As everyone will have noticed, it’s been a bit hot and sticky recently. This means several things:

1. As Brits, we naturally fall into reminiscing about the good old days, when it just used to rain miserably
2. We notice that it’s more likely to be sunny on weekdays and rain at weekends (this is in fact true, and is due to pollution)
3. The newspapers take pictures of very glamorous women on the beach to demonstrate pictorially that, when the weather is very hot, glamorous women like to go to the beach.
4. Transport is horrible. End of story.
5. And we get our milky legs out, like matchsticks that have been discovered at the back of a dark cupboard.

On the subject of milky legs, I decided mine were due an airing. The government has apparently called this sort of heat Level Three, which means that the NHS has specific instructions to keep patients cooler and more comfortable (genius!) and if this is a Level Three sort of heat, then I think I have the right to wear shorts. In the Metro this week, there were several clarion calls from government and business organisations, asking for employers to relax the rules. I am thus at the forefront of employee relations, and leading by example. Besides, I’d made a foolish boast on Facebook the night before that, no matter what, I was wearing shorts tomorrow.

I went for, well, shorts; and it occurred to me that a nice Hawaiian shirt would perhaps fit, too?

I only had one meeting to attend on Wednesday; and I have to say, the wearing shorts thing did not go well. Let me explain:

1. I had visualised the meeting, and I thought it would be OK. What I hadn’t visualised was a large, open plan reception area, complete with a very supercilious security guard. I don’t think he believed for one minute that I was there for a meeting at all.
2. Also, whilst I knew the chap I was meeting (he was fine with the shorts thing), I don’t think I impressed his assistant/intern. Well, what do I care? She should have been on the beach. It said so in the papers.

I think what I have learned is this: I am by no means a suit and tie sort of bloke, but we do all sort of naturally gravitate towards an appearance that makes us all feel comfortable with one another (believe me, I was never what you’d call conventional, but even I have reverted to type). And I crossed the line. I might as well have turned up with a three-foot Mohican or a series of small children in tow.

So, the shorts are now for office use only. And I apologise to Londoners at large. The stumps are staying under cover.

I want to tell you today about a great colleague and friend of mine, Matt O’Neill, who now runs a cracking communications company, Modcomms (if you run change management or corporate communications programmes, do get in touch with him – he is absolutely first class).

We have given each other advice, work and contacts for many years – it’s very much how business partnerships should be.

Unlike me, Matt is extraordinarily focused. I like to think I’m ‘creative’, but you could be wholly forgiven for just calling me ‘woolly’. Successful companies have clear sales strategies; whereas I have blundered through by luck more than judgement. What we do for our clients is bloody excellent (though I do say so myself), but the art, no –  the discipline, of managing a sales pipeline is a bit of a mystery to me.

At least, it was until Matt told me what he was up to. It’s very simple. And it works. He’s bunged all his contacts together and he sends them a short email on a regular basis. I do that, too. But what makes us different is that he’s thought it through properly. He knows exactly what he’s going to say in his newsletter up to three months ahead. Which means he can really catch the mood of the moment every time he puts pen to paper (or finger to key).

It’s all part of CRM: having a rigorous sales plan which keeps you in touch with every possible opportunity, and in these tough times I think it’s a crucial part of making sure you never miss an opportunity.

Here are just a few of the wise words Matt has imparted to me last time we met – I’m putting them into practice too, and I hope they help you as well:

• Ideally, you want to be at the front of your clients’ minds when they decide that they want something. So communicate with them very regularly – as often as once every 7-10 days.
• If you’re going to communicate with them that often, you also better offer them something for their time. So don’t just sell – offer helpful advice.
• Be human. They’re buying from you for a reason; and unless your offer is so spectacularly different that you haven’t got any competitors; then that will be about you, your people and your approach.
• Don’t write War And Peace. Short and sweet will do just fine, provided it’s crammed full of valuable goodies.
• Think like a customer – address their concerns, not your own ones.

CRM was generally thought to be the province of larger companies, but hosted online services now put sophisticated software packages well within the reach of the small business. And the beauty of it lies in the flexibility – expanding? Scale up. Drawing back a bit? Scale down. Monthly subscription charges let you balance your books too. If you’ve got Outlook 2007 with Business ContactManager you’ve already got your own CRM system (but I bet you’re not using it to its full potential!). Let me know if I’m wrong…. Meanwhile, here’s some background reading.

