Bye bye Chimaera

Well the day finally came last week when I accepted an offer for the Chimaera... It doesn't actually go until later in the month but after 5 great years of ownership I'm about to hang up my sports car gloves for ever (or at least the time being)

So, not blogged for a while... been busy buying and selling cars, with some success. Finally made up my mind to sell both the Touareg and the TVR and replace with a new Jaguar XF. So far ive put an order in for the Jag XF 3.0s and have traded in the Touareg against this. I'm still in the process of selling the TVR though and I have to admit I still admire it and my hearts not really in it.

Placed an ad on Pistoheads and on Ebay as a classified rather than an auction, had 4 offers so far but all too low... patience required me thinks.

TVR Photograph Session

Received an email the other week from my local TVR Car Club organiser. Apparently a chap doing a degree in digital studies was putting together an exhibition and wanted to include some highly recognisable marques from the 90's.

I reached out to him and offered mine... and a few emails later we arranged to meet one cold night in March at a remote location. Imagine how I felt driving there, never met this guy before, was it for real, was someone going to half inch my pride and joy, and most of all would the car make it there and back. After all it was the first run out of the year?

Needless to say, all my concern was for nothing, as the guy turned out to be a very nice chap called Andy. Not only did he have a passion for cars... he drove a BMW 335 but I won't hold that against him... he was also a very good photographer, as you can see from this picture.

It took us about two hours of shooting to get the pictures that he wanted and it was great to watch how he set the car up and chose different angles and lighting... here you can see my feeble effort of how the previous shot looked to me... this is exactly the same car position, honestly!

During the shoot, we also had a very nice chap come out and make us a cup of tea... imagine 9pm on a cold March evening and two total strangers are stood outside your house taking photo's... what would you do?

Turns out this guy was also a petrol head and had an AC Cobra replica in his garage. We had a good chat about his experiences of driving the Nurburgring, and we thanked him for the tea.

Anyway the moral of this story is reach out and offer some help to students, it's amazing how many people turn down their requests, you might be as amazed at the results as I was.

Sports Relief Mile

Participated in the Sports Relief Mile in Gateshead this morning, my kids and myself were running for charity... our dog, a Border Terrier, also ended running and up doing his bit for Sport Relief. We all had a great time and I have to say the location and organisation of the event was excellent, what's more the sun came out and it was a beautiful day. Congratulations to all of the other people who ran today, gives you a great feeling doesn't it?

How can your business use Twitter?

If you’re reading this blog then you may be a regular visitor to the Sage Blog, or more likely you’ll have been directed here by a tweet.

My inspiration to write this blog came from reading an article in the BA Business Life magazine whilst I was flying last week. I read the statistic that 27% of UK SME’s use twitter. Doing a quick piece of math, 27% of 1.4 million businesses registered for VAT equals 460,000 SME businesses using twitter in the UK today… and this number would rise to well over 1 million if you include businesses who are not VAT registered.

There is a readymade network out here that the SME can leverage, not only to share information about their business, but to set up trading network and build their brand. What’s more the buzz word in industry today is globalisation, more and more businesses are trading overseas and twitter plays to this as you’ll see in the example below, as it has no boundaries.

As a social networking tool Twitter has had a bit of a meteoric rise to fame with between 3 and 6 million users from all walks of life, with some very notable participants in the likes of Bill Gates and Barak Obama, although I’m not sure the latter writes his own tweets.

I have to admit when I tried it first time round, I was unimpressed… how can it possibly be of any use? How do I know who to follow? How do I get followers? What could I talk about? and how could I say it in only 140 characters?

Today, I’m a convert, I use twitter every day, it’s an excellent source of news and information on just about any topic. For me it allows me to keep my finger on the pulse of IT and Business information as well as to share information about Sageas well as my other passions with people who have chosen to follow me.

When I say share information with people who have chosen to follow me, the twitter network leverages the six degrees of separation principle well, so if one of my follower’s re-tweet’s my tweet, then all of their followers get to see my tweet, and so on.

