Here at Web-Empire we pride ourselves on digging out useful information that can help you with your technological and business endeavors. This week we have found an excellent web-site called http://www.startingasmallbusiness.org.uk/. This site covers much of the nuts and bolts of starting and running a business and, much to our delight, it actually covers the different approaches for setting up a business and covers the pros and cons of each, and does not just sing the praises on one specific type, or relegating the others as silly or ‘will never work’.

The site is a veritable mine of useful information including how to use social media effectively and technology in general including the sort of costings you can be expecting. We recommend that you give it a little look and we hope you find it as helpful as we think it is.

New businesses struggle generally for the first two years of their life so if your company or business is in the infant stage how can you increase its chances of survival?

We here at Web-Empire have been looking into this in the hope of aiding our customers and in doing so we have come to the conclusion that to help our customers we have to help them help their customers.

Customer feed back is essential, whether positive or negative. Giving your customers an outlet for their complaints – however annoying you find it – may well save your business. If the dissatisfied customer feels they have been listened to they are actually more likely to praise your business than a customer who thought your service or product was brilliant in the first place.

Not only this but a customer who feels they have not been listened too can do untold damage to a small or medium sized business. They will tell somewhere in the region of ten people who – being people – love passing on bad news, and so will tell several more people each. This would not seem so bad except that businesses of this size still rely most heavily on word of mouth regardless of their advertising budget.

According to Paul Graham feedback from customers is even more important than just keeping them sweet so they don’t bad mouth your company. He says that it will help you track what their needs actually are giving you the chance to adapt or learn from mistakes. He also has a few more useful tidbits for young companies or those considering starting one up.

But how can small companies manage the time and resources needed for this sort of customer service? There are many solutions, such as call centres which give the appearance of a dedicated helpline but these can be prohibitively expensive initially. But feedback forms and frequently ask question (FAQ) on your web-site may be useful as long as you actually answer respond to them.

We here at Web-Empire consider that these are indispensable on e-commerce online shops and encourage our customers to include them.

Another solution is for a company to have a profile on sites such as http://www.getsatisfaction.com/ they even help prioritise feedback so that you can respond to the most urgent first, useful if you are getting a lot of feedback! Part of what we do here at Web-Empire is knowing about such sites and helping customers us it – we will even set profiles up for our customers if thats what they want.

Some situations may even call for a support forum for customers where they can share uses for your products or even iron out any bugs themselves!

We hope this has been useful.

From all of us here at Web-Empire

The financial system is complex and, to a certain extent, chaotic. Here at Web-Empire we feel that those doing the financial modeling failed to predict the current economic crisis (aka the “credit crunch”) due to several factors.

One of these factors is the weather and though we would like to think it no longer impacted on our wellbeing as it did in the days of old when a bad summer meant you would starve in the winter, it would appear this is not the case.

But we all sit inside offices to work and we have food from all over the world and we are not starving here in the West so how is the weather affecting business?

Any Fire Officer will tell you that businesses whose main site is affected by, say, flood or fire generally does not survive the two years afterwards. The cost of such disasters, especially for small and medium sized businesses, is catastrophic. Even if they are insured, even if they do have off-site back ups of all their information. Many businesses do not think and keep copies sometimes right next to the original or master.

Now one or two businesses being wiped out by a fire and the fact that they may go out of business two years afterwards means that the financial system can survive this. But large storms can affect whole regions or districts and a good proportion of the buildings hit will be business property. The amount of time taken up in sorting the mess out – getting the insurance company to pay out and the work done (here at web-empire our personal experience says that getting the builders in is more of an issue than getting the insurance payout). This all eats into company time; and then what if half the employees of a company have been hit personally? They will need time off to sort their own affairs out and may even be traumatised by extreme events.

Even moving to other premises is time consuming and costly to businesses, both financially and in human resources.

Floods and wild fires can be equally as devastating and often one form of extreme weather can spark off another – ie storms and floods. Gloucestershire came to a complete halt in 2007 when large regions of the UK flooded that year. Many properties flooded including the Promenade in Cheltenham that has many shops on – including the bookshop that one of our team was going to for the launch party of the last Harry Potter book. Some buildings are still under repair at the time of writing (early 2009).

Power was down in some places due to a sub-station being flooded and drinking water was contaminated for similar reasons. This meant that huge chunks of the county were relient on water shipped in from other counties in tanks they sat on the road side. Few businesses could work – health and safety meant that most catering places had to close and with no running water toilets in offices would be an issue too.

Such events would at least put strain on the local economy.

The recent snow is another example. People could not get out to shop, at least in the villages, but more importantly a lot of them could not get to work and though the internet is a marvelous thing it can not compensate for everything.

London was even brought to a grinding halt – large chunks of the Underground weren’t running, buses stopped and roads were impassable. Universities canceled lectures, schools closed, tourist attractions had few visitors and people simply could not get to work. There were more road accidents and the like.

Extreme weather also hits the insurance companies as they struggle to pay out more people in one hit than they are designed to cope with. Insurance relies on paying out say 1 in 10 people who pay insurance leaving the excess for investment. If they are suddenly paying out 9 out of 10 people then there is no excess and sometimes not enough to cover costs. This hits the financial sectors again this time from an investment side.

We here at Web-Empire feel that their may well be a more significant link between the weather and economy – just the number of businesses affected would surely have a knock on effect. Weather is also a chaotic system meaning that predicting what is going to do next is actually very difficult and the further into the future you go the more uncertain things become until preditions are worse than useless. If there is a strong link then it would mean that there is at least a chaotic factor in the financial world and that would need to be addressed in the models or at least in how the models are used.