This Business and Moment...

Hopefully get good news best of luck!

I am now officially on wind down mode, my line manager has emailed today saying best of luck and just to make sure I hand over all my existing cases to a workmate before I leave.

Rock on.
 
ChrisD. said:
Where do you work?
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I work for a Service Provider up North, currently specialising in a lot of SDDC Stuff, especially around NHS Trusts. Currently planning our second VCF Implementation and just tendered for another. We also do a lot of PS for traditional Infra around VMware/NetApp/Cisco and I am currently part of a Private Cloud refresh with NetApp HCI of all things.
 
mrk said:
From what I can tell, the pay/perks do depend on the location and division/role itself. Here I can join the shares incentive scheme as well as the company performance bonuses and retail discounts. Pension scheme looks decent too. At least for down here on the south coast it all looks to be decent anyway!



Great news!
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Everyone needs discounted missiles :p
 
Marvt74 said:
Everyone needs discounted missiles :p
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Haha share the love! You could be an international arms dealer like on war dogs! Nothing could go wrong @mrk


Did my onboarding today and yesterday, which was pretty useless as I have been here longer than most the people giving the trainings but hey! Did it. At the same time they were taking people through how to order chemicals using sciquest, which is an app I look after in my old role, and sending things using TraMS, which is another I looked after... so great use of my time!
I'm now stuck with this weird role of expecting me to do both roles... I have told both old and new manager that I need a plan for the handover and needs to be a clear cut off date, but I think current manager is going to try and make me long this out as long as possible. Which means I'm going to have to give someone **** and likely it'll be her. I think she's a bit put out my new role is above her and seems to be being a bit funny with it. Love a bit of politics!
 
Is what usually happens though in many places, person in higher standing gets bitter that their lower is now going to be higher than them so tried to take the pee somewhat :p
 
Christ i hate having people above me asking me for forecasts on billing when people are so erratic and just bill at random.

I gave a number on Monday based on the current sales and also taking into account what was showing as expected to be invoiced for July (this is always a lot higher than what actually lands), just checked today now we've closed off and it's jumped up another 10% to our record ever sales month. It was already looking decent so i was being a little prudent. Just ended up making myself look a dick :D
 
I was made redundant from my Job of nearly 14 years back in June. I worked as a BA/PM in the Clinical Trials Software industry. I'd been unhappy there for quite a few years but we needed the stability with my partner being self employed and us getting our first house together two years ago. Over the last 18 months I have been working on a new business venture with a friend I used to work with. He has handled the coding side of things, I've handled BA/PM and testing.

My partner runs a dog walking business and a dog grooming business. Back in early 2019, she asked me to look into some "Salon Software" that was for dog groomers. There was a company that had recently started up, got a lot of interest but basically delivered a pretty crappy product. Their success was because they offered something. I realised that there was a market for this and I know the market very well as my partner does it for a living. I looked at the few providers in this area and they all suffer from the same problem; they are really difficult to get set up & working and generally too complicated. Fast forward 18 months and we've been running a closed beta for a few months now with a small selection of dog groomers and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. They have helped us tweak a few things but in the main they consider it to be far superior to any current offerings. Now after 18 months of development on weekends and evenings we are ready to launch at the end of the month. We just need to sort out the public facing website. The redundancy almost came at the right time and now I have a good amount of savings to see me through while we grow the business. I'm really excited and hope it will be well received and we can expand into other sectors that we have ear marked.


We are still operating under the radar as don't want competitors getting alerted to us until it's too late :p
 
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So we've launched this now and it's been live for just under three weeks. Uptake has been slow, slower than hoped; We are at about 30 trials, I'd say less than half of these are actually using the system though. The people who have actually signed up and used it are really positive about it but we need more people signing up. I'm confident that once people start using it they will like it and stay. We've got a few decent USP that our competitors don't offer but it's tough getting people to part with their free time to actually look at it, let alone money in these times.

I think the issue we have is that my business partner and I have strong software development skills but zero marketing experience. I've taken over the marketing while he works to add additional features to the system. We are missing online booking, dashboard and reporting. Once we have these in, we will have parity feature wise but at a lower price with better usability.

As my partner runs her own grooming salon I see the struggles of the job so I have produced a load of short videos on the Facebook page that show how we sort these pain points. I originally recorded all videos on the desktop but quickly realised that 95% of our visitors are on mobile so I need to be recording them on my phone. I'm trying to work out the best times and days to post these videos are engagement varies a fair bit. We have just over 600 likes on our Facebook page but most videos and posts don't really get much engagement, where I am brand new to marketing I don't know if this is something to ring alarm bells or just par for the course. I did a webinar demo last night, I thought I advertised it quite well, had zero people turn up!

I'm hopeful that this will work, I think it just needs more time to get established. If we get to the start of the 2021 and it's still not really doing much then we will get full time jobs and leave it building in the background. It will be feature complete by December so it won't need much work doing on it so would work quite well if we were both in other jobs.
 
I'm just about to launch selling the personalised clocks i make. Had really positive feedback from fb and sold a few right away. As a product its perfect for 'not on the high streets but their fees are high (does anybody have any experience if the traffic is worth the price). At the moment going to do etsy, shopify and maybe ebay and amazon.

Am I allowed to post pics?
 
9% pay rise - they always seem to be 9% for some reason (not just this company). Given the current situation I'm happy with that.
 
Nice one @Rroff I am not sure many people will get one this year so that's pretty damn good.

I've already wracked up about 2 weeks in flexitime on the new job, coupled with the 10days holiday I have, I think I'm going to take all of December off. Sounds like a plan to me lol
 
randomshenans said:
Nice one @Rroff I am not sure many people will get one this year so that's pretty damn good.

I've already wracked up about 2 weeks in flexitime on the new job, coupled with the 10days holiday I have, I think I'm going to take all of December off. Sounds like a plan to me lol
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Was surprised in the current climate but half of it comes from re-alignment of pay enhancements which saves money across the business in the long run but happens to work in my favour.
 
Currently doing a training course, which is at A level standard, which is fine I can handle most of it,
just having to change my line of thinking, from an ordinary worker to one that leads or even manages people.

Been thrown in the deep end a bit really, but I'm using it as my chance to shine.

Things like Team Management vs People Management or Team Role Theory.
Plus Motivation Theories, and HR systems and Legal requirements.

Stuff that's way above my pay grade, but I've just three questions left and several hours to finish it so should be fine.
 
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