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thepensioncounter.com; an insight into early stage business

Chadwick’s Daniel Harvey takes us through his experience of launching a start-up technology business: thepensioncounter.com

It is important to keep learning in business. Norfolk has some of the UK’s most innovative and ambitious small businesses. Here we look at an example of the lessons and highs that come from running a project from the ground up.

Daniel Harvey is the Special Projects lead at UEA-based advisory firm Chadwicks. Joining as a graduate trainee in January 2014, he founded thepensioncounter.com. the following year when he saw a need to help payroll bureaux, accountants and employers comply with workplace pension reforms.

Here Daniel shares the highs and lows of building a business to meet a new market.

How did the project start?

“I was helping one of our corporate clients with their pension scheme. I soon realised how tricky the new legislation [workplace pension reform] was making the whole process of managing a company pension scheme. We like to think inventively here at Chadwicks; my idea was to simplify the processes that go on behind setting up your company pension scheme. Our aim was to make the whole thing a lot easier for everyone involved.”

“It was one of my first projects working at Chadwicks. The company is a bit different, we encourage and back innovative ideas. As a graduate, leading the project was an opportunity I do not think I would have got anywhere else. It was partly what attracted me to work here.”

What was one of your highlights on the project?

“There are many highs when setting out on a project like thepensioncounter, especially as I was given a lot of responsibility right out of the gate.”

“I would have to say my biggest highlight was Sage tweeting about our webinar. Sage is a giant multinational company with 14,000 employees with a large user base from which to promote us. Something as simple as that tweet was a great source of pride. We had worked hard and to be recognised by a multinational company such as Sage was a landmark moment.”

What have you learned most from your time working on the project?

“At Chadwicks we consider ourselves a learning organisation. We strive to keep learning new stuff and developing new skills regardless of what it is. We really champion our relationships with our clients and I think thepensioncounter was a lesson in the importance of developing meaningful relationships.”

“One of thepensioncounter’s USPs was its process. It was hassle free and required minimal engagement from businesses to streamline the process of auto enrolment. As a result we were hindered in actually connecting with the businesses we were targeting. This lack of direct contact made it harder for us to maximise the potential of the relationships we were building.”

“I think it was a very positive learning project. These are experiences that I think have made me a better advisor and a better strategist going forward.”

Summary

Daniel will be speaking about his experiences at Chadwicks Insight Masterclass on Wednesday 14th November where the theme will be early stage investing. Daniel will be joined by innovation specialist Dr Clive Edmonds, founder of Scienta Group and Saffron Myhill-Hunt who, as innovation funding manager at the Low Carbon Innovation Fund, brings her practical experience of investing in early stage businesses.

The event is free to attend.

To learn more and to register, please visit: 

https://www.chadwicks.co.uk/masterclasses/patient-capital-investing/

To keep in touch with our future masterclasses, or to sign up for  ‘Behavioural Insights’ masterclass,  follow the url below:

https://www.chadwicks.co.uk/masterclasses/

Volkswagen confirm manufacturing of the VW Beetle will cease in 2019.

Since the beginning of production, the Volkswagen Beetle has been world renowned for its ergonomic design, curved body and round headlights. Following a decline in sales, Volkswagen have confirmed that manufacturing of the Beetle will cease in 2019 after the release of two special edition models.

These are the celebrationary Edition Models. Image obtained from VW Media.

These 3rd generation coupe and convertible bugs will be released in two brand new hues, beige and blue, in addition to the standard colour collection. 

‘The people’s car’ has become iconic within its 70 years of production despite its Nazi roots. Sales peaked in the 1960’s when it became the biggest selling foreign car on the US market- a response to the 1968 Disney movie ‘The Love Bug’ featuring the autonomous and loveable ‘Herbie’.

The love bug Herbie takes on the racing competition.

The Beetle has only gone through two full redesigns during its lifetime, yet the original shape embodies the essence and true character of this Bug.  The value of the first-generation Beetle is expected to increase, especially if they have original features like the split screen.

The firm’s chief US executive Hinrich Woebcken captured fanatics devastation of the news in his comment “The loss of the Beetle will evoke a host of emotions from the Beetle’s many devoted fans.” However, he then sparked hope when he revealed “I would never say never” to resurrecting the Beetle again. Enthusiasts around the world are wondering the same thing -Is this truly the end for the Volkswagen Beetle?

The priority for Volkswagen at the moment is to concentrate on developing, manufacturing and producing electric vehicles in an attempt to fulfil their green initiative.

We cannot know for sure if this is the end of the Beetle, but we can admire its quirky charm.

Please share what your favourite memories of the VW Beetle is on our Social Media pages: @Chatsbrook. 

For more information on our products and services, contact 01603 733500 or email info@chatsbrook.co.uk today.

We were approached by Westcountry Estate Planning to help maximise their rankings on Google for a number of key terms relating to later life solutions including estate planning, funeral plans, family trusts and property protection trusts. With a new site built on Wix.com, we were asked to help optimise the site from head-to-toe and ensure that can be found on search engines, specifically in the South-West of England in areas such as Cornwall, Devon, Truro and Plymouth.

