Saturday, August 27, 2005

Make others look good (in business)

I have recently seen a few people talking about much the same concept in a number of different ways - Make Others Look Good.

That link is talking mainly about making other people look good in general - and I think this is an admirable aim. Richard Denny, who we have been working with recently says a similar thing in his books - his version is more business-focussed (though it applies to life outside work as well) - that you should try to make your business contacts look good, introduce them to useful people and even sell for them (or at least create selling opportunities) without expecting anything in return.

What goes around comes around

Although you expect nothing in return, it is rare that you go unrewarded. In the vast majority of cases, you gain. Whether it be by expanding your network, making one of your customers happy by solving another of his problems, or through the more obvious route that the person you went out of your way to help comes back and helps you.

We have mentioned before that we are working very closely with Creative Cattle, the central London photography and design studio. Recently we have been unashamedly talking them up (not beyond their abilities though - if you want to see for yourself, check out some of their digital retouching work). We work very closely with Creative Cattle and recommending them does us all kinds of indirect good:

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Sunday, August 07, 2005

Am I working now?

It was always an easy question to answer when I worked for someone else; I was never in any doubt whatsoever about whether what I was doing at a given moment in time was 'working'.

Now that I work for myself in a startup, that question is often much harder to answer. There are aspects of the work I do between 9 and 5 that are so much fun they shouldn't be called work and I can on occasion be found doing the accounts at 11pm (or, memorably hacking around with Knoppix doing some disaster recovery for a client scared of losing everything at 1.30am) when I should be winding down. It's hard to say whether it's work - I'm certainly free to be doing something else at that moment in time (and no-one - not even Duncan would think any the less of me).

What business can learn from open source

This dilemma is (for me) the crux of the point Paul Graham is making in his latest article What business can learn from open source. I feel that it's summed up perfectly in what I'm doing right this moment. I'm sat in my living room in shorts typing a blog entry on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee beside me. There are all kinds of good business reasons for having this blog, but am I working at the moment? I'm not sure - and that's what makes what we're doing so powerful.

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Friday, August 05, 2005

The Richard Denny Group : Richard Denny

We have been working with Richard Denny for a few months now - ever since we read his book
Selling to Win Richard Denny: Selling to Win

A Sales Guru

We were so impressed with the book that we got in touch with The Richard Denny Group and have received the benefit of his insight in person (our copies of his various books are now signed).

They are one of the UK's most trusted and respected training consultancies and now we can see why.

We have re-implemented The Richard Denny Group website. In the first instance, the aim was to allow them to update the site themselves and improve the download time. There are future phases of work coming up to raise Richard's online profile and launch their new services such as Denny Executive Resourcing: permanent and interim recruitment solutions. What this space!

Great testimonial

We have a great testimonial on our site from Judith Harker, General Manager of The Richard Denny Group:

"We were struggling with our website - we couldn't update it and it took forever to load. With WandD Content Manager, all our problems are solved. They are trustworthy, reliable and efficient - I would recommend them to anyone."

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Wednesday, August 03, 2005

WandD Content Manager Documentation

Our Content Manager documentation is now all available online.

There's lots of other information on there as well including:

How do I use WandD Content Manager?

The best way to get started is to read the quickstart guide to WandD Content Manager and refer to the troubleshooting guide if you need to.

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E-commerce and online stores

We have a couple of online stores on the way - it's a bit of a race to see which will be the first to go live and we'll certainly write about them when they do. We do have one site live that is the precursor to an online store: jewellery from KazAnne.

At the moment the site is all concept and contact details but sign up to get information about when the shop goes live or to hear about where you can go and see KazAnne at a show.

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