Remember the runners-up

You don’t have to spend a fortune

Get Your Team To Choose The Winners

Alan writes articles on the corporate gifts industry for The Corporate Gifts Company

The government has just released data suggesting that businesses could lose £21 billion every year because of cybercrime. Cybercrime is any criminal activity relating to a computer or network. This includes criminals stealing private data that is being stored by companies on behalf of their customers, including sensitive information like names, medical reports, addresses and other details.

Cybercrime has become such a problem that the government has pledged to invested £650million in their National Cyber Security Programme over the next four years. A new cyber infrastructure team will also be installed in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

What can you do to protect your business?

It’s essential to put to take steps to protect client information. Security software manufacturer Norton offers some smart advice on what you need to look our for and what to do if you suspect an attack. It’s also important to take steps to protect against the worst case scenario.

Getting Professional indemnity insurance can help cover you against claims of professional negligence. This may include losing confidential data and other breaches of confidentiality. However, check what cover you need because not all policies cover you for hacking risks and/or virus attacks on your systems.

My Destiny Inc. is a not for profit organization that has as its objective the empowering of individuals and businesses in the areas of entrepreneurship, leadership and capacity building.

Dr Peter J. Daniels is a Christian multi-millionaire, international statesman and businessman and is committed to helping people attain financial success in their own businesses. Dr Daniels has served as a director of several international companies and continues to advise many of the world’s leading organizations. He is the author of 13 bestselling books including ‘How To Be Happy Though Rich’ and ‘How To Be Motivated All The Time’. In Pursuit of Destiny’s opening session is at 7pm on Friday 4^th March followed by two sessions at 10am & 2pm on Saturday 5^th March.

This two day Conference is for both those who are looking to take their first steps into business and those who are already established in business, and is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn from one of the best business minds of our time. The Conference will be held at The Albert Hall Conference, North Circus Street, Nottingham NG1 5AA.

Seating is limited, so please register early to avoid disappointment. To register please visit www.milestonechurch.org.uk or call +44 115 822 0606.  We are able to offer a discount for block bookings.  Please call us for details.

In business though, it is not enough just to have people talking about your advert, it’s conversions that matter. One way of improving conversions is to increase the ways in which consumers can interact with your brand, using a related campaign that encourages those who had their attention caught by your advert to take more notice of the company behind it.

So how do you do this? Orbital campaigns can consist of many different aspects that all use the theme of your advert to feed back into your company. A popular advert is nothing if nobody knows who produces it, so feeding off the buzz created by your ad is essential if your campaign is to be considered a success. Here are some ways of doing this:

Create a Specialist Website

You might be able to create a great buzz from your campaign, but if the product you are trying to sell isn’t something that people would want immediately (insurance, for example) then they aren’t very likely to follow it up by clicking on to your website. If you create a special website that is specific to your campaign however it can be an effective way of driving consumer interest towards your brand and keeping you in their minds even after the end of the campaign.

This can then help to drive a secondary viral online campaign that will have your brand buzzing around the internet, not only securing more potential customers but also doing wonders for your internet marketing efforts.

Social Networking

Social networking has become a great way for businesses to interact with customers, and sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide companies with an effective way of connecting the marketing campaign with the brand. Pointing your customers in the direction of your business Twitter and Facebook accounts is as close as it comes to providing physical contact with your company over the internet, forging a community of people who have one thing in common, your brand. By getting people to “Like” you on Facebook, you will also be getting them to tell all of their “Friends” about your company and your campaign, opening yourself up to potentially thousands more people who will interact with your company.

Promotional Products

If you have created a campaign with memorable characters or catchphrases, using relevant promotional products and promotional gifts can be an effective way of capitalising on the success of your campaign. It is providing potential customers not only with a further interaction with your brand, but putting something physical into the hands of consumers who have only had a virtual relationship with your company up until that point.

Improving the interaction between those who are interested in your advertising campaign and your brand is a key way of increasing conversions. A popular advertising campaign is a great start, but orbital campaigns are vital if those who are interested are going to be convinced to buy from you.