To give you an example of how this works, I tweeted a link to my last blog on the secret to successful innovation then I watched what happened… even though I only have a few hundred followers myself, within the first hour, my original tweet had an audience of over 30,000 people. Within a couple of days my blog had gone around the world and turned up on other sites such as Innovation America, it also stimulated others to reuse parts of my blog in their own innovation blog a way to keep the message alive and a complement indeed.

I was amazed by what had happened here… one piece of information, seen by a huge audience across the globe and recycled a second and third time, what’s more it increased network traffic on sage.co.uk and on average people looked at 8 pages in addition to the one they were directed to… and all from a single tweet… the power of social networking truly is amazing.

I would strongly encourage all of the SME’s reading this to think about how you might use the power of social/business networking to benefit your business. Twitter is just one part of what you need, it’s a tool to build your network, headline key information and lead people to your business. When they get there they need to find a website, or a blog with more meaningful and relevant information.

I don’t propose to tell you how to get going with twitter in this blog as it has been covered by many people already… although you might find this link useful from CIO online and this link from Social SmallBiz who offer great advice to SME’s or our own guide to social media for small businesses.

Give it a try, other than a little of your time and effort, it’s free… and you might be as amazed with the results as I was.

Sage Blog

What is the secret to successful innovation?

I was intrigued when reading a story recently which defined the meaning of innovation as the execution of an idea, whereas creativity was having the idea in the first place. Most people I speak to would instinctively lump these two things together and call them innovation. So, I went off to the web to check this out; here I found a number of meanings. A couple that jumped off the page were…

“Innovation can be described as the result of some amount of time and effort into researching (R) an idea, plus some larger amount of time and effort into developing (D) this idea, plus some very large amount of time and effort into commercialising this idea into a market place with customers”.

Being from an R&D background, this strikes a chord with me as it combines the idea and the delivery, and more importantly it goes further to look at commercialising… I wonder how many companies put all of their effort into the first two parts and forget the last and arguably most important part? I have to say that I’ve seen this happen on more than one occasion.

Building on this point, I came across another thought provoking statement…

“Innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash. Invention is the conversion of cash into ideas.”

How many businesses set out to innovate but end up inventing? How many people remember the £40 million ATP Train innovation or invention? How many businesses really turn ideas into cash? and how many innovations end up costing the company a small fortune?

A few weeks back, I was watching this youtube video posted by Dennis Howlett, It’s a chap called R “Ray” Wang presenting how a major software vendor had failed to commercialise some great ideas.

Why does this happen? Did they get it wrong from a customer perspective? Did they work with customers to see if the original ideas were valued before they went on to deliver them? Did they fail to commercialise them? Do the company see this as a failure? Or was it actually a ‘share of voice’ Marketing and PR success despite the ideas not being widely adopted? Plenty of food for thought, and only the vendor themselves will know the answers.

Is the secret behind innovating to ask customers what they want before you start?

Controversially, I would have to say no to this question, well not entirely anyway… Whilst, I would advocate speaking to customers at all times and involving them through the process to add value, you can’t always rely on customers as your only source of “innovative ideas”. What’s more the customer will most likely be focused on today’s issues as opposed to looking for step change innovation. Henry Ford’s classic quote sums this up nicely…

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.”

To be really successful in business I believe you have to continually innovate and generate new ideas, not by relying solely on customers to tell you what they want, but by understanding how your customers work, what they need today, and where they are headed in the future.

In my experience the best and most successful innovations are the ones where you deliver something that the customer didn’t know they needed but can’t live without.

And what happens when you run out of ideas?

Go visit a bunch of customers!

Sage Blog

TVR Car Club outing to Floors Castle

Some cracking pictures from a TVR Car Club outing to Floors Castle in the Scottish borders last year. Forty or fifty TVR's roaring through Kelso was a sight and sound to behold.

Red V8 is in there somewhere, probably shy and retiring just like me!!!