A wise businessman and fellow sole trader once told me that clients often don’t really know what they need. They just know they need something. This fellow traveller in the field of communications, training and confidence building, has had a few more years under his business belt than me to recognise the early warning symptoms. He’s
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The Last Word blog comes straight from the heart of WORD UP.
In our irregular online offering, we aim to please, entertain, and be brutally honest in our musings on small biz, the ageing process, and life. But we sometimes raise hackles and spark off debate, so feel free to join in, or fire back if you don’t like what you read.
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The Blog
I’ve always cast myself as a free spirit. A creative thinker brimming with alternative ideas and approaches, someone prepared to challenge the status quo and swim against the tide of rules and regs. I’ve always felt fine about sticking it to The Man. But a recent stint back at the BBC has made me wonder if
It’s not that I’m perfect or anything. As if. Indeed, I’m all for learning and growing, and admitting my flaws, but small business self-improvement brings out the full-on snarling cynic in me. And it’s not just small business self-improvement that gets my goat, it’s the whole self-betterment snake oil shebang with its cultish converts that
Woeful and wabbit. Wrung oot and wallowing. Ah yes, this week we at Word Up have been feeling well and truly sorry for ourselves. It might be nothing more than the January blues. Dear knows, there’s nothing like the sound of the relentless rain rattling off the Word Up windaes to bring on general gloom
There’s nothing like lifting the handset to try and sell something to a complete stranger for bringing on a case of the commercial collywobbles. The very thought of it makes me sweat and feel ever so slightly sick. Because, when it comes to finding new clients, the fine art of cold calling is something we
Everybody wants to rule the world, right? Everybody who’s an entrepreneur, anyway. Well, there wasn’t much entrepreneurial activity, let alone global domination, on show chez nous on Sunday evening. No, just the mundanity of a bit of clearing up after a final seasonal calorific overload, courtesy Mr Word Up’s magnificent macaroni cheese. But I was
Who am I? Oh no, none of your trivial nonsense going on in the Word Up nerve centre this week. These last few days have witnessed nothing less than one of the great philosophical questions of life passing through this particular cerebral cortex. Anyone who reads the weekly meanderings of this middle-aged media madame and
Let there be light. Sometimes, just sometimes, the screamingly obvious in self-employment comes along and flicks on a light switch. But this ain’t no common or garden 60W tungsten, this is one which really illuminates the shadowy corners of your business brain. And sometimes you really, really wish that the switch had been flicked just
The steep learning curve of starting a new small business certainly stays precipitous for a long, long time. Or so it seems from my own personal ascent of the sheer cliff face of commerce. Cos it sure as hell doesn’t feel that I’m going to be reaching the summit any time soon. It’s not that every