When you are looking at your next big marketing and advertising campaign, make sure you go orbital to improve your chances of success.

Alan writes articles on issues surrounding the marketing, advertising and PR industries for The Promotional Gifts Company. They specialise in providing promotional gifts to enhance brand awareness in marketing campaigns.

Having started her working life as a shop assistant at John Lewis Mary Portas discovered a talent for transforming big-name brands like Harvey Nichols. With true entrepreneurial spirit she later went on to write about retail therapy and in 2007 launched her TV career with the popular Mary Queen of Shops. You can find out more on her great website here.

In ‘Secret Shopper’ Portas starts by tackling fashion stores and company Pilot. The programmes contain a lot of nuggets of wisdom for wanna-be retailers or as Mary calls it ‘Fast Fashion’, I’ve listed some below:

Episode one: Fashion

• Keep your store tidy.
• When helping customers with enquiries, show people where products are, don’t just tell them.
• Train your sale staff properly to be polite and helpful. Make sure they know the status of stock.
• The culture of a business comes from the top.
• Put customers not profits first.
• Make sure the fitting room’s are staffed.
• Mary’s three golden rules of retails- A smile/A ‘hello’ and service.
• Keep fittings and fixtures clean and in good condition and build changing rooms big enough to dress in.
• Don’t let customers wait more than 3 minutes to pay, reduce queues.

Episode two: Sofa superstores

• Don’t use ‘hard-sell’ tactics, be senstive.
• Avoid misleading customers by lying about dates that sales end, and don’t make empty price promises.
• Sales people shouldn’t use a script, robots can’t sell and becomes problematic when they have to discuss something unusual.
• Don’t put sales on if they’re not genuine sales.
• Treat customers as individuals.
• Help customers find the best product for them don’t just push them into inappropriate buys to make sales.
• Ask the right questions to understand your customers lifestyles.
• Answer enquiries on the web.
• Invest money in customer service.

Episode three: Phone shops

• Don’t use confusing jargon.
• Listen don’t just tell people what they want to hear.
• Don’t baffle people with statistics.
• Show working examples of products.
• Consider new shop layouts to make people engage more with the product.
• Embrace change.

Episode four: Estate Agents

Wednesday February 9th, Channel 4, 9pm

But don’t worry, I’ll be carrying on his good work covering everything from world wide business news and new business startups to up-and-coming entrepreneurs, business tips and important dates for the diary. So please check back for updates in the near future.

If you’ve got any thoughts on something you’d like to see, either email me, or contact me on Twitter.

Charlotte Clark

charlotteelizabethclark@gmail.com
@charlotteclark
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/charlotteclarkislinkedin

Want to start a business and earn loads of money? Have no money to get started, then read and be inspired!

Ingvar Kamprad

Net worth: $31 billion

World’s richest retailer and founder of furniture store Ikea.

Kamprad began to develop a business as a young boy, selling matches to neighbors from his bicycle. He found that he could buy matches in bulk very cheaply from Stockholm, sell them individually at a low price and still make a good profit. From matches, he expanded to selling fish, Christmas tree decorations, seeds and later ball-point pens and pencils. When Kamprad was 17, his father gave him a reward for succeeding in his studies. He used this money to establish what has grown into IKEA.

The acronym IKEA is made up of the initials of his name (Ingvar Kamprad) plus those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born; and the nearby village Agunnaryd.

Kamprad has admitted that his dyslexia played a large part in the inner workings of the company. For example, the Swedish-sounding names of the furniture sold by IKEA were originally chosen by Kamprad because he had difficulty remembering numeral stock-keeping units.

Reputed to be quite frugal: flies economy class, frequents inexpensive restaurants, furnishes his home with Ikea ware.

Li Ka-shing

Net worth: $26.5 billion

Li fled turbulent China in 1940 and resettled in Hong Kong. Li’s father died in Hong Kong.

Shouldering the responsibility of looking after the livelihood of the family, Li was forced to leave school before the age of 15 and found a job in a plastics trading company where he labored 16 hours a day.

