now I don’t know this man and my personal mobile number is something very very few people have and although i like to work long hours… on a bank holiday like it is now i switch off from work, totally off.

So the obvious first question was – “Ofcourse i’ll can help you. But would you mind telling me where did you get my personal number”. He told me he looked it up. I explained it’s ex directory and not listed anywhere, thinking someone might have published it online . “Listen, it’s none of your business where I got your number, I have a problem and your gonna sort it out” – He was a Guard.

Now its not that i ever mind helping a customer, but no one likes been spoken down to, especially by someone ringing you in the middle of dinner. Since this guard has gotten my number illegally through his capacity as a guard (Is there no data protection anymore?), I was worried. Not that anything was wrong, but if a cop is the type that will break one law who knows i might find myself getting pulled over every ten minutes or worse.

So i left my dinner, luckily i hadn’t sipped the wine yet and drove into work. Traced his order and called him to tell him that it has been delivered this afternoon (it was only ordered yesterday) and was signed for by… and gave him the name of the guard on duty.

So that’s how i spent my bank holiday evening and now i’m in a foul mood….

This weekend i finally got around the putting up some content and working on the design for Zatori website. It was something that’s sat on the to do list, but had never been touched. Really do people ever get to the Important but not urgent sections of a to do list… Anyway i made it a priority this weekend and so far here’s the first draft.

Zatori Website Screen Grab

Having got some great feedback on twitter we will be lightening the theme a bit, as several people i really respect thought it was too dark – something i liked, but hey majority rule on this occasion. If any readers have any thoughts or feedback on the site i’d love to hear it.

The other interesting thing we’ve done is laid our cards on the table and spelt out what two new businesses i’d be launching in 2010. I don’t thing we’ve let the cat out of the bag, but if anyone’s interested in what industries i’m looking to shake up, visit the Zatori site.

I’ve noticed lately that many UK sites that are clearly doing over the £35,000 threshold in B2C sales to Ireland, still aren’t charging their customers Irish VAT. With the country in such a mess financially at the moment surely this kind of low hanging fruit is something revenue should be focusing in on. Eventually i would guess revenue will catch on and then they will back charge the companies for the VAT they should have been charging.

So to my fellow E-Entrepreneurs if your delivering into Ireland and make over the threshold in sales, get registered to save yourself some unexpected audits and penalties.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the Brand New Mollys.ie – My latest e-commerce venture in partnership with Mollys founder Claire Lanigan. Mollys Pet Boutique is one of Ireland’s Top Pet Shop Brands.

Using a new platform and combining that with the tips and tricks picked up from other businesses in my portfolio, this is one of the most exciting projects to date. The pet industry has some big established competitors and it’s extremely populated, selling dog clothes and healthy cat food might not sound like an obvious step for the guy that spent the latter half of last year choosing my favorite bikini models, while moving one of Ireland’s fastest growing e-commerce companies to a whole new level. But the business principles and strategies are similarly aligned and i do love a challenge of taking on bigger and bigger opportunities. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

As always would love to hear your thoughts on the new site:

www.Mollys.ie

Christmas FM

Today is the final broadcast for ChristmasFM so i wanted to thank all the team of volunteers that helped us make the station such a success again this year.

Although we can’t release the official amount of money we’ve raised for the Simon Community (fighting homelessness), I can let slip that it was in excess of our forecasts. The official figure will be announced in the Irish Daily Mail.

Also thanks to our sponsors for 2009 – EBS, The Irish Daily Mail, Tesco, Lemon Sweets, D4 hotels, Webworld, Formit, TheCostumeShop.ie. Also all the presenters, Street teams, people that donated their skills in any way to make the station happen.

We go off air at 7pm today.

Plans are already bring thought up for next year to make it even bigger and better. But we’d love to hear your feedback on Christmasfm.ie

I love stumbling across great and new marketing approaches. recently i saw this marketing campaign on d-lists blog and was really impressed with this advertising / design by Publicis Mojo.

What methods could you do in your business to become a talking point?

Every found yourself In a toy store in January scratching your head and wondering why on earth after the small fortunate that Christmas Cost and the lifetimes worth of amassed stockpile of toys your child has accumulated over the festive period are you yet here you are again opening your wallet. Then you remember you made a promise to a child and you need to show them a promise is important…

Sound familiar?

Every year it’s always puzzled me how the big toy that everyone wants is always no-where to be found. Radio station talk shows advise parents where the last items could be, parents queue for hours for the chance to get one of the “last batch in”. Listen out for it this year, it’s the best marketing, that money can’t buy.

So with the speed of production and distribution in the modern economy do the toy companies really get demand predictions that drastically wrong, is it just a coincidence that it happens every single year???

Surprisingly not! Toy companies are smarter than you think, the more rare a commodity the more value is placed on it. The fact that you can’t get a certain toy makes people talk and demand go up. January is a notorious slow time in the toy industry and to combat this the toy companies have a little trick up their sleeve. They:

1. Create the demand – you promise your kid a toy for Christmas
2. Limit the supply – so you can’t get it
3. Do supply a wide range of substitute goods – If your not capable of fulfilling your promise to your kid toy companies know that in the feeling of guilt you are likely to spend even more and buy even more toys to try and compensate for your feeling of letting them down.
4. And here’s the real clincher – “But Mum You Promised” come January your back in the toy store buying that gift anyway.

And this my friends is what strategy is all about, cleverly disguised as love and affection, subconsciously toy companies are maximizing your buying budgets through psychology. So next time you find yourself puzzled of how someone managed to get more of your wallet share than you were will to part with ask yourself… at what point did you loose control and in where children are involved did you really ever have a chance of winning?

October 2009 was a great month for The Costume Shop .ie. Founded just over 2 years ago it’s grown rapidly to a point where we needed to take on an additional 50 temp staff for the Halloween period and add additional warehouse space to bring us to over 10,000 square feet.

What had me really excited however was the data. Within it’s first year TheCostumeShop.ie had the number one position in the market place for fancy dress costumes, however even in our wildest dreams we didn’t think we’d be one of the biggest Irish owned B2C e-commerce businesses in the country. In fact we were, according to Alexa, #284 in rankings for sites in Ireland.

To quantify that lets compare the data on that specific lets compare to another online company on the same day, supermarket giant – Tesco.ie

alexa data

Just to be up in the top 500 would have been a huge compliment, but to be up in the top 300, playing with the big boys and beating them was an amazing feeling. I appreciate its a snap shot in time and in our quieter months or ranking will drop down. However i’m totally energized to think in such a small space of time, without huge funding and being 100% an Irish business we had the ability to use our skills to completely dominate a market.

With a brand new online store launching at the end of November there’s a new spring in my step and i’m ready to have fun learning from and taking on a whole new industry.