This year, rather than sending cards or gifts to our clients, we’ve decided to instead donate £250 to the Operation Santa Toy Appeal run by Dudley Hope, a local charity which provides financial support to help tackle child poverty.

The Operation Santa Toy Appeal ensures that children who would otherwise receive nothing at Christmas are given a gift or enjoy a trip to the pantomime.

Click here to find out more about Dudley Hope.

If you or your company would also like to make a donation please contact Hilary Benton of BPH Ltd on 0121 421 8111.

Without doubt the single most effective way that I have found to grow my business has been through networking and referrals.  Five years ago I joined a new BNI chapter that was starting up in Halesowen.  At the time I was just starting out in business and I only had a single small business client.  Since then JamesCash.co.uk has grown considerably and we now have a team of five serving over fifty clients.  When I look back at the source of these clients I see that most of them were referred by existing clients who in turn were either themselves introduced by an existing client or were someone I had met through networking.

But it’s not just a healthy client base that I’ve developed through networking.  Back in 2003 I wouldn’t have dreamed of standing in front of a room full of 30 strangers and talking about my business.  There is a huge personal development aspect to participating in a BNI chapter or a similar group.

And then there are the people I’ve met who, whilst not necessarily becoming clients, have made a massive impact on our business – people like Steve Wright of Sandler Training.  I even met my business partner, Mark Poulding, through a contact I met at a networking event.

One thing to remember, networking isn’t a quick fix solution.  If you need sales this month then forget it.  Relationships take time to build and the results often take months or years to appear.  I’ve had two opportunities develop this week from a contact I first met three years ago but hadn’t spoken to in the last six months.  If you’re prepared to commit to networking in the long term you’ll see real benefits.

Some of the places you’re almost certain to find me in the next month or so:

Tuesday 18th November – 7pm – Dudley Business Club

Wednesday 26th November – 12pm – Brite Sparks – Birmingham

Friday 28th November 2008 – 8am – 4networking Wolverhampton

Tuesday 2nd December 2008 – 5.30pm – High Fliers

Wednesday 10th December 2008 – 8am – Stourbridge Breakfast Club

Wednesday 14th January 2008 – 7am – Wolverhampton Business Breakfast

If you’re going along to any of these events please seek me out and say hello – it would be great to see you!

I was recently introduced to a fantastic piece of software that I now use every day.  The application is called FinePrint and it works its magic by installing as a virtual printer.  You then set this as your default printer and print to it from all of your applications as normal.  However, instead of the print job going straight to the printer you are presented with a preview window showing the print job.  From this preview you are then able to:

• Save paper by deleting unwanted pages or scaling down the size to fit two or more pages on a single printed sheet
• Save ink by removing graphics or converting from colour to grayscale
• Print double sided jobs (even without a duplex printer) and create booklets
• Add an electronic letterhead or stamp pages with draft, confidential or any other watermark that you choose

Once you’ve made the necessary adjustments you simply click once to output to your selected printer.  If this wasn’t enough, print jobs are automatically archived allowing you the ability to quickly reprint if necessary without going back to the original document.  This is particularly useful for web printouts.

The standard version of the software is $49 per licence which seems pretty good value.  There is a server based version and the optional pdfFactory software adds some excellent PDF creation features.

Click here to see more information on the FinePrint website where a free trial version is available for download.

I’m always amazed at the difference in attitudes to backups.  Some small businesses are fanatical yet others I’ve come across, at least it seems, couldn’t care less. Most, however, are somewhere in between – they see the importance of having good backups but it can be a pain rotating backup media and storing it off-site.

Online backup will probably be the best solution in the longer term but at the moment, if you have any serious amount of data, the price can be prohibitive.  There is also the issue of being able to quickly retrieve a large backup in the event of a complete system failure – who wants to be waiting for a disk to arrive by post when they are in a business down situation?

Backups are an insurance policy and from a disaster recovery point of view we want to be making sure that we have all bases covered.  All too often I come across people just backing up My Documents folders, accounts data and other individual folders.  In reality this isn’t enough and they are invariably missing important data from their backup routines.  To be completely sure it’s a good bet to back up the entire system using a solution that allows bare-metal restore.

Once we have a backup system in place it’s important to check the validity of backups and periodically test to make sure that we can restore the data.  In the past I came across a decent sized company that were very careful to make sure they changed their backup tapes every day and stored them off-site.  It later turned out that the backup hadn’t actually worked since the day it was set up over three years previous.  They were more than a little miffed with their old IT provider.  Fortunately for them they didn’t have a system failure in that time.  They’re now very glad that we check their backup every day as part of our service.

I think that in general, for the time being at least, the best option is to backup to local USB drives which are then rotated to off-site storage or replicated to online storage.  We recommend the following to our clients as a minimum:

• Backup software that allows bare-metal restore
• Daily backups to local USB drives
• A minimum of 5 drives, changed daily and stored off-site / or a single drive with off-site replication of data

At the end of the day it’s up to you which backup system you choose to implement.  Hopefully you’ll never need to call on it, but if you do, you’d better be sure it will be up to the task of getting your business back on the road.