Lucidica The IT department for small business

 

 

November 2009

We’ve had a busy November - Thomas (our CTO) spoke on a Computer Weekly roundtable Tuesday with a few competitors plus large companies like PwC and Capgemini.  The results of this roundtable, on “Project failure: what it means to your job, corporate reputations and managing risk” will be in a 2 page article to appear in Computer Weekly’s magazine, digital magazine and website.

And on 20 November Thomas held a “IT for working from home” seminar at the British Library to close Global Entrepreneur Week at the Library.  The seminar was fully booked and received great praise from all whom attended.  With 2.8 million businesses in the UK now working from home, the Friday theme of “Home Business” in Global Entrepreneur Week was very popular.
This is what the Manager of the Business & IP Centre had to say after sitting in on this seminar:

"An excellent overview of why and how one would use technology to improve productivity. I liked the fact Tom seemed to be able to find free, or nearly free software for most things."

Neil, Manager, Business & IP Centre, British Library
As you can see below - with the Erasing David film we also helped out with - we are getting more-and-more media exposure, without really searching for it!  In 2010 we will be more proactive on this front as we believe we have a lot of experience and opinion on technology for small business.

Lucidica help "Un-Erase" David

Our CTO, Thomas Jeffs, this month appeared in the fascinating film Erasing David.
The premise of the film is that David Bond will try and disappear and the corporate investigators Cerberus are tasked to track him down within 1 month.
We helped Cerberus with all manner of technical tricks from fake emails and fake websites, to device tracking. The film charts David’s journey as he tries to establish how much his privacy is threatened by the digital world while evading the ever enclosing investigation firm and their efforts to pin him down.

It’s currently touring the festivals, and should be on general release in the New Year.

 
Our new British Library seminar schedule is locked in

Our seminar schedule at the British Library Business & IP Centre for the first 6 months of 2010 is now confirmed. All seminars we ran there in late 2009 booked out a month in advance so if you’d like to learn more on SEO, Email Marketing or CRMs and take the opportunity to check out the great resource that is the Business & IP Centre after the seminar, be quick to book a spot.  You can see all the seminar dates and topics, and how to register here.

October 2009

I’m very pleased to announce Christopher Payne started with us on Monday.  He is our Service Delivery Assistant and works with Mo (Service Delivery Manager) in talking with new or prospective clients, and ensuring our existing clients are happy. 

Christopher and Mo conduct our daily IT Support Job Survey (we call 1 in 4 jobs that closed the previous business day, and ask the client contact whom logged it 3 quick questions - to gauge their satisfaction), our annual Client Satisfaction survey and field complaints (or compliments!) from our clients and feed these back to our team.  They also proactively invoke our Satisfaction Guarantee for clients, so don’t be afraid to let an engineer, Christopher or Mo know if you’re not 100% happy with a recent job or our performance.

Swine Flu Outbreaks Near Me?

Harvard medical centre have released an iPhone application to alert you to swine flu cases near you. As El Reg put it ‘Pig Plague; there’s an App for that’.

The iPhone now has over 100,000 Aps available covering everything from local information, to convertors and internet radio. There are also several developers who are trying to hone technology that will allow you to view information about buildings and locations just by pointing your phones camera at them. The PDA really is more than an assistant, it’s point-and-fire information.

No longer will your phone just keep you in contact with friends, family and colleagues - it will tell you the history of the building you’re meeting them in, the closest cashpoint. Oh and the closest person with swine flu!   

Our 20 November seminar at the British Library
Our next seminar at the Business & IP Centre resource at the British Library is 2pm Friday 20 November, on “IT for your home office”. 

As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week we’ve been asked to run a seminar on how to get the most from your technology if you work from home. You can book for this seminar here.

To see all the events during that week, including Inspiring Entrepreneurs session with Lord Sugar, read more here.

 

September 2009

We hope business is good for everyone, the economy seems to be on the up.  A quick look at our figures recently revealed sales are already 50% up on last year!  And during this growth we have kept our word to our existing clients, of not dropping service levels. Our daily IT Support Job survey (we call 1 in 4 jobs that close and ask 3 quick questions, including how satisfied you were out of 10) has shown us average around 8.5 our of 10 in 2009.