Microsoft Office Outlook with Business Contact Manager

Microsoft Ask The Expert article on investing in an entry-level CRM system

Microsoft Online Services

Regular readers (yes, you, Mum) will know that I spend a fair amount of time here banging on about customer service. Today, I doff my cap in honour, because I’ve got a guest writer in to tell his story. Eamonn O’Rourke is a great friend of mine – and mighty funny too. So pop the kettle on, and take a seat. Because getting a great British Garden Shed really shouldn’t be this hard…

“I’ve worked all over the world, been to both poles, round the equator, and dived in nearly every sea. I’ve had the privilege of being immersed in cultures both ancient and modern but none of them have embraced what seems to me that uniquely British icon, that symbol that tells a man he has arrived. I refer, of course, to the Garden Shed.

Mock ye may; but while Americans are cosseted in high-tech facilities paid for by venture capitalists, and our European partners are comfortably ensconced in Brussels-funded industrial-strength villas, the British entrepreneur is in his shed, knocking out everything from steam-driven tampling w0pples to prototypes for three stage rockets. I have this picture in my mind of pipe-smoking men in sensible cardigans, reinforced at the elbows with patches of something that they slapped together a few years ago and which turned out to be Kevlar, inventing everything of any importance to us in our modern lives, all from the reassuring comfort of a shed in Solihull.

Obviously, I am now of the age where one of these structures has become essential. My wife and I make scale miniatures as a sideline for sale in America. It’s a classic shed enterprise.

It was fantastically exciting making plans with the missus for what design of shed we’d go for. The long winter nights flew by and, come spring, we were ready to choose the lucky supplier.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that the centre for this industry is Birmingham! The Midlands: the engine of the Industrial Revolution and probably the very birthplace of the shed! Until then, men just crouched under orange crates.

I placed the order for my new shed with a man with the most comforting Dudley accent and a shedside manner that was at once interested, reassuring and knowledgeable. “This man knows his sheds,” I gleefully informed the wife.

Delivery was set for 27^th May. A friend had kindly offered to help me prepare the base for the long anticipated edifice, so I got him to knock up a ton and a half of sand and cement and lay 50 slabs for the purpose. Sure he moaned, but he’s from the Midlands too; and I told him he’d be able to sit in the shed and feel like he’s right back home again.

Said shed arrived on the back of a lorry still smelling of coal, steel and cordite. The two chaps had the shed up in two hours and relieved Mrs O’ of £910, cash. As they were back on the lorry and away before you could say Newcomen Engine, my wife didn’t notice the defects until they were well north of Watford. The shed, our long-awaited, budgeted for, and vital shed, had problems!

Mrs O’ was on the phone to ‘Dudley’ to explain what the problems were. “Don’t you worry”, he said, “I’ll call the boys and get them to turn round. I’ll call you back.” Now it has to be said that my other half has a slightly short fuse; and when she’s being messed around, she does tend to mention it. I was surprised, then, that she put up with the fact that Dudley didn’t call back that day or the next. I called him two days later and was a good full minute into a monologue before he stopped me in my tracks and asked: “If you could just give me your name?” I gave all the details I could and he promised to call me back. You can probably guess how the next week or so pans out. He never called, so I started emailing. No response. I called again, getting a little testy by this stage, but Dudley is better than that: after two minutes of explaining my problem, he once again said… “If you could just give me your name?”

You have to understand that I’m really and truly not gullible. I am not a natural customer service victim. Dudley is gifted. He was able to defuse me completely by explaining that emails are not really ‘his thing’ and that ‘the girl that does them’ isn’t in. Now, I like a Luddite as much as the next man, but I was starting to wonder how he managed to take the orders in the first place.

Numerous phone calls and emails later, and three appointments for which Dudley’s boys didn’t show up, I emailed a simple statement giving him seven days to send me £320 for two joiners to put right all the problems, or I’d claim against him in the County Court.

I actually received a call from Dudley today. He made an offer, I countered it, and he has promised to call me back! I live in hope…

The whole episode highlighted to me the two areas where smaller businesses are so weak in this country. Firstly, we are hopelessly inefficient at winning new business: Dudley sticks his sheds on eBay and hopes for the best- not having thought through how he’s even going to answer his own emails. Secondly, we are prepared to put a monumental amount of effort into doing nothing rather than deal with a customer complaint proactively. Dudley’s only real choices, had he faced up to it, were to either come and fix the job or pay me to get someone to do it.

Dudley’s genius is in dealing with people. He remained calm and understated throughout, indeed sometimes so calm that I wondered whether there was a pulse at all. He had superb people skills, but he achieved nothing other than a delay. If he’d got behind the complaint straightaway, he would have had a happy customer and two more sales: neighbours either side of us having reached that certain age want sheds too. Not surprisingly, we told them to go elsewhere.