By 1950, his hard work, prudence and his pursuit of excellence had enabled him to start his own company, Cheung Kong Industries. From manufacturing plastics, Li led and developed his company into a leading real estate investment company in Hong Kong that was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1972.

Roman Abramovich

Net worth: $23.5 billion

Orphaned at age 4, Abramovich was raised by his uncle and grandmother. He dropped out of college and eventually made a fortune after taking over Russian oil giant Sibneft, which he later sold.

Roman, was gifted with a talent for business and being in the right place at the right time as he started his career as an entrepreneur just as Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms permitted the opening of small private businesses.

He began his business career selling plastic ducks from a grim Moscow apartment but, within a few years, Abramovich’s vast wealth spread from oil conglomerates to pig farms, and secured his place within Yeltsin’s inner circle. However, even today, his task force of bodyguards and armoured Mercedes testify to the high-risk nature of capitalism in post-Soviet Russia.

Sheldon Adelson

Net worth: $26 billion

The son of a Boston cabdriver, he borrowed $200 from an uncle to sell newspapers at age 12. Later, he dropped out of college to become a court reporter. Now a casino and hotel magnate, Adelson took his Las Vegas Sands public in December 2004.

He worked at a young age selling newspapers on local street corners and owned his first business by the time he was twelve. In the years that followed, he worked as a mortgage broker, investment adviser and financial consultant. He started a business selling toiletry kits, and in the 1960s he started a charter tours business with two friends. He went to college at City College of New York but did not complete a degree there.

The basis for Adelson’s wealth and current investments was the computer trade show COMDEX, which he and his partners developed for the computer industry; the first show was in 1979. It was the premier computer trade show through much of the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1988, Adelson and his partners purchased the Sands Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, the former hangout of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, in order to bring Las Vegas to a new phase of business centricity through the exhibition industry.

Amancio Ortega

Net worth: $20.2 billion

Son of a railway worker Ortega apparently got started as a clerk in a shirt store. With $25 and help from his then wife Rosalia Mera, now also a billionaire, he began making gowns in his living room.

In 1975 he opened the first store in what would grow into the enormously popular chain of fashion stores called Zara.

Kirk Kerkorian

Net worth: $16 billion

Son of Armenian immigrants, he dropped out of school in the eighth grade and took up boxing.

Kirk Kerkorian was born on June 6, 1917 in Fresno, California, to Armenian immigrant parents. Dropping out of school in 8th grade, he became a fairly skilled amateur boxer under the tutelage of his older brother, fighting under the name “Rifle Right Kerkorian” to win the Pacific amateur welterweight champion.

After the war, having saved most of his wages, Kerkorian spent $5,000 on a Cessna. He worked as a general aviation pilot, and made his first visit to Las Vegas in 1944. After spending much time in Las Vegas during the 1940s, Kerkorian quit gambling and in 1947 paid $60,000 for Trans International Airlines, which was a small air-charter service which flew gamblers from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

He then bid on some war surplus bombers, using money on loan from the Seagrams family. Gasoline, and especially airplane fuel, was in short supply at the time, so he sold the fuel from the planes’ tanks, paid off his loan – and still had the airplanes. He operated the airline until 1968 when he sold it for $104 million to the Transamerica Corporation.

Later, he made billions buying and selling movie studio MGM. Today his MGM Mirage owns more than half the hotel rooms on the Las Vegas Strip.

“I just lucked into things. I used to think that if I made $50,000 I’d be the happiest guy in the world.” Kirk Kerkorian

Oprah Winfrey

Net worth: $2.5 billion

Born in rural Mississippi to a poor unwed teenaged mother, and later raised in an inner city Milwaukee neighborhood, Winfrey was raped at the age of nine, and at fourteen, gave birth to a son who died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19.

Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Winfrey became a millionaire at age 32 when her talk show went national. Because of the amount of revenue the show generated, Winfrey was in a position to negotiate ownership of the show and start her own production company. By 1994 the show’s ratings were still thriving and Winfrey negotiated a contract that earned her nine figures a year.