No new team members this month :-) but we did have a wonderful achievement in September.  Jamal, one of our Engineers, became an Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP), and in fantastic style – achieving 100% in the exam!  In addition to being a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), having a Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management (ITIL) and a Bachelor of Mathematics and Computing (Honours) – he is almost as qualified as Tom!

It has been a year of change and hard work by the entire team, and we all look forward to celebrating a successful 2009 at our Christmas party in December – we hope you can make it (a date and location coming soon).

Toaster predicts the invasion of space slugs?

Back in April we launched a virtual intelligence powered from an Argos toaster in the style of Talkie Toaster from Red Dwarf. The little fellow seems to have caught on with a few online forums with lots of users conversing with him and then posting their chats online. One online forum though took things further and voted for their funniest conversation, it went like this:


you> Stupid
Talkie Toaster> Are you calling me stupid?
you> Yes
Talkie Toaster> I will remember you said that when robots take over the World.
you> Which robots?
Talkie Toaster> space slugs.
you> They’re not robots
Talkie Toaster> Not yet.

To speak to talkie, or for more information on him, check him out here.

August 2009

Another month, another team member starts :).  Nathan Stanford started with us in early August, as our Service Delivery Assistant.  Nathan will work with Mo (Service Delivery Manager) in talking with new or prospective clients, and ensuring our existing clients are happy.  They conduct our daily IT Support Job Survey (we call 1 in 4 jobs that closed the previous business day, and ask the client contact whom logged it 3 quick questions - to gauge their satisfaction), our annual Client Satisfaction Index survey and field complaints (and compliments!) from our clients and feed these back to our team.

They also proactively invoke our Satisfaction Guarantee for clients, so don’t be afraid to let an engineer, Nathan or Mo know if you’re not 100% happy with a recent job or our performance.

Do you have a mentor?

Even Warren Buffet and Bill Gates still have mentors, most successful people in business do.  We are interviewing a new mentor in early September. A good mentor holds you accountable for large goals you set yourself over a quarter, year or several years.  Often business owners don’t have people “above us” – like a Board of Directors - to ask the hard questions, challenge our ego and our set ways.  A good mentor does this and also forces you to lift your head from the day-to-day so you think and act on strategy (working “ON” not “IN” your business, as Michael Gerber from E-myth says in his great book).  One of Troy's all-time favourite quotes is from Sun Tzu:

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”

 Kerrie Dorman, one of our long-standing clients, provides a great mentoring service to businesses.  And you get to choose from 3 different mentors – each with their own specialist background, and each whom has run their own business (a vital ingredient in a good mentor).  Check out Kerrie’s website here.

July 2009

Lucidica Speaking at the British Library

We have recently agreed to run 3 half-day seminars at the British Library, for FREE.  Tom, our CTO, will be speaking on Email Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for small business and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - including how we got to page 1 of Google for “it support London” in less than 3 months.  The British Library’s modern Business & IP Centre is a tremendous resource for anyone running or thinking of starting a small business.  See the British Library seminar dates and how to register, plus other FREE technology seminars we run.

We're sorry to keep bangin’ on about this (as Sir Alan would put it).  But on the Monday of the second test this month (day 5) - when Tom and Troy and a few others were at Lord’s watching Australia lose for the first (and last) time in the 5 test series - Troy passed his phone to Tom to show him something quite astonishing.  Troy Googled “it support London”, as he does every week or so to see how we’re tracking, and nearly fell off his chair!  We are now in the top 3 positions, on page 1 of Google for our primary search phrase. To hear how Tom did this, and how SEO can boost your web traffic let alone sales, come along to one of our FREE technology seminars on SEO. 

This month sees us start a 2 year project to upgrade all our systems. Dr Yishu Ding will be leading this project and we are extremely excited by her start - especially as the 3 disparate systems we have been using over the years to run and grow our business, are creaking!  Yishu brings a wealth of systems knowledge and experience to Lucidica, and we look forward to our team and clients reaping the rewards of her imminent hard work. That takes us to 17 people.

