Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

Openreach recently reported that over 25 million homes and businesses can now access up to 80Mb/s Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) superfast broadband. 19 million premises were connected in the first roll out in 2014, at a cost of £2.5bn.

Ultrafast 330Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) is also said to be available to over 200,000+ UK premises and there are plans to roll out next generation hybrid fibre technology with download speeds of around 300Mb/s by 2020.

The opportunity

As a trusted supplier of services to UK SMEs you may be asked to advise on connectivity available as customers consider upgrading. Typical customers are start-ups looking to set up their first office, growing businesses moving to bigger premises and SMEs considering cloud-hosted applications such as hosted voice.

During our business careers we forge many partnerships, have you ever thought about why some are so much more successful than others?

Trust

This is non-negotiable. It also needs to be unreserved, unambiguous, and unequivocal. Trust is one of those things that is easy to advertise but a lot more difficult to demonstrate and retain over a long period of time. It is doing what you say you are going to do. It is coming to an agreement and honouring it. It is having contracts that are clear and concise and don’t hide any surprising clauses. It is about trusting someone with your end users, helping you demonstrate products and win new business.

Shared vision

Sharing a vision such as a passion for customer service is important. On a day to day basis it is about having someone to contact and support you, answer queries so you can get back to a customer in a timely fashion. Someone who takes calls after hours like you do, to go the extra mile for your customers. Someone who isn’t dictated to by strict processes and scripts who can help you customise a solution and expedite delivery to meet expectations where possible.

One of my better decisions in 1996 was to come home from the USA and after 10 happy years with C&W leave in favour of a port-a-cabin start-up on a chicken farm in Leicester. These days the cloud has enabled companies to start-up with little capital investment, renting enterprise-level applications on monthly contracts and allowing staff to work from anywhere. If you can live on your savings for a few months you may even be able to get going without having to sell any of your company to external investors. Reduced start-up costs could be one reason why there were a record 608,100 UK startups in 2015, up 4.5% on the previous year which was itself a record year.

If you are considering taking the plunge, breaking away from corporate life and having a go at working for yourself there will be many thoughts occupying your mind right now so let me add one more.

What kind of entrepreneur are you?

1. Lifestyle

This entrepreneur has turned something they love doing, into a business. They have no immediate plans to sell the business which exists primarily to fund their lifestyle. If they are doing well they will be approached by people who tell them they could be millionaires by expanding, getting new investors or preparing the business for sale. After several months of stress and expense it fizzles out and the lifestyle entrepreneur breathes a sigh of relief. I know many lifestyle entrepreneurs who have learned to be comfortable in their own shoes and resist encouragement to expand or recruit. If you are one, you probably know you are not attractive to professional investors because they need an exit to return a gain to their fund in a specific period. If you need money for growth or new equipment, then borrow it. Interest rates are low and most banks are happy to lend you money if you will give them a personal guarantee. There is also a government-backed scheme, offering loans of up to £25,000 at 6% interest.

Recent research from YouGov suggests that there is now a 50/50 split in mobile users on contract and SIM-only deals in stark contrast to the previous year where only 16% of contracts were SIM-only. Both types of deals have grown in the last five years however SIM-only deals have grown the most. Since 2010 the percentage of phone owners with contracts has decreased from 80% to 67%.

1 – Not employing the right people

However, you decide to recruit, putting the time in to plan the type of person you need and their potential career path is worth it. The cost of hiring the wrong person and then needing to recruit again is not just one of time and money.

Hiring a team with a different skill set to yours is invaluable as it allows you to delegate tasks outside of your unique abilities, to keep you focussed on driving growth. Allowing your team to progress their career within your business and rewarding staff with bonuses also helps to retain focus on shared goals.

2 – Not effectively managing cash flow

Growing a business and managing a cash flow go hand in hand. Late payments and billing disputes can be an even bigger problem, when you factor in additional costs to fund growth. Banks may be able to help with overdrafts for working capital but you need to arrange this in advance. Direct debit can help with late payments. Detailed cash flow forecasts can help to highlight any issues before they affect your business.

MSPs

The term MSP (Managed IT Services Provider) has been around for years, typically it is an IT Support company that remotely manages a company’s IT infrastructure, with services such as managed IT.