Cleaning up the site

Using a popular SEO tool called Screaming Frog, we were able to crawl every page on the website and ensure that everything was optimised to include key terms, specifically in the:

• h tags/titles
• meta titles
• meta descriptions
• meta keywords (removed)
• internal links

The idea is to have one specific page for every main keyword you want to target and not overlap with several pages. Your homepage is always your strongest page so we used this to focus the keyword ‘estate planning’ and then having separate landing pages for things like will writing, funeral plans, trusts etc

New Steps

Once the site is optimised on a basic level, we then have to look at bulking it up in terms of content and links. Naturally, a site with very good content and a lot of good links is going to outrank a site that does not. Slowly but surely, we are ramping up the content that we are adding to the site in the form of useful guides and typical questions that people would ask relating to later life planning. The links we acquire must come from relevant sources, either in the local area, or relating to senior living – hence we have reached out to news sites in the South-West of England and sites that really talk about senior life, hence we have already approached another partner at Perfect Funeral Plans. 

Conversion Optimisation

SEO is a process and it takes time not only to rank on Google (3-6 months) but also time to get everything on board for the client. Ideally, we will need to make some subtle changes to the existing content and make additions to improve conversions. Common techniques include adding a phone number and email address on the top of every page and adding clear contact forms so an enquiry is just one click away. 

Combined with good rankings on Google and a good user experience to get conversions, we are on track to making this campaign a real success.

There are likely to be many reasons and scenarios as to why you miss calls. Perhaps you have insufficient staff but can’t justify recruiting anyone else or much of your day is spent in meetings. You don’t have back up during peak holiday times or when an employee is off sick. Maybe there is a problem with the phone line itself.

Whatever it is, have you considered what image this may be portraying to the outside world? How your prospects and customer may feel when they can’t reach you and how this could have a very negative impact on your business?

Your customers shoes…

When a call is missed, there will be one of three things that your caller is experiencing…whilst reading through these it’s worth thinking about a time when you needed to reach someone you wanted to do business with.

1. They call, the call rings out before they hang up 2. They call, the line is engaged, or they are put on hold for a long period of time before hanging up 3. They get your voicemail option

Regardless of the scenario that your customer is faced with, it’s frustrating. In most cases, they are calling you to either find out more about your product/service or to discuss a purchase they have already made.

Calling for the first time

When someone is calling you for the first time and is unable to get through, it just looks like their call is unimportant to you and that, should they eventually place their order and there is a problem, they will have issues getting this resolved.

Existing customers

If they are an existing customer wanting to discuss their purchase, missing their call will leave them feeling neglected and a little helpless particularly if their call is already relating to an issue that they need to get resolved.

It’s worth remembering at this point that people will shout a lot more about a bad experience than they will a good one. Social media and our impulsive review culture is fantastic for generating sales but can also be your biggest enemy.

First impressions count…

Using a call answering service such as Pocket Receptionist will significantly improve your reputation almost overnight and even if your caller’s issue can’t be resolved on that first call, they have been acknowledged – that makes a massive difference and shows that you value them!

In order to get working on the website of our client Trovex, we had to spend some time getting familiar with the services they offer and the general get to know the general tone of their company so that we could reflect this in their content and meta-data. This is always a vital part of working with any company as we want any content on their site to appeal to their target audience.

Trovex provides superior hygienic surfaces and systems for walls, ceilings, doorsets and washrooms. All the while, their solutions work to enhance the hygiene and functionality in healthcare, leisure, hospitality and commercial environments.

Trovex’s client base was very impressive, including the NHS, and they have many years of experience. As a digital marketing company, some of these terms are very specific so we had to take time to develop an undetstanding of the product and how we could target them effectively on Google. Our keyword research and approach is moving away from very specific projects to more general times such as commercial washrooms, bathroom suppliers and hospital refurbishments.

Meta-Data

In SEO, one of the most important things to get right is the meta-date of a website. This includes meta-descriptions, meta-title and alt-text on images. In these are not all correctly optimised it can seriously damage the websites ranking potential. In fact, good optimisation of keywords in the meta-titles can be the difference between ranking on the first couple of pages and the last few pages.

We ran a standard health check on the Trovex website. From this, it became clear that each page was missing a meta-description and the images present on the site did not feature an alt-text. Therefore, we made it our priority to getting working on writing these up and adding them in across the entire site and all of its 111 pages.

Crawl Errors and Response Codes

If you want a website to rank well on a search engine, then you will need to turn your attention to the health of the websites to identify whether there are any crawl errors or broken response codes which might affect it. These are broken links on the website, broken pages and any links that are redirecting to others – but by cleaning everything up, you enable a much smoother indexing of the website.

The initial results for Trovex in the first month are extremely positive. Once the site has been fully fixed from a health check perspective, we then need to scale our SEO activity through useful content relating to hygience and bathrooms and generating links from strong, trusted resouces in the health and business sector.

