Industry News

Hot off the (virtual) press from Glanton Solutions “A Business Guide to Twitter” which can be downloaded for FREE

www.innovateip.co.uk

Many businesses ask what are the most important things they need to know about Intellectual Property. Karen Hensman of InnovateIP outlines 7 simple steps to protecting your business’ IP:

www.thefdcentre.co.uk

So, to be a highly effective FD in your business, you have to be up to date on all the latest accounting standards, be really up to speed on the latest developments in tax legislation and spend long hours in your office reviewing reconciliations and signing off VAT returns. That’s right isn’t it? Well...NO! Below Colin Mills, Founder & CEO of the FD Centre Limited, outlines the 7 habits that he feels makes for highly effective FD’s.

www.glanton.com 

Glanton Solutions (with offices in the UK, Australia & the USA) had been developing corporate Intranets for global companies such as BP since 2002. Early in 2009 Incisive Marketing worked with the Directors of Glanton Solutions to help develop a strategic marketing plan focused on growth and delivering new clients for Glanton’s WebAdvantage® product. Since then the Glanton team has successfully implemented the growth strategy, developing global corporate intranet & web projects for a number of mid market and large companies.

Tucked away in Nailsea, North Somerset is a successful British manufacturing company called Protechnic (www.protechnic.com). The Protechnic team there have been designing & manufacturing bespoke flight & transit cases for over a decade. Protechnic’s client list includes Aerospace, MOD, Instrumentation, Defence, Pharmaceuticals and Motor Sports companies including Formula 1.

The EXOCase® is Protechnic’s latest innovation with a patent pending ExoSkeletal design to provide maximum protection to high value, sensitive equipment in ruggedized environments. The EXOcase® has been tested to Military Standards and is designed & manufactured at the Nailsea factory.

There’s up to £1,000 of Grant Funding available to qualifying SME’s for Leadership & Management. The current scheme is similar to the previous Leadership & Management Advisory Service (LMAS) programme but with a greater emphasis on supporting high growth businesses.

This latest LMAS programme is administered by Skills South East who can be contacted via their website www.skillssoutheast.co.uk The funding is limited so make direct contact with Skills South East sooner rather than later to discuss the eligibility criteria. 

I was recently introduced to Groupon as a new way for consumers to make purchases at discounts of up to 70%. Groupon UK was launched in 2009, offering daily deals for restaurants, salons, hotels, cinemas, days out and a whole lot more, in dozens of cities across the country. You simply register on the Groupon website www.groupon.co.uk to receive your daily email with the offers available.
 

It’s a fact that the 2009 recession has remorselessly eaten into the sales incomes of SME’s across a diverse range of market sectors. This has triggered an equally harsh cut in marketing budgets as businesses have simply tried to balance the books. Now this is not what you read in the textbooks (“in a recession you should spend more on marketing…”) but the reality is that marketing expenditure is seen as a relatively easy hit.