Pay monthly services

Managed IT services tend to have a fixed monthly cost and are flexible to accommodate changes in requirements as companies grow. Traditionally MSPs partner with vendors such as Microsoft and other VADs (Value added Distributors) to ensure the latest IT solutions.

IT support desk

IT support desk is a popular managed IT service which allows customers to unlimited helpdesk support in business hours although specialist services are also available out of hours for sensitive applications. Pricing is often associated with the number of users of the service.

Monitoring

Monitoring is another common service which gives SMEs peace of mind that their hardware is being kept up to date with the latest upgrades and alerts are raised should services go down.

Low upfront costs

Hosting business applications, such as telephony, in the cloud typically has low upfront costs, as solutions are sold on a per seat per month basis. There may be a small set-up fee, however it is possible to upgrade to a feature-rich phone system, with the latest IP handsets, for around £14pcm.

Availability of fast, reliable internet connectivity

If your phone system is hosted in the cloud, it goes without saying that a stable, high-bandwidth connection is critical. The roll out of faster, more reliable fibre broadband has made the decision easier for those who can access it today. In areas where faster fibre broadband is not yet available, BT Openreach has introduced a waiter’s scheme, where suppliers can place an order and when the number of waiting orders reaches a threshold, the cabinet is prioritised for an upgrade.

Need for scalability

The cloud route is excellent for allowing you to downsize or upsize your desk phone needs in short order with minimal effort. Going in-house for your phone system can require purchasing licenses outright and in some cases, investing in greater hardware. Not to mention, if you don't have your own IT staff, you need the skills to configure additional users. This is usually self-administered via a portal with cloud-hosted solutions.

If you supply business communications or support to SMEs, you may have seen a rise in interest for Ethernet leased lines recently, as some prices have reduced by up to 23%.

There has never been a better time to get your customers connected. Supplying a quality internet connection to your customers keeps the competition at bay and opens up a world of upsell opportunities including hosted Exchange, cloud back-up, hosted desktop and hosted telephony.

What is the best way to compare ethernet leased lines?

Jola has an Ethernet leased line quoting tool which allows users to enter a customer postcode and receive a quotation for the best priced connectivity options, from all the main network providers. Pricing is available for dealers working on a 50/50 margin share basis and for resellers who bill end users and set their own margins.

Should you uncover a requirement whilst visiting customers you can log into the leased line quoting tool on your mobile and produce a quote for them there and then in minutes.

Introduction

Local breweries are springing up all over the country. Often family-run and led by experienced brewers determined to make their hobby profitable. Local breweries like many other growing SMEs often have online shops so typically require a faster, more reliable broadband connection.

BT estimate that around 80% of businesses now have access to FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet - fibre broadband) which is helping to facilitate the introduction of new cloud-hosted applications such as hosted telephony.

1 – To facilitate a move to hosted telephony 

Growth is one driver causing breweries to consider purchasing a cloud phone system. Extensions can be purchased on a monthly basis with the ability to add or reduce connections as required. They can keep their existing phone numbers and with no physical system on site the set-up is quick and easy.

2 – To access an array of new phone features

The most compelling feature of hosted telephony solutions for local breweries is that, perhaps with only a couple of extensions, they have all the features of a much larger and highly developed business phone system. Many features are included as standard, such as shared call appearance, voicemail and disaster recovery. A range of inexpensive add-ons like unmetered standard UK landline and mobile, call recording and auto attendant can also be rented monthly.

Internet bandwidth is getting cheaper and faster and as a result, revenues from business cloud products are growing quicker than ever before.

Most voice resellers and IT support companies that were not already selling connectivity, cloud voice and mobile SIMs are now actively looking into it, either to protect their customer bases or to add valuable recurring revenues and margins.

Unless you intend to build your own network and switches you will probably need to select a supply partner. This subject has been well covered in previous blogs so we need make no further comment here.

This article is about how you engage with your chosen supplier(s).

Dealer or reseller?

The most common question we get as we recruit new partners is if they should become a dealer or a reseller. This is not as straightforward to answer as it may seem. In general terms a reseller has the contract with the end customer and they bill and support them directly. A dealer often sells the solution to their customer but the billing and support will be done by the supplier who will often then pay the dealer a commission. The decision to go dealer or reseller can differ between products and contract terms so the first thing to say is make sure you pick a supplier that offers both schemes with options to transition between them. Here are a few more things to consider;