Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

I am still amazed by how many companies do not set an annual budget at the beginning of each financial year. Producing a budget starts with the sales forecast and if you are not great with spreadsheets there are plenty of .co.uk sites where you can download a free generic template. Group your main products into categories and decide how many you expect to sell each month, add the sale price and your buy price for each category and the template will calculate your gross margin. Decide how much of that gross margin you are going to spend on Overheads (salaries, travel costs, marketing etc.) and out of the bottom drops your monthly profit.

If your business requires capital expenditure, put this on a separate sheet and decide the period over which you want to write these assets off (depreciation). At this point you should probably give everything to a management accountant who will ask you questions like how long your customers take to pay you and when you have to pay your bills. If you cannot afford a management accountant yet there are management accounts templates on the web that will also turn your assumptions into a profit and loss, cash flow forecast and balance sheet for your business.

In any business, and especially those in start-up and early growth, cash flow is important. For companies that sell products and services requiring regular monthly payments, insisting your customers set-up a direct debit mandate with you seems like a good idea – and it is. 

Usually at the start of the month you will send your customers a bill stating how much they owe you and at the end of the month you take that money directly from their bank, without them having to do anything. No more late payments or endless emails and phone calls chasing them. From your customer’s point of view they don’t have to worry about transferring money or writing cheques and they have plenty of time to query the bills before the money is taken. Even if they have a dispute after the money is taken The Direct Debit Guarantee entitles them to a full and immediate refund from their bank and they can cancel their mandate at any time. Seems like a perfect arrangement but there are a couple of things you as the supplier need to consider; 

The objective of management accounts is to provide timely and key financial information for managers to make short-term decisions.

They are usually produced monthly and cover cashflow, an income statement and a balance sheet. You should also keep an eye on your margins and measure your performance in all areas against a budget.

Gross margin

Companies are often obsessed by revenue and of course this is a key indicator of progress, however I like to focus on gross margin. The average gross margin you should expect from your business will depend on what industry you are in, the products you are selling and where you sit in the supply chain. A distributor may be happy to operate on a gross margin of 5% whereas a reseller may need 40% to cover the cost of serving their customers and to compensate them for the value they add. I am always thinking about how I can buy better, reduce the cost to serve without affecting quality and the optimum price for each product. Look at the margin analysis by product to see if your mix of products is right and think about what you can do to increase the volume of higher margin products.

Each year, millions of Brits cross the channel to visit mainland Europe and further afield for business and leisure. For business users it is essential to stay connected whilst travelling to check emails, access documentation and for navigating to meetings.

Use your own

When you travel you can use your existing minutes and data with EuroTraveller or WorldTraveller for a small additional daily fee. You can also buy bolt-ons for additional data, European, World or roaming minutes.

JolaMobile

JolaMobile is a very cost effective and flexible SIM-only business mobile service provided on the Vodafone network. There are three main packages to choose from which include standard UK minutes, texts, 4G data and non-geographic number minutes on a 30-day rolling contract. You can easily add additional minutes such as non-geographic, Ireland, European, European roaming, World and World roaming. You can add EuroTraveller and WorldwideTraveller, additional data and roaming data as required. We also offer mobile broadband in the UK, EuroData and WorldData SIMs.

How important is price?

Price to partners is important because this is a competitive market and resellers need to win the business at a decent margin. If you look for providers that have invested in automation you will generally find them cheaper because their operating costs are lower. They may also be easier to do business with and delivery may be quicker and more predictable. Most SMEs still just need the basics, which most platforms do, and some of the advanced features are still a bit niche. Of course it is possible to get ‘free’ seats if you’re prepared to use self-developed, freeware platforms but most resellers have ditched this idea because of reliability, security and product roadmap issues. Now that hosted voice has moved out of the early adopter phase, the trend is towards established brands, low upfront costs and fixed monthly rentals for everything, including calls, over longer term contracts.

Has the connectivity issue disappeared?

Not entirely. FTTC has really helped but still doesn’t reach around 40% of businesses. ADSL2+ is better than its predecessors but with limited upstream speeds you have to be careful with how many simultaneous calls you are trying to support.

The research

The Swan Independent Research survey of August 2014 randomly sampled 20,000 UK SMEs. In the sample 85% of SMEs had fewer than 50 employees and 62% fewer than 20. The survey showed that 54% of respondents used a local communications supplier and 48% said that they were influenced by a local supplier when it came to making purchasing decisions for communications products and services. 22% would get references from other SMEs and 55% said a primary source of information in any decision was the web. 78% of MDs were involved in the buying process – 47% from the start.

