For starters every industry has to abide by certain health and safety laws, which is understandable but then I looked at the cost involved in making sure your business is up to scratch with these laws, policies, documents, time and energy needed to apply yourself to sort this out.  Having NO IDEA what health and safety policies in particular I would need to follow – I took their questionnaire which asks a few simple questions and then emails you a list of all the required policies you should be aware of.

Looking at the state of this country and how important health and safety seems to be and how difficult it is often to implement such policies in your business I found that being given a list of what I should at least be *aware* of was very handy. I did look through the site and see that Safety Sorted offer a variety of “health and safety contracts” available but for my use I found the individual policies more appealing, being able to download, edit to my needs and then put into place in my business was very useful.

At least this way its another corner of my business that I should be able to keep covered.  Has anyone else had experience with Health and Safety issues in the workplace?

Often with small business investments the amount of investment is low with a small stake/equity of the company being taken by the investor and at the grand old age of 22 I can now confirm that I have invested a stake in a small jewellery business Crystal Jewels.

My participation and actions in the business shall become more noticiable as the coming months progress as I attempt to help grow the business over the coming years to where the business is in a good position and can keep providing the excellent quality of service and beautiful products it has already become known to provide.

I have always been a fan of products by Crystal-Jewels as in the past I have purchased items for my sisters 18th birthday and more. Find out more about our deal and what Crystal-Jewels has to offer by visiting the blog and reading more.

This has personally come as a surprise as I personally know several people managing relatively decent sized social networks on Ning and cannot see them paying for such tiered pricing to continue their community when facebook would offer pretty much the same service for free. The pricing levels Ning have introduced are not over priced at all starting from around $3/month with its core features and going up in price dependant on a variety of factors that the user would wish to bolt onto their “social networking website”.

Tiered plans are rolling out in June and we shall see the true backlash of this as many users will undoubtedly flock to Facebook for a “newly released” community page which is a branch from the popular “Pages” used by businesses and the like. Others I suspect if they are serious about their social network website on Ning will opt to spending money creating a true self owned platform/website and shell out the initial cost as opposed to paying a monthly fee.

Ning ID is also being chopped which in a sense is a good thing, this was a single sign on created by ning so you would be able to sign into any social network hosted by ning with a single username/password combination. I say its a good thing because now we have so many other single sign on platforms ranging from the age old Microsoft Passport, to the variety of OpenID providers and of course the fairly newcomers of Google, Twitter and Facebook connect programs.

What is your view on Ning?

Now I had a chat just the other day with one of my competitors and it wasn’t hands round their throat, instead it was a civilized drink and chat to discuss not in too much depth each others businesses and where we are heading. Who says you have to be ruthless with the competition and can’t be civilized.

I saw recently an advert from said competitor that got my uneasy about some of the direction and current position both my business holds and theirs also so with just a phone call a meeting was setup and we discussed things. Now don’t get me wrong when it comes to business and anything really I am extremely competitive. Just for the case that you got your new laptop a day before mine arrived will agitate me slightly – but back on business having the competitive edge is really important but you do not need to low ball your competitors to out perform, out sell or plain out beat them.

Our hour long discussion ranged from what we were planning “more or less” to do in the second half of the year and what demographic for certain items we were focusing on and this led to a very interesting discussion as it would seem that someone who in 2009 was a direct competitor in 2010 we are taking separate paths and not only that but over the course of the next 6 – 12 months could see a collaboration between the two businesses that will complement each other and be highly beneficial.

Moral of the story is just because you competite doesn’t mean you should ignore. Get to know your competition and not just from a market perspective, you never know you could end up being regular golf buddies, drinking friends, go out for meals and so much more and if business comes into play then it can lead to very interesting conversations.

Always keep in mind how much you talk to your competitor about your business, you wouldn’t want to be giving TOO much away.

What is your view on competition, would love to hear it!

So visit the article on Crystal-Jewels.co.uk to learn move and let her know your thoughts on social networking also

These past couple of weeks I have taken time out of work and online life to reflect on life and business and soon I shall be posting more regularly and be more active again but in the mean time here are a couple of great videos I have watched lately that help boost me back up a bit and feel a little better.

Jonathan Rosenberg – Rules to success

Gary Vaynerchuk

Growth is most often a good thing but is often difficult and proves to bring around more problems in the short term than one would imagine from the start.

As I am personally in the process of growing my own business vertically AND horizontally as well as being in the process of investing in a new business to help it grow, I’d like to know how other people have dealt with growth?

What are your tips, experience and thoughts?

So, at home, bit lifeless today I went ahead checked my emails as I do every day and as always delighted by the emails I get from clients every day and im very lucky to work with a great set of clients and I just want to say THANK YOU. Im lucky to be in a position where I can pick and choose who I want to work with and I am honoured to work with the people I do every day.

