A few weeks ago I was honoured to be a presenter on the ABN webinar Increase Your Visibility as someone who has used social media to build business success. I was a bit surprised when Suzi asked me to talk about my online experiences in the webinar, but who am I to say no to an opportunity to talk about my business, Facebook and Twitter? So I jumped in and shared my experiences. After the webinar finished I started thinking about how far I’ve come as an ABN member since joining more than three years ago. When I first became an ABN member I wasn’t really...

As I sit nursing a shoulder injury I suffered at the weekend, I have had a lot of time in between hospital and doctor appointments to think about what got me here. The game I was playing when I injured my shoulder was a friendly to signal the start of the 2010 Decoys softball season and I was excited to be using my skills again after a long winter. Softball has been a passion of mine since I was a child, so when I decided to take the sport up again last year I was thrilled to find the Central Coast had its own dedicated club – Decoys. After a few trial...

I was recently invited by Digital Citizens co-founder James Fridley @fridley to be on a panel discussion entitled “Startups, small shops and bootstrappers: the real value in social media and digital PR for small business”. Digital Citizens is an inclusive, informal organisation dedicated to knowledge sharing and discussion of social, political, ethical and professional issues related to new technologies and the social web.   So my first response was along the lines of “Are you sure you want me”? I don’t profess to be an SME, SMEG or...

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...