One could therefore conclude that where no in-house expertise exists, the MD will often lead a project themselves, guided by trusted suppliers, web research and peer recommendation.

Steps to take

So what steps can you take to appear on the radar of customers and prospects investigating a move to cloud applications? Getting a decent web site and good referrals is obvious, but how do you know if you are a trusted supplier? Maybe ask yourself;

Hunt groups allows users within a group to be included in a specified sub-group to handle incoming calls received by an assigned phone number. Group administrators can choose from any of the following schemes, each of which rings the specified phones in a different manner:

• Circular – sends calls in a fixed order. The call is sent to the first available person on the list, beginning where the last call left off.
• Regular – sends calls to users in the order listed by an administrator. Incoming calls go to the first available person on the list, always starting with the first person on the list.
• Simultaneous–rings all of the users in the group simultaneously; the first user to pick up the ringing phone is connected.
• Uniform – as a call is completed, the user moves to the bottom of the call queue in a shuffling fashion. The next incoming call goes to the user who has been idle the longest. If a user receives a call that was not directed to them through the hunt group, the call is not included in the receiving order for uniform calls.

One in three employees are guilty of not using up their annual leave and those who do go away often remain online, still checking and replying to work emails. Thanks to cloud computing with the ability to access not just your email, but your documents, CRM and billing platform from your mobile as well as using the mobile client for your hosted telephony, it is getting worse.

Taking holiday is important for both staff and businesses. Work can at times be all-consuming, so it’s understandable that workers find it hard to switch off and for many, the fear of falling behind on their workload whilst on holiday is enough to keep them in the office. However, those running a business need to have processes in place that encourage annual leave, otherwise staff could burnout. How many of these steps do you take in your business for example?

1 - Encourage annual leave

First and foremost, as a business you need to foster a positive message about annual leave and engrain it into your company culture so that employees don’t feel guilty about taking time off. Instead encourage staff to take a break and promote the importance of unwinding and leaving the office behind. You could also use annual leave as an incentive for reaching targets.

2 - Put simple processes in place

Your business should make the process of booking holiday easy. Make sure handover processes are also in place, so that your staff don’t have to worry that their workload is piling up in their absence; this could be achieved through a team meeting, via email, or both, so that their team is aware of what needs to be done. Similarly, activating ‘out of office’ responses helps employees relax that bit more, as they know that urgent enquiries will be picked up by someone else.

Hoteling

Hoteling allows users to log in to a guest profile on a shared phone. Once users have logged in to their guest profile, the shared phone acts exactly like their own phone—all their network features, phone number(s), and dial plan capabilities are available on the shared phone. This is of use if you have a hot desk in your office used by many.

Shared call appearance

Shared Call Appearance (SCA) offers the user the opportunity to run several devices (e.g. mobile app, handset, softphone) on the same extension, usually with no additional charge. The user’s profile is cloned on each device so they behave identically. For example, when switched on all devices will ring at the same time and Busy Lamp Field (BLF) settings will be identical. Calls cannot be transferred between shared devices and devices cannot call each other.

‘Connectivity’ is an ugly word but the easiest term for the communications industry to describe the physical media we use to communicate with each other. So why not use terms like broadband, internet, Ethernet, leased line or ADSL and what about ISDN, GSM, GPRS and 4G? 

The need for more granular definitions depends on the audience. The SME generally doesn’t care if its Fibre Ethernet, EFM, EoFTTC, 4G, ADSL or white magic. They just want to send and receive information as quickly and as reliably as possible. On the other hand, the industry, and the channel in particular, is obsessed with learning and explaining the nuances between technologies even if their customer isn't interested. After all what’s the point of knowing all this stuff if you can’t use it to differentiate your proposition? Some suppliers even make up new names to describe their connectivity and further confuse their customers.

So the answer is that when you are talking to the channel you have to use generic terms like connectivity for fear of the pedants seeking you out and ridiculing your simplicity. “Internet access? What if my customer wants a P2P leased line or an MPLS network without breakout?” In communicating with end customers I think a different approach is needed. Find out what they can get before you contact them and certainly before you product-dump every technology and associated features. Ask them questions about what they think they need and uncover problems so that you can suggest things they didn’t know they needed.