The Moseley Exchange » Resources

Birmingham Bike Foundry

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:59:30 +0000

Some of us at the Exchange are bike users, either for pleasure or for getting around in Birmingham – it’s greener, keeps you fit and saves petrol or bus fares. However, a bike still needs to be maintained to be safe and serviceable and we were discussing the best place to go that provides good quality repairs and servicing at an affordable price. I use a friend who runs his own repair business from home, but he’s quite busy teaching at the moment so can’t take on any more clients. However, he did recommend the Birmingham Bike Foundry and put me in touch with them. Here’s what Nancy from the Foundry has to say:

“We have a ‘bike clinic’ model we offer to workplaces where we provide mechanics and tools on site to do repairs and bike checks. We work out a budget with the workplace and do repairs up to that point. Otherwise, we do repairs in our workshop in Digbeth, 14 Rea Street South. Our mechanics are cytech trained and charge £15 for a bike check and simple repairs like indexing gears or tuning brakes, beyond that we’ll quote for any major work/new parts.

We are a worker co-op and not-for-profit. As well as repairs we take on donated bikes and fix them up with the aim of making better quality affordable bikes available to our community, and saving bikes from landfills! We also offer maintenance and cycle training as well as a tool club for more experienced mechanics who can subscribe for £10 a year and then use our workshop to do their own repairs every Thursday evening.

Our website is www.birminghambikefoundry.org.”

Maybe we can run a bike clinic at the Exchange if enough people are interested? Comments welcome.

CRM: Customer Relations Management

Matt Colleran — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:46:47 +0000

Clear and simple marketing to attract the right customers is important – but having an effective means of managing the ongoing relationship with customers is equally, if not more important. There are various systems currently available:

The system which was demonstrated to us during our CRM workshop last week was In Touch. A web-based system which is very user friendly and simple system to understand, with easy screens for adding new contacts, tracking contact history and events, product information, sales figures, marketing campaigns and report building. This system is free in part and £20 per month for use of the newsletter section
There are several systems developed by Sage including Act! and Sage CRM which can be installed or used as a web-based option. There is a guide on how to choose a CRM system which can be downloaded from their website as well as numerous demos of the various features
Another web-based option is Absolute Busy. There is a demo version available to browse
For MAC Users an option is Daylight by Market Circle
Salesforce looks to be aimed at much larger organisations
vTiger is a free, open-source option
Capsule is another online option

If you stumble across any more good ones then let us know.

Career resolutions for the New Year…

Matt Colleran — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:51:00 +0000

January; a great time for taking stock and setting goals for the year ahead!

This interesting article from the latest Creative Choices newsletter gives a useful 10 point list of ideas for focusing your energies and achieving more from your career…

Karin

Venturing into the business jungle…

Matt Colleran — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:02:13 +0000

...which way next??

Hailed as ‘without doubt the biggest step that you will take on your journey towards self employment‘, I recently booked myself onto a Thursday evening Business Awareness seminar held at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. The seminar programmed by the BCT Business Venture Scheme is ‘a chance to hear what the experts in business start-up have to say‘.

The first thing that John Kilcoyne, our expert for the evening, asked all of us to do was briefly introduce ourselves to the group one by one and say what our business idea was. There was a very broad range of ideas from personal fitness trainer to wig maker, and cake making to selling handmade vases from recycled materials.

John revelled in telling us that none of the ideas were unique enough to not have been used as the basis for a business before. Where we were all heading to was an already crowded marketplace. If we were going to carve a niche for ourselves we would need to swot up on the concept of wealth creation, familiar to all entrepreneurs.

There was a lot to ponder and some of John’s anecdotes were very thought provoking (such as the experiences of Anita Roddick when she set up The Body Shop) and kept me going for the 3 hour seminar after a long day at work.

I got home from the seminar and wrote myself a quick action plan checklist:

Call the tax office to register self – employed
Set up a transactions records system for income and expenditure plus somewhere to store receipts. (Records of transactions need to be stored, saved, kept for 5 years for tax purposes. Note: I’ll need a secure Ikea style storage solution!)
Start preparing a business plan, cash flow forecast, and marketing strategy – including a timeline with dates allocated to activity. There are templates for these online including loads of useful stuff at www.percyemmett.com for instance.
Take advantage of one to one business advice sessions (i.e appointment with Marion Taggart at the exchange)
Get business cards

Feel free to share your top tips for setting up in business in the comments below. I’d also be interested to hear about obstacles others are facing and things to avoid/watch out for…

Lauren

12:00-2:00pm Thursday 1 October 2009 T-Shirts and Suits Coffee Club

admin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 06:11:39 +0000

You’re invited to join us between 12 and 2pm on Thursday 1st October 2009 for a chance to meet David Parrish!

David has written a book called T-Shirts and Suits (available to download from his website) and is a business advisor working with creative businesses and agencies that support them. He helps his clients by drawing on his own experience as a creative entrepreneur combined with his knowledge as a specialist professional advisor, trainer, speaker and writer.

Please let us know if you plan to join us.

Tony