Blog posts of '2018' 'February'

I'm pleased to report that I have not suffered from any more cilinary disasters this week mainly because I haven't tried anything new and have only stuck to tried and tested recipes. Something that I am also guilty of as far as business goes. It is so tempting to just stay in your comfort zone in most everything we do. This week I took the really bold step of changing our advertising on Yell.com go me eh! Time will tell if this has been a worthwhile investment but at least it means that we have changed something. I'm a firm believer that businesses either expand or contract, they very rarely stand still. We have enjoyed a period of relative calm and stability for the last few years and so it is high time we made moves to expand the business hence increasing the advertising budget for this year. I will let you know how it's going in later blogs. Wish us luck. 

P.S. Well done Team GB.

Here we are getting towards the end of February so already almost two months into 2018 and as with most people around my age and above I'm wondering how on earth time passes so quickly. Totally contra to that is that with only 2 months gone of 2018 I'm struggling with thinking of anything to blog about!! This is so similiar to the reason I don't do anything like the BNI, you try and think of something interesting to say about printing or promo goods for 2 minutes every week and you'll see what I mean. Thats not even thinking about the ten minute presentation you need to do every so often. Having racked my brains and having read all of the trade magazines for interesting articles that I could summarise here I have decided to tell you about the disastrous Spanish Omelette I tried to cook last Tuesday.

Following Jamie Olivers instructions to the letter I bought my 500 grams of a creamy potato, the variety called Charlotte was recomended and since thats the name of my eldest daughter I chose those. I did however use frozen onion as it is so much more convenient that peeling and chopping the fresh equivilent. I peeled and sliced the tatties, patted them dry and cooked them for the requisite time in a small frying pan as required. I whisked the 5 large eggs with a fork and added a touch of seasoning. 

Once the tatties and onions were cooked they were duly added to the whisked eggs and then returned to the frying pan for a further 20 minutes. Everything at this stage was looking just dandy, however the next instruction was to gently release the omellete from the sides of the frying pan using a fish slice. This I did and even at this stage things were still looking pretty good. It was the next phase that spelt disaster, placing a dinner plate over the frying pan and flipping it over all seemed very reasonable but it was only having done so that I remembered why we never used that frying pan. The Teflon coating has long since been replaced with something resembling super glue and once upturned I was left with a pan with a thin coating of egg, onion and potato instead of the Teflon / Super Glue and some not quite cooked scrambled egg, potato and onion mix on the plate. My wife chipped in rather hopefully with a 'never mind I expect it will still taste good' alas not even that would prove to be the truth. 

I was able to remove the handle from the frying pan and consign the whole sorry episode to the bin, I think I will try again once I have purchased the proper tool for the job. If I can find a ready made one though I suspect I might settle for that.

All in all it still beats worrying about GDPR or getting on my Turbo Trainer in the garage!

So back to the GDPR subject again. I went to a trade show last Wednesday at Silverstone which was one of the reasons for attending as I had never been to Silverstone before and being a F1 fan it was great to be in the Wing building for teh first time. The other and I must say main reason for going was a talk being given by two people from DAMM Solutions Ltd aboiut GDPR and how it affects our industry in particular. As I had hoped this proved to be a very interesting 45 minutes which has prompted so more action on our part over and above what we have already done. We have started an 'Action Log' where we list what we have done in detail and the date etc it was done on. We have used firms in teh past for sending promotional emails and I have made sure that any contacts databases that we supplied to them have now been deleted to keep the amount of data we are controllers for to a minimum. My partner is in teh process of removing the details of clients that no longer exist from our management information system (MIS). 

Later this month we will be looking at our privacy policy with a view to upgrading it to GDPR standards. Overall we are relatively foirtunate in that the vasat majority of our business is in fact done on a B2B basis rather than a B2C basis. This makes compliance with the new regulations considerably easier for us than for many companies and industries out there. It was a very worthwhile 200 mile round trip and I think we can look forward to 24th May 2018 with a reasonable amount of confidence.