My initial reaction to my father-in-law offering us a paid trip to the UK for a month was to panic! Even before the excitement set in, I panicked and only because I wasn’t sure how my business was going to survive without me. Now that we are on our last day of our four week holiday, I’m yet to experience any problems or dilemmas or any reason why I need to come back! So I got to thinking that maybe we should look into moving over to the UK for a year to set up our UK transcription site. We have the website already and clearly my business was being...

Papa Ted (David’s father) has a love for Jersey Boys, the UK smash hit musical that has been running for two years at The Prince Edward Theatre, in fact he’s seen it live six times now so I wasn’t surprised when he bought tickets for the five of us to go. I was impressed though that he had paid for us to have a private suite with our own host, drinks and hors d’oeuvres, signed programmes by the whole cast and backstage treatment! I was in two minds about Jersey Boys as I didn’t really know much about the Four Seasons or Frankie...

I’ve been seeing a lot of similarities and somewhat strange things whilst I’ve been in the UK although I have visited here a few times in my life, I seem to be noticing the more trivial things, like Penguins. Penguin biscuits are milk chocolate-covered biscuit bars filled with chocolate cream identical to our much loved Tim Tams. Each wrapper has a joke or “funny fact” printed on it and imaginative, often humorous designs featuring penguins that often pastiche famous works of art.  There seems to be a lot of discussion around which...

Well Friday (2nd July) saw “me” packing frantically as most of it was left till the last minute and not because I was being lazy or putting it off, it’s because the week turned out to be more frantic than usual. Typically when you want an easy week, it generally ends up in the opposite direction! To my credit, I did pretty well considering it pretty much was a ‘grab and dash’ situation. We managed to arrive at Sydney Airport on time, check in and have some time to catch up with family before our 8.00 pm flight to Melbourne. My...

Typically my father-in-law who lives in England visits us on the Central Coast each year for Christmas but this year, he threw us a curve ball and invited us to come over to England … for free! Of course we had to accept. It was a very generous offer and one that made me slightly nauseous intermittently while I thought of travelling that far with 5.0 (Lily) and 7.0 (Oliver) and to some extent the 42.0 (David). David’s Nan is too old to travel now and had last met Lily when she was six months old so it was a great opportunity on many levels. We...

So following on from my last blog about sacking clients that are not respecting your process and paying their accounts, taking them to court is a situation that you may just find yourself in when all else fails. This is not a situation I share loosely with people because a) it’s not a nice situation to be in and b) it has been such a lengthy ordeal (one that is still ongoing) that I prefer to put it in the back of my mind and chalk it up to experience. However, a lot of my colleagues, particularly small businesses, have found themselves with no option other...

This week I had the unenviable task of firing one of my clients. The decision to let this client go was not an easy one, it really goes against the grain of any business, after all we are here to attract clients not to get rid of them. But there are times when you have to make hard decisions which are in the best interest for your business and this week was one of them. Let me give you a little bit of background. We provide a business to business service, our clients provide us with audio which we transcribe into text and give back to them in the form of...

Those readers who follow me closely know I love all things social media, so when I was given the opportunity to live-tweet at the Media140 for Foodies event I didn’t think twice. My fingers were poised, ready to send tweets via my trusty iPhone, @dictates wouldn’t hand over his iPad ! Media140 was founded by Ande Gregson in February last year as a way of bringing people together at events and conferences all over the world to “explore the future of the real-time web”. Twitter icon Mahei Foliaki ( @iconic88 ) and his partner The Internet Chef...

I should probably be blogging about this ‘after’ my next blog regarding the transition (in its entirety) from home office to commercial premises however it bugged me so much, I couldn’t wait! This blog is about a fridge! So generally how a commercial lease works is you have your rent each month plus you have outgoings which are things like general upkeep of the actual building, maintenance, cleaning and security of the common areas (you pay separately for these for your own office). On our floor, in the Highpoint Building at Erina, there...

I’ve only written a handful of blogs and generally they are very structured and relevant about my transcription business and when I read back over them, they appear to be informative but pretty boring. I wasn’t quite sure why as I love to tell a story and consider myself pretty good at it but it wasn’t until I went to a conference recently “ConnectNow” and heard two key speakers on the day, that I realised exactly what it was that was missing from my blogs. It was me. Whilst I was away camping over Easter at a hoe-down (that’s another story),...