School for Start Ups - by Doug Richard

In the last 6 months, Troy (our GM), has been to a lot of business seminars and by far the ones of greatest value were the two he attended at the School for Startups.  On a Saturday this month he attended the “Entrepreneurial Marketing: No-money marketing” at the London Business School, and a month earlier the “How to make money” seminar at the British Library – all about funding your business start and growth. 

These full-day seminars are engaging, witty, extremely relevant to anyone thinking of starting or even looking at growing an existing business, and tremendously insightful.  Doug was the American Dragon on the first 2 seasons of the BBC show, Dragon’s Den.  He has a wealth of experience in business and conveys his messages as super-effectively as anyone we’ve seen.  The audience participation is great too.  In each seminar, at least 4 businesses were up on stage, profiled and critically analysed (nicely though!) by Doug and the crowd, for whatever part of the day we were focusing on.

If as a business owner/manager you are interested in continual learning and improvement, we highly recommend you check out one of his 5 seminar topics.  You won’t be disappointed.

June 2009

We are very pleased to announce an addition to our Operations Team.  Dionne Traylen is our newest Administration Assistant, and works with Jo (Operations Manager) and Manuela (Admin & Business Development Assistant) to ensure all things finance, admin, legal and systems-wise runs smoothly.  That now takes us to 16 people.

And, same as we have a commitment to our great existing clients not to drop service levels as we continue to grow, Tom and Troy also commit to our team not to neglect them during our growth.  In our May quarterly employee satisfaction survey, every employee at Lucidica voted us as the best place they’ve ever worked.

Lucidica aces Google!

Our brand new name servers have been online for a short while now so we asked an independent server consultancy to test and rate how we were doing against our London-based rivals and against the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft. We included the 9 other companies we share the 1st page of Google with and the results were: Lucidica: A; Google: A-; Apple: A-; Microsoft: B-; Average IT Support Company: D-. What’s more, these name servers power not just us but the majority of our clients as well.  Not sure what a name server is, or how important it is to the internet, read up about it at Wikipedia.

May 2009

We made page 1 of Google for "it support london", with 2 days to spare!

On Friday 1 May Troy happily handed Tom a bottle of premium gin.  But as he said from the outset of the bet 3 months earlier – he wins either way!  An amazing feat - Tom dragged us from page 72 to page 1 of Google for our primary search phrase “it support London”.  And he did it in less than 3 months, knowing very little about SEO at the start.  This is a phenomenal achievement and we have noticed our web traffic, and inbound sales calls, dramatically increase from this work.

If increasing traffic to your website is important to your business be sure to come along to a FREE monthly seminar on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  Tom, our CTO, will provide plenty of FREE advice on good SEO and outline how he got us to page 1 of Google.  These half-day seminars are valued at £295 ex VAT per person and we happily invite all our great clients along to these, at no charge.  Find a suitable date and how to register.

We got out first client through Twitter

In April a prospective client called and when Mo enquired how they heard about us we were all surprised to hear it was through Twitter (the latest Web 2.0 and social media phenomena on the internet).  The prospect had asked the good people on Twitter if they knew any reliable IT support companies in London.  From what we hear, two separate people sent glowing “Tweets” back about Lucidica.

April 2009

OK, another month, another team member starts! This month we add another Engineer to our pool of growing nerds. Jamal Smith-Graham joins our high calibre team as a very qualified Engineer, having completed his MCSE (Microsoft Certified ystem Engineer) in 2008. The MCSE is the highest qualification you can attain as an Engineer working in the Microsoft realm, and takes around 7 exams and 1.5-2 years to achieve.

Red Dwarf A.I. Toaster Speaks from Shoreditch

Earlier in the year Tom, our CTO, gave 2 members of our engineering team the challenge of creating an 'Artificial Intelligence' to talk to people on our website. A few months later, and coinciding with Red Dwarf's return to our TVs, they have launched a virtual intelligence powered from a toaster - in the style of the Talkie Toaster from Red Dwarf. If you want to see their challenge and how they did it check it out here , or to talk to Talkie himself, visit him here (just don't ask for toast!!).