Over the last few weeks this column has looked at the various stages of a marketing strategy. It’s gone from building awareness with your prospects to being found at the research or comparison stages through to the actual point of all this marketing effort: the conversion, or sale. We have looked briefly at some really big subjects and mentioned products in passing that really do need explaining more thoroughly. It is true that the devil is in the detail – there truly aren’t shortcuts to success. Marketing a business needs to be a well planned and thought-out affair, and to avoid it also being cripplingly expensive, a business must be able to understand which product might give the needed outcome. It becomes even more tricky when you factor in the chaos that is people. People are active on social media in the evening, looking at purchases on a desktop computer during their lunch hour, and searching on their mobile phone while walking the high street. Getting people (or potential customers) to your business can be like herding cats. Your potential customers are all over the place: gone are the days when ads in the Yellow Pages and local newspapers covered all bases, now your customers can be anywhere and looking for you at any time of day. Advertising success for a business now comes from understanding all of the platforms, methods and routes to your market. Over the next couple of weeks we will look at the individual tools you can use in a little more detail. We will have a look at display and brand building advertising, websites, PPC, SEO and social media in a little more detail. Each week we will take a different group of products and highlight their strengths, the best way to use them and if you are interested we will point you to some useful content on our website for more help. If you want to get started, and build the basis for a good marketing strategy you can start looking at an overview of marketing tools and purchase funnels.

FKGB Accounting was named after its founders, Farley Kaye and Gary Bloch. An accountancy firm originating from London, England, the company has moved to Tel Aviv in Israel to assist individuals and companies who are trading in both countries. With Israel having a fast moving tech, research and development and pharmaceutical industry, there is huge scope for companies to work with FKGB. 

We were approached by the client to help their website rank in Israel (google.co.il) for UK accountants in Israel. So if you are an Israeli company and looking for specific accountants with a knowledge and understanding of the UK, FKGB would be the right fit for you. This can relate to companies or individuals too and how it affects their trusts, inheritance and finances too.

Updating their website

FKGB have just launched a new website and when doing this, you need to do a full SEO check to ensure that you do not lose any of your rankings. Several anomalies can occur including missing meta-data, descriptions, crawl errors and broken pages which emerge as a result of new URLs and pages being changes. This was the first priority for the SEO work we did, going through every single page and making sure that it is optimised. We also went through over 100 images on the website and added alt-text which Google looks for to read the image more effectively. Other additions included the generation of a new sitemap, robots txt file and settings on Yoast SEO.

Next steps

As we continue with SEO with FKGB over the next few months, we have to position FKGB as the one-stop shop and the ‘go-to’ place for UK accountants in Israel. This will be achieved through the additional of regular content (one news or article per week) and the acquisition of relevant links from Israeli-based news and finance websites – with relationships already sparked with the likes of Arutz Sheva and The Jerusalem Post.

Elsewhere, we need to ensure that the search results are not just in English but Hebrew too – so we have suggested the addition of landing pages written in Hebrew so that we can cover all our bases.

In the first month, we did not only maintain the strong search results but also lifted them significantly as FKGB ranks number 1 in Israel for ‘British Accountants’ – we will therefore scale our strategy to incorporate other keywords too.

The weather has turned colder, in fact, this October was the coldest recorded this decade. With this cold weather, rodents start looking for a warm home. The best control, as with all pests, is to do what you can to avoid them becoming a nuisance in the first place. We call this prevention!

Rodents, rats, mice and even squirrels can cause a lot of damage to homes, and businesses. From destroying furniture, chewing through wires and cables to spreading disease.

Spotting the signs of an infestation

Rats and mice are certainly most active at night, therefore it is often easier to spot the signs of an infestation than the actual pests.

You may find their droppings or marks they leave as they travel along their routes, you may hear scratching noises at night, find holes (they dig extensive burrow systems); also watch out for teeth marks (rodents need to gnaw continuously to keep their teeth short). They will use whatever soft material is available to them to make a nest – including loft insulation, cardboard, so keep a lookout for shredded material.

Preventing the problems rodents cause can be easier than trying to control an infestation.

Here are a few tips that could save you from having rodents:

• Rodents are attracted to a property if they can detect potential food sources.
• Keep foodstuffs in containers with tight-fitting lids.
• Don’t throw scraps of food outside and make sure all food waste is securely wrapped and always stored in the appropriate bin.
• Repair any small holes in brickwork and holes in outside walls, floorboards or skirting boards. They will find a way to enter your property!
• Tidy cupboards and remove any potential nesting material. As we said earlier, rodents will use any soft material such as loft insulation and cardboard.
• Keep your home or business tidy. The less clutter there is the fewer places they will have to hide.
• Clean up any waste pet food or bird seed debris regularly. Store these items in containers with fitted lids and preferably above ground level.
• Keep gardens free from debris and clutter.
• Don’t put food waste in your compost bins. This is sure to attract mice and rats.
• Do act quickly and call in the professionals to prevent a larger infestation developing.
• If you have already spotted signs of rats or mice such as droppings, it may already be too late. Give us a call as soon as you can on freephone 0800 980 9609.

Don’t give the pests a chance to breed and become a major infestation. Only a professional rodent control programme can provide reassuring protection from the risk of rats and mice on your premises. Request a free survey on our website.