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Will watch this one with interest chaps! We're a McAfee house and are interested to understand what Intel's plans are for the business, especially as they paid so much over the odds for it.

haha, good one Alison..

How is the new site layout working out?

Phil

I think both the above posts are typical examples of why this business has failed, like Woolworths before it they failed to adapt to the emerging economies, business practice and the basic principle of providing a GOOD service and delivering a quality job for a fair price! And the fact that like most corporates they are ladened with excessive costs and spending.

We see this everyday in the education sector with ICT service providers. We started our core business (S4 ICT Ltd) a little over 2 years ago as the recession bit, we recognised that the education sector, particularly primary has been very badly serviced for decades by a cluster of poor IT companies (large and small) who cornered the market and were complacent in their public sector prowess.

Beating them was simple as Connaught's competitors may have found. Simply do a good job, for a fair price and really care about your customer! Get along side them and understand what they want, not what they've always got! A methodology that saw us win over 400 schools as clients in just over 2 yrs causing our main "long established" competitor to go under.

I'm sure they blamed the economy?

Apart from many SME's who have gone under due to cash flow issues and a lack of support from their banks and the government, corporates in many cases simply become complacent in their position and "history" and are unable to flex to the conditions of an economy than smaller businesses.

Long live the SME, britains biggest employer!

I agree with what everyone is saying above. The answer is if you want traffic and leads you ave to use a mix of PPC, SEO, social media and other forms of advertising to generate traffic. this way you'll hit a broader audience if properly targeted as not everybody responds to any 1 type of advertising the same.

Yep I agree with Kip #2 is looking really good..

Yeah same here with our accountant Steve but appart from that we are 95% paper free! And I agree with you about new businesses, with all the publicity about how you can be greener, it is easier for a start up to implement green practices.

Our business has just been awarded a place on the eco-Innovate programme in patnership with Lancaster University. We not only practice green policy we assit our clients to genuinely improve thier green status through a number of practices. Mostly though through the simple fact all our services reduce hardware use, power consumbed, and even in travel as our engineers dont need to go to a customer site to resolve any issue as it all sits within our data centres the main one only 5 miles from HQ

So if your a business looking to reduce your costs and carbon footprint - Hosted services all the way! (Oops blatant plug haha)

Seriously though, here's something interesting! We have just put our Hosted Microsoft Exchange service into a big national client with 200 mailboxes, and apart from the instant improvement in thier green credentials the client worked out our solution will save them almost

Haha.. Come on Scootek?

I would be diplomatic and say "well I am willing to evalute alternative services" lol

Phil

Yes we're on the ODP for our other business not that I can see its ever been a benefit? For Cloud4 it's been submitted but similar to Steve earlier in the thread.. Nothing! I've applied to edit categories... Nothing? So i'm only going to try so hard know what I mean?

Phil

I'm watching with interest on this one too chaps so keep posting updates with progress Steve, and how negotiations are going Ryan

Phil

Freeindex has been particularly good for us too as we direct our clients to provide feedback for us on jobs we have delivered and it helps with traffic and leads directly from the site. Wordl of mouth, the most powerful marketing medium and alsways will be!

Phil