There is something intrinsically British about this. Great things, truly great things, come out of sheds, but getting the shed in the first place underlined for me  how we so often fail to get the vital basics right.

I’m a writer. I do words, innit. Pictures and graphics, however, are a magical world, into which my clumsy fingers have no right to delve. Still, I do occasionally have to mess about with photos, and luckily there is now a plethora of online graphics tools which mean I don’t have to buy expensive photo-editing software.

Since I’ve just had to do exactly that, I thought I’d share with you a few of the best freebies I’ve found online.

Photos

Sourcing photos is a doddle now, thanks mainly to the legend that is http://www.istockphoto.com/. Licensing isn’t free, but you do get a choice of millions of professional photos (and now video and flash animations, too). There’s also around 300,000 completely free piccies for your delectation at http://www.photoxpress.com/.

Editing

If you were born incapable of picking up anything more artistic than a crayon, have a go at any of the following easy picture manipulators; all of which can handle cropping, resizing and some basic effects:

http://www.picjuice.com/
http://www.drpic.com/ (effects are a bit hamfisted)
http://www.fotoflexer.com/
http://www.fixpicture.org/flash/
http://www.picnik.com/ (very slow to load)

But if you really want the daddy of online photo editing, let me recommend you to http://www.pixlr.com/. It’s amazingly fast (in fact it performs as well as desktop software), the photo processing algorithms are superb, and it comes with bags of filters and toys. I’m now a budding Michelangelo.

Special Mention

A special mention goes to http://www.reshade.com/. Resizing images is easy if you’re reducing the size of a picture, but usually goes horribly wrong if you’re trying to size a picture up. Reshade works some sort of digital magic to make upsized pictures still look as good as the original.

It’s been a fairly lazy start to the week – I had a lovely long weekend in Belfast, visiting friends and godchildren.

Along with family stuff, I got a little time to whiz round the city. As a Londoner who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s,and hadn’t been for over a decade, I heartily recommend popping over to Belfast. I won’t sugar-coat it: the centre of town has been well regenerated, but if you think the scars of the Falls and Garvaghy Roads have completely healed, that’s too much to hope for just yet.

Samson and Goliath dominate the skyline

Anyhow, politics isn’t my game – business is. Dominating the Belfast skyline are Samson and Goliath, the monstrous cranes belonging to Harland and Wolff, the legendary heavy industrial and shipbuilding company based in Belfast since the 1860s. H&W built the Titanic (and indeed lost employees when she went down) and during the War was responsible for no less than six aircraft carriers.

Manufacturing is in Belfast’s blood – the city is also home to Shorts - who were to aircraft what H&W were to ships (indeed at one stage H&W and Shorts were brought together as businesses, although Shorts is now part of the BAe empire).

H&W has done what many businesses need to do today – change everything. Its shipbuilding business is actually going rather well at the moment, but over the past 30 years it has been in general long-term decline (along with its sister site at Govan in Scotland). The management has therefore looked at other heavy industrial businesses, and whilst Goliath were decommissioned in 2003, it was brought back into service four years later in 2007 to build wind turbines and other renewable energy equipment.

If a motor manufacturer like GM had put that much forethought into renewable energy five years ago, it wouldn’t be on the brink of collapse as it is today.

Belfast is still struggling to deal with a painful history and even more painful false dawns (anyone remember John deLorean?). The ability to diversify, even in complex and high-budget manufacturing, as shown by Harland & Wolff, is the way to beat a recession and build for long-term profit.

As I write, London is yet again under the cosh of a tube strike.

It’s a proper pain for me. We have eight guests turning up for a TV studio session – studios which don’t come cheap, and don’t come with a refund, either.

I am a huge fan of London’s transport system. Our buses have improved immeasurably over the past decade. New Yorkers come here and gawp at the efficiency and cleanliness of our tube trains. Yes, really.

An American friend of mine (who runs large companies very well, so he knows a thing or two about money) marvels at the fact that the entire 1100 square miles of Greater London is at his disposal for under £10. Anywhere, for the whole day. The travelcard is indeed a joy.

Before you think I’m a union basher, let me also tell you that I’m also not a pure-bred Boris fan. There’s political hypocrisy everywhere. Boris would like us to ride bikes around town – but it’s impossible to get a bike onto a train during peak hours. Similarly, we want to discourage car use and move people onto trains – but many station car parks are punitively expensive (and can cost more than the Congestion Charge).

But transport remains the lifeblood of business in the capital. Without our tubes, trains and buses, our ability to conduct business efficiently simply falls over.