Considered the richest woman in entertainment by the early 1990s, at age 41 Winfrey’s wealth crossed another milestone when with a net worth of $340 million, she replaced Bill Cosby as the only African American on the Forbes 400. Although blacks are 12% of the U.S. population, Winfrey has remained the only black person wealthy enough to rank among America’s 400 richest people nearly every year since 1995.

Micky Jagtiani

Net worth: $2.5 billion

Jagtiani flunked out of accounting school in London and took up driving taxis and cleaning hotel rooms to pay the bills and support a bottle of whiskey a day habit. He then lost his entire family to illness in the span of one year.

Just 21 and alone in Bahrain with $6,000 of his and his family’s savings, he took over the retail space his brother had leased before dying of cancer and started selling baby products. Chain is now one of the most profitable retail groups in the Middle East.

Thirty years after he landed up in Bahrain the Dubai-based CEO of Landmark group has built himself one the largest and most profitable retail chains in the Middle East, with more than 280 stores, 6,000 employees and an estimated $650 million in revenues.

Richard Desmond

Net worth: $2 billion

After his parents divorced, Desmond lived with his mother in a garage apartment. Quit school at age 14 to become a drummer and worked in a coat-check room to help pay the bills.

His first job was for Thomson Newspapers, working in classified advertisements. He moved on to another company and by the age of 21 he owned two record shops. He acquired an interest in publishing and in 1974 published a magazine called International Musician and Recording World.

Started his first magazine at age 22 and now owns dozens of titles, including celebrity rag OK!.

J.K. Rowling

Net worth: $1 billion

British writer and author of the Harry Potter fantasy series.

Rowling moved to Portugal after the death of her mother from multiple sclerosis. She returned to the U.K. a single mother and lived on welfare while finishing her first Harry Potter story. Now one of the world’s most successful authors, she published the seventh and final installment of the boy wizard series last July.

Brazil is a country with a foot in two camps – part rich, mainly poor, so it’s a good place to take the financial pulse of a global phenomenon like the internet.

Brazilians love the web. Not everyone has access, but those who do spend an average of 70 hours a month online, which is more than anywhere else in the world.

Less than a third of Brazilians have a connected computer at home, so most people go online at internet cafes, known locally as Lan Houses.

There are more than 100,000 Lan Houses dotted around the country.

Winning combination

The country’s online revolution has created opportunities to establish small businesses that simply didn’t exist before.

Fabio Seixas is a 35-year-old “serial entrepreneur” whose three previous businesses went bust.

But he appears to have struck gold with an innovative way of selling designer T-shirts online, by getting his customers to do much of the work.

His website runs online competitions asking people to submit designs for T-shirts, which are then displayed on the site and people vote for the ones they like best.

He then manufactures the winning entries.

It means he only produces goods he is sure customers will like, and in internet-crazy Brazil his online design competitions have become very popular.

“With a local shop, you don’t have access to many people, but with the internet I can have customers all over this big country,” he says.

He created his company with $7,000 five years ago, and now his turnover is $1m a year.

He says that it is hard for entrepreneurs to raise money in Brazil.

“We don’t have access to venture capital and the banks are not lending money, but the internet allows us to start a business with low costs,” he says.

“You have to be innovative to attract attention. We’re doing well because people are talking about us.”

Massive growth

Fabio’s business is by no means an isolated case.

The popularity of the internet has created a platform for lots of internet businesses, many of them for online shopping.

“The growth of commerce in Brazil is not coming from the top 50 retailers, it comes from the other 10,000 retailers,” says Romero Rodrigues, founder of BuscaPe, Brazil’s first price comparison website.

He maintains that there is an ever-growing number of internet retailers, whose sales increase every year.

“Many of these companies began working from home, sometimes mom and pop businesses, and now they have 40 or 50 people working for them,” he says.

He dropped out of college to found BuscaPe 12 years ago at the age of just 21.