Update on our quest for page 1 of Google, for "it support london"

On the "it support london" SEO bet Troy (our GM) made with Tom (our CTO) in early 2009 - if Tom got us on page 1 of Google for this search phrase by 1 May 2009, Troy owed him a bottle of premium gin (otherwise, Tom owed Troy a case of premium beer). Well, as of Tuesday 28 April Troy could be seen wandering the fin gin shops of London as Tom got us to page 1 with three days to spare - check it out. This is a phenomenal achievement, as search engines (especially Google) and competitor listings change all the time. We are also higher up the organic results at google.com (the bet was on google.co.uk), and are even on page 3 in the world search phrase "it support". Well done Tom, a fantastic effort. Why not hear Tom speak about how he did this, in our FREE monthly technology seminar on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Check here for dates and how to register.

March 2009

During March Tom achieved a phenomenal milestone - getting us on page 1 of Google for the search phrase 'computer support london', check it out .  This is no easy feat as search engines change their algorithms all the time, and competitors improve their sites (and SEO efforts), which knock you down a page or two with no notice.
Mid-March Roberta went on maternity leave (she is due in May) and expects to be back late 2009 or in 2010.  Roberta was so good at her job she even found an excellent replacement for herself while on leave - Manuela Fernandes started with us full-time in early March.

February 2009

Well, February sure was a month of changes for us. On day 1 we took another room in our building (we can all breathe a little easier now), recently finished off our new website (launching next week), completed our annual competitor research, finalised our new products & pricing (too much to talk about here, so we send a separate email next week), had 2 more people start and our search for a Systems Analyst/Developer began.

I’ve got to stop hiring people!

Sounding too much like Dustin ‘Rainman’ Hoffman, instead of “going to Kmart”, I wander the halls of our building chanting “I’ve gotta stop hiring people, I’ve gotta stop hiring people”.
On Monday 2 February Lauren Conrad (our new Trainee Engineer) started with us, and (thanks to a great client, PlayGen) this week university intern Ayesha Ansari started part-time to help us on 2 fronts over the coming months: researching the City market (we’re launching a sales campaign directed at FSA-regulated firms very soon); and researching acquisition targets.  Our main growth strategy is through acquisition - buying small competitors (those with less than 5 staff).  So if you know anyone with an I.T. Support company who may be interested in selling-up, please get in touch.

Systems Analyst/Developer

Due to the excellent feedback we got from our Clients late last year in the annual Client Satisfaction Index survey, we have started the process of vastly improving our systems.  They’re not the worst, but the 4 disparate systems we use mean we will struggle to grow with as little pain as possible in the coming years – unless we stop now, take a breath, design great systems, put them in place then train our team.
The Systems Analyst/Developer post is for the 2 years we anticipate this project will take.  They’ll be responsible for analysing our systems needs, assessing what’s already out there then project managing the implementation of the chosen platform.  So, as always – if you know anyone who loves to design and implement systems, please let me know.  Once they start, we’re up to 15 people!

Adobe PDFs remain unsafe

Adobe has become the latest casualty of malicious software as they struggle to patch the ubiquitous ‘Acrobat’.  The world’s 9th biggest software vendor proves that making safe software isn’t easy and has announced that PDF documents, but more particularly Acrobat, will  remain ‘unsafe’ until early March.  As always, we’re advising clients to not open attachments from unknown recipients and to contact us if in doubt.  But for the time being Adobe has left a large hole in I.T. security

January 2009

As of this week we are now up to a team of 12, which is soon to grow some more! Last week Tom and Troy interviewed some aspiring nerds - for our Trainee Engineer position. We're looking for the right person (with an inner nerd) we can coach and develop into a high calibre Engineer.

Systems Analyst/Developer
Late in the month Joanne Guy started as our Operations Manager. For the last 4+ years, Jo was the Office & Administration Manager at the G4S group of security companies, managing several staff and responsible for the payroll of hundreds of contractors. We are very excited about Jo starting in this role. She was by far the best candidate in our search over the last 4 months to fill this important role. Apart from ensuring our business runs smoothly from a finance, admin, systems and legal point-of-view with Roberta, Jo will have a steady stream of projects to work on throughout 2009 to help our business grow that little bit more.