Even though I preach so much about having excellent relationships with your audience and your customers – which I constantly strive to do and hopefully from the great feedback I get I actually accomplish 99% of the time. Recently I discovered an action I took as part of my business although seemed right at the time not through being greedy, lazy, inconsiderate or any of the other usual pitfalls businesses fall into when they commit an error but simply because I thought it was the right thing to do meant that I lead my business down a route that was incorrect and as a result made certain errors become more apparent and more of an issue than should have been.

Although I do not wish to disclose the errros I have commited – what I do want to say is that this has caused damage to my business and personal brand both of which I pride myself on and it takes just that one small error and it doesnt matter whether you damaged your brand in the eyes of a single person, a single business or an entire country – damage is damage.

Hopefully things can be rectified and patched but as always its so crucial to remember that making a slight mistake really will damage your brand equity. So next time take an extra few minutes to decide on various factors and stages of a product line, project milestones, that new magazine design layout, whether or not you should change the way that image looks in photoshop, how you approach someone in person or online and how you interact with the world on a daily basis.

Keep working hard people and everything you are trying to achieve will come true.

On the road, in the air, on the train or wherever I need to get work done as long as I have these bunch of tools then I’m good to go – What do you use leave your tips/tools in the comments?

My top ten tools I use on the road and why they are useful to me and possibly to you

Evernote (evernote.com)

Evernote allows you to keep track of everything in your life and put it into notes – its like downloading your brain to your computer – never forget anything again. With Evernote there is a Mac, PC, iPhone, Android and Web application available to use where by all you do is capture the information you want to save and its there for life.

So for example you can

• take a picture of something you want to remember and email/upload it straight to evernote
• write a note detailing something you want to remember, bread, the milk, your printer model for ink, shopping list whatever and then tag it!
• record an audio clip of a meeting, voice notes, tag it email it or upload in the application itself and its there
• Tweet @myen to let evernote know you want to store a tweet maybe it has a link/image in it

Why is this useful? I follow the GTD (getting things done) method of working and I have an inbox, next action and reference notebooks inside evernote and with their excellent search that will identify words on scanned in documents I can find anything I need very very quickly through hundreds and thousands of documents in seconds.

Remember the milk (rememberthemilk.com)

Having to-do lists are very common no matter if they are on paper, notepad on the computer, a web app or a desktop application – remember the milk is the killer to-do application online that allows you to create and manage unlimited amount of lists VERY quickly and easily.

As with all applications listed here its free to use with a pro account available (freemium model) with the pro giving you access to a windows mobile, blackberry and iPhone/iPod Touch application to manage your tasks on the go which is a must! I have around 30 different lists setup at any one time and I shall one day go over these lists on why they are setup so well and useful.

Try out remember the milk and see how you can manage your to-do items so much better – there is also integration with Twitter – tweet new to-do items and it will be stored and when they are due Remember the milk will tweet you!

Dropbox (dropbox.com)

Dropbox is an amazing application that has fantastic uses the simple version of what it does is its a online file store / backup software that gives you 2GB of free storage – which is great that is plenty for most people to store all their documents and photos and there are pro accounts with higher storage levels should you want/need it.

Heres the good bit though not only can you access all these files through a beautifully designed web application but the software you install on your PC/mac which intelligently decides which files depending on usage and size gets uploaded first will keep a copy in a syncronized folder on your computer for you. Meaning the second you update that file and save it – its gets saved, stored and secured back in your online backup.

But wait there is more…Install the same dropbox application on another one of your computers i.e. maybe your laptop, partners computer, your iphone(!) and all those files will be sync’d across ALL the devices/machines without the need for you to tell it to backup or sync. Edit, save and its copied straight away to all your machines! Never loose work again!

Oh and to save time from downloading the files from the online storage if your machines share the same network – it syncs across the network too which makes it lightning fast!

The is probably THE most important app I use on a day to day basis. Working from my personal laptop on a file, close it and on my work machine that file is there instantly! WOW

Drop.io (drop.io)

This service allows you to create small “drops” for free 250mb in size where you can upload files and quickly send the short link to a client for example which will allow them to download say a pdf or audio file you may need to send them quickly for review/approval.

Any time you need to send files too large for email (typically 10 – 25mb) then using drop.io is a great choice. I use this when sending large files to clients such as zip files with images or large chunk of documents etc.

Google Apps (google.com/a)

Google mail (gmail) was a breakthrough in email UI when it come out all those years ago now and in recent years Google created Apps for Domains which allows any domain to use Gmail/Google Mail as its backend – so rather than having Microsoft Exchange (costs money!) Google allow you to use their system completely FREE. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses small and large using this as their email system now.

I use it religiously not only does it have my email but it also gives you a calendar and contacts database of which all keep in sync with my blackberry and iphone (blackberry needs Google application installed to keep in sync) without any hitches.

Fantastic offering and all businesses should use it instead of ever paying for email services OR using crap like horde or the like for their email systems.

What do you use for your tools? Any tips leave them in the comments.