His site helps people find cheap deals on goods ranging from Television sets to perfume.

He started in Brazil, but now BuscaPe has expanded across Latin America and Mr Rodrigues recently sold a 90% stake in the company to a South African electronic media company for more than $300m.

But he denies that the deal made him a multi-millionaire, as the proceeds were shared with other investors who had put money into BuscaPe to finance its rapid expansion.

Christian Owens set up his first website three years ago and now has a business offering pay-per-click advertising in 86 countries.

He employs four people around the world and it is believed his website
is the 86th largest internet property in in the globe.

He was named winner of the teen category at the Enterprising Young Brit Awards, beating four other finalists to win £1,000 and a trophy.

The Brooke Weston Academy student and former Danesholme School pupil pitched his ideas to a panel of judges including director general of the Institute of Directors Miles Templeman and Penny Newman, chief executive of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Foundation.

His business Branchr, was set up using pocket money with the idea of
making online advertising accessible to all. Now it is used by brands such as William Hill and MySpace.

Christian, who lives in Briery Close, Great Oakley, said: “I taught myself basic web design and it was something I really enjoyed so when I was about 12 I started my first software promotion company.

“Then I started Branchr which connects people who want to advertise online with people who want to make money from their website.”

Even Christian was shocked to learn his website was being used in 86 countries. He said: “We went to a statistics company who told us we were the 86th largest web property in the world.

“We employ five people now including me, two in San Francisco, one in Boston and another in France.”

Christian runs his website in the evenings and weekends. He will take 16 GCSEs this summer and is considering delaying going to sixth form so he can run his business full-time.

His mum Alison, 44, is a secretary and dad Julian, 50, is a factory worker.He said: “I don’t think they really understand the ins and outs of the business but they are supportive.

“I would say I’m richer than most 15-year-olds but it’s not really about the money.

Cyrus Adkisson doesn’t have a business plan for Trubz, doesn’t know if he’ll make a dime off it. And he’s proud of that.

At the very least, Adkisson figures his Internet application will bring him exposure in the technology start-up community, and that’s a good thing. Making money off the application would be a bonus.

The important stuff: Trubz — pronounced “truhbz” — is named after Adkisson’s dog. And it’s being unveiled today.

It’s an Internet mechanism by which Facebook users can comment on any site — whether it takes comments or not — using their Facebook sign-on. Trubz is an add-on for Firefox similar to add-ons like the popular AdBlock Plus, that users install. Users then sign in and make comments in a browser sidebar.

The advantages, said Adkisson, 29, are numerous: You can converse with other Facebook users about what they’re reading online and, if you’re the sort who tends to have comments booted off an organization’s comment board, they will have appear in the Trubz comment sidebar anyway.

“It just came to me through need,” Adkisson said. “There are all kinds of sites out there that don’t allow comments … and there are a lot of sites out there that make you create a new identity.”

“… An independent third party comment log lets you comment the truth without fear of reprisal.”

Brian Raney, founder of downtown technology incubator Awesome Inc., said the Trubz application “is a great idea. Probably the most valuable thing about this tool is it takes the ability to produce content and puts it more into the hands of the consumer. … Providers of Web sites can no longer filter your comments or delete your comments or change your comments … a pretty valuable thing on the Web.”

Web users are using such workaround technology already, Raney said, but Trubz “just makes it a little more transparent and puts it side by side with the content.”

Adkisson is having a debut party for Trubz at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Awesome Inc. at 348 East Main Street. He requests attendees bring laptops so they can see how the application works.

The application’s Web site — Trubz.com — is just a placeholder online with a picture of a cute kitten, but there’s a link that leads you to Adkisson’s Facebook page, where you can download Trubz.

The Trubz application can be described as “kind of a piggyback on Digg,” Adkisson said referring to the social news Web site that allows readers to vote stories up or down.

“You bring your Facebook friends with you,” Adkisson said of Trubz. “I’ve learned through entrepreneurship that timing is everything … People do want to talk back (and) nobody wants to create a new I.D.”

http://www.trubz.com/