And I’m happy to admit, I don’t like Bob Crow much. Under 25% of RMT members have actually voted for strike action; and of the four unions involved in tube operations, only the RMT even held a ballot. I would also suggest that the success of the strike vote is as much down to the weakness of our current political administration as any valid grievance – with Gordon Brown’s career on a knife-edge, it’s an ideal moment for union militancy to flex its muscle.

I find it hard to accept that with jobs falling by the wayside left, right and centre; that above-inflation wage settlements can be justified for transport workers. And whilst the finance industry has indeed has its nose in the trough for far too long, most Londoners are hard-working wage-earners; not bankers. If the RMT wants to foster an “us and them” attitude, where it sees all the commuters it serves as fatcats who deserve their wrath, that’s a big mistake.

I’ve said here before that I run a business because I can. Because it gives me choices, and puts food both on my table and those of the people who work for me. I’m not a fatcat, and I deserve every penny I earn. I don’t have an offshore bank account, and I don’t resent the taxes I pay which keep London a largely lovely place to live and work in. So, Mr Crow, kindly respect the contribution that I and the 7 million other people who troop into London make to the wealth of one another and the nation as a whole, and let us all get back to work.

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, I hope I’ve been broad enough in my declared opinions for you not to be able to guess which way I vote in political elections. After all, that’s nobody’s business but my own.

I’m not going to tell you here how I voted on Thursday (although in my borough we only had European elections rather than a council ballot too). But I am going to say that I take great relish in the upheaval it has caused. It doesn’t matter for the purposes of my argument whether Gordon Brown stays or goes; or whether minority parties reach previously uncharted levels of voter sypathy. What matters is that, thanks to the economy and thanks to the expenses scandal, the cat is well and truly amongst the pigeons.

MPs are fighting for their political lives. There is the smell of battle in the air. Men and women with twenty years in comfortable armchairs are being forced to rise to new challenges. It is at times like these that real change happens – and you need to be scared into action to make the most of it.

This is also how businesses perform best.

I don’t mean that the board of a company should be a brawling melee of self-interested plotters (we’ll leave that to MPs). But you can’t beat the energy and adrenaline of pure fear to tease out new opportunities and face new challenges. If you run a business, you need to get into a mindset whereby this sort of unpredictability leaves you breathless with excitement.

Some MPs couldn’t stick the fight. Bereft of their cosy expenses arrangements, they’ve decided to stand down at the next election and watch the action from home. Some businesses will do that, too: closing their doors and giving up.

Others will play the game, even though they might lose. That’s politics, and that’s business, too. You have to have the stomach for a fight. In politics, the fight is for voters. In business, it’s much easier- it’s just a fight for customers. Just like an election, the current state of the economy is an ideal time to ask those customers “What could we do to make you a bit happier?”

I am watching a manufacturing edifice come crumbling down. As I write, the future of General Motors, a global manufacturing behemoth, hangs in the balance. At least, that’s what the media and politicians would like you to think. There’s a lot of kudos in last-minute rescues, so let’s not pretend all is lost.

GM is not going to go bankrupt, bust, to the wall. But it is going to go through a painful restructuring, beginning with a Chapter 11 filing (bankruptcy protection), which will cost money and, more importantly, jobs. My basic online research so far suggests that 20,000+ jobs will go in the US. I would be amazed if none of the 5000 in the UK went, either. Chrysler, too, by the way, is in Chapter 11, and a deal is expected to be announced in which Chrysler ties up with Fiat.

But what’s astonished me is the really big numbers.

GM lost $30bn last year. It has received $20bn in state aid in the past year, and so far as I can glean, the reorganisational plans will involve a further $30bn. GM employs a huge roster - around 250,000 people worldwide. But that still means its state deficit will be something like $200,000 for every person working at the company. I bet the average wage is a lot less than $200k. Yes, despite the fact that labour is the biggest cost in just about any business, everyone at GM could have stayed at home for a whole year, and still the company would have posted a massive loss.

This, dear friends, is bonkers. It’s what makes the numbers immaterial. It’s why overstretched, large and bloated companies are in a mighty pickle.

GM hasn’t just been crippled by the credit crunch, loss of market share, and reduced demand for its products. After all, hey, that’s just sales. No; GM is stymied also by crippling healthcare insurance payments and loan arrangements which cannot be justifiably restructured. And it’s when issues like that eclipse the day-to-day business of making something and then selling it, that things go badly wrong.

There’s one really interesting silver lining. According to a BBC report, the US government won’t be the only shareholder in GM (although it will own some 70%). What interests me is the fact that unions are also being counted in on the deal. I am neither smart enough or privileged to the data to tell you what that will involve. But anything which brings unions (who will rightly want to keep their members’ healthcare benefits) and business leaders closer together is an excellent move. If we’re going to look for a Third Way between the thorny issues of crumbling capitalism and equally uninspiring socialist spending, it can’t hurt for the two cultures to spend a little time learning the ropes from one another.

Today, dear reader, you find me on the beach. Only in the UK – I’m going green. (And cheap. The great thing about the environment is that it gives the impoverished middle classes an excuse not to mention money. We can say we’re staying in Britain this year because of a commitment to reducing global warming. Rather than our belts, which are so tight, they’d make a sumo wrestler’s eyes water.)

I tried not to bring my laptop and phone, but thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and a terrible fear of Missing Out On Something (the businessman’s equivalent of the bogeyman under every kid’s bed), I did. If you run your own business, do as I say, not as I do. Take proper time off. It’s pure egotism to think that the world will stop spinning without you. It won’t.

I will get back and find that everything is fine. In fact, last time I disappeared for a couple of days, one of my staff proudly told me that everything was going much smoother without me, thank you very much.

I am on the south coast to indulge my absolute passion; water-skiing. And when I haven’t been dragged around a lake at high speed, I can report that the economy down here is nothing short of booming. Restaurants are full, piers are buzzing, and from Kent to Cornwall we’re rediscovering that we do like to be beside the seaside (although not in a B&B. I truly don’t understand the attraction of the British B&B, which seems to have been invented for the same reason as camping: i.e. spending your holiday in conditions which are designed to be worse than anything you’d tolerate at home…)

If one effect of the downturn is that we make the most of what we’ve got, and put money into our non-urban economies (from seaside villages to local pubs or tourist attractions) then that’s a pretty good silver lining. Now, has anyone yet invented a lilo with a built-in iPod?

Mostly, this blog deals with my personal experiences of running a business. Today, though, instead of taking you to my office, I’d like to take you home. To sunny Sydenham in South London, for a quick look through my local lens at supermarket giant Tesco.

Tesco has an astonishing position at the top of the retail tree. One pound in every eight spent on the UK’s high streets goes to Tesco – a truly mind-boggling achievement. Back in the late 1980’s they blazed a trail in customer relationship management with the Clubcard. They also beat many of their competitors by splitting their products into general, value and luxury ranges. By no means first to do so, they were also quick to exploit the growth of local stores in urban areas.

The company has also worked magic on real estate: in some parts of the country, Tesco has bought giant tracts of land, building hundreds of houses around a new Tesco store and then selling the houses; knowing full well where their new owners will do their shopping. Smart. On a personal note, I also hugely admire the fact that their top man, Sir Terry Leahy, is not a private equity carpetbagger, but a man with retail running through his veins who has worked his way from shop floor to boardroom.

That’s not to say that Tesco is perfect. Private Eye, the magazine that often acts as the conscience of politics and business has recently drawn attention to alleged dubious practices in Tesco’s approach to planning permissions for stores. And as a market leader, Tesco is not surprisingly fingered regularly by the press as the main reason for “the death of the corner shop”.

Which is why I was very interested when a Tesco Express opened its doors at the bottom of my road. We’ve had a corner shop (a Spar franchise) within 200 yards ever since I moved in ten years ago (and I have to say, it’s staffed by lovely people). What would the effect of a Tesco be?

The Tesco Express has been open for a week now. A quick whiz around the shelves, and it turns out that Tesco prices are between 10% and a whopping 60% cheaper than the Spar shop. The range is massively better, particularly for fresh fruit and veg (yes, I know, I sound somewhere between Delia Smith and Mary Queen of Shops- I’m not really much of a shop reviewer…). And the staff seem to be nothing short of evangelical in their desire to help out. Despite the challenges of making the most of highish-rent urban space, there’s room to swing a trolley; and aisles are carefully lit. Queues are stamped out fast. I know, it’s just a supermarket, but it absolutely knocks the spots off the corner shop.

And there’s the problem for the “Death of the Corner Shop” brigade. What’s not to love? The corner shop has had a decade to get its house in order. Instead, the place has largely been left to rot (I’m sure some of the tins have been there the whole ten years), and along comes Tesco with a proposition that really can’t be beaten.

And before you say that Tesco are being the brutal overlord, don’t forget that other local shops are seeing increased trade as people pop by to do their weekly shop. I have no proof, but I will bet my earnings this year that footfall to other local retailers is going up fast.

Yes, Tesco has the advantage of nearly endless pockets; it’s truly a retail Goliath. But on the experience of what’s happening at the end of my road, they deserve to be there. It’s a classic business story: the price of failing to compete and innovate is a slow and financially painful demise; and provided they play fair, blaming the competition simply for being bigger is not a justifiable defence.