Patteson spreads wings and flies the nest.

Mike came to us a year ago to learn a thing or two about the internet. I could immediately see that there was potential. So I started stacking up things to stretch him.

He got right down to business and began looking into industry best practice and how we could operate better as a business. The year went like a flash and now as I look back I can see the terrific progress that was made.

I am not going to tell you everything, but the logos above should give you an idea of the work done by Mike.

The biggest improvements came in project management. The core of our business now runs on the products from 37signals.com. Basecamp is a truly an impressive tool that keeps all of our communications, tasks and milestones in one place.

Right, how do we now fill some shoes the size of barge boats?

Good luck Mike!

Why do business with IMRE ?

I went into three sales meetings this week and was asked the same question three times!

“Why do business with Imre?”

I think I gave some waffle as I had to think on my feet, on reflection, I should have pointed to the following.

• Mike, Przemek and I all come from customer support backgrounds. Client support is something that we take very seriously. Mike and Marcin are currently bashing the tin on our new  ticketing support system.
• We have high client retention. Most clients have been with us for at least 3 or 4 years.  In a recent survey of 60 clients only 2 would not score us a 4 or 5. Even with these clients we put in 110%. As they say, you cant win them all.
• Doing the right thing for us is all about getting the right strategy in place for the client. White elephants are just the wrong way to go. Getting it right means coming up with the  goods that make sense. And how do we do this? We follow best practice and agile development methods whilst getting down to the essential client objectives.
• We have a decent portfolio of work, client types and industry sectors. Essentially, we are credible players in  our market.

Not convinced? Watch this youtube video clip to find out more.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuJzQKw6xD0

A big thank you to Iain Chalmers from the Holst Group for being such a great client and for going out of his way to make this video in support of Imre.

Kudos for Imre, referred by RapidHost

Before we talk about Rapidhost, let me state this: Some hosting companies are truly very difficult to deal with. I will give you a clue and an example.

Clue:
Carry out the mathematical operation on the company name and the answer = 2

Example: 
Try to move a domain or talk to support and you get the feeling that life just cannot be this hard. In one example a client was dumped into a black hole and I was pleading with an Indian support manager to do the decent thing, which he promised to do. On the next phone call I found that he had finished his shift! Arrrghhh. Result, client email and website was down for 48 hours. No fault of ours, as we had been bady advised and supported on what should have been a simple procedure. (A procedure that we follow with many other hosting companies!)

Now let us talk about Rapidhost.
A  decent, capable, intelligent and a people oriented hosting company. They are a joy to deal with as you can actually talk to them, without cultural translations, and they really know their stuff. For a specific project we needed a load balancing solution and they simply and calmly organized the technology  and came up with a deal that would not break the bank of our startup client. Every interaction that I have had with them has been entirely professional whether it be on the sales side or working with the support team. Rapidhost show that on a daily basis hosting does not have to make your blood boil! Rapidhost are different and are worth a serious look. Simple.

The great news for us is that we have been added to the Rapidhost partner page. This is a great boon when you consider that the gesture was entirely theirs. We must have done something right! Thank you Rapidhost.

2009 Recession busters?

Ran in into Alan King, who we have blogged about before, and he was a bit full of gloom and doom. We all get a bit like this don’t we? Alan has many many contacts in Banking, Industry and Engineering…… as far as he can tell, we are all a bit “stuffed”, and possibly for a long time to come.

It can’t be all that bad? Can it?

So it was time for some Google research to find out who will be surviving the recession. Below you will find, I think, some very interesting resources. A “wordle” was a new idea for me

• Small biz will do well
• A recession buster wordle!!!  (A Wordle?)
• A very good explanation of sector, stock market and economic interplay via a visual and graphs.
• Five sectors that can survive. (Not what I expected!)
• Online ad sector should do well
• An Indian perspective
• A discussion on Linked-in

mebeli
So whilst we are being “stuffed” some “stuff” is actually happening. My view on all of this?

We need to be more like speed boats than oil tankers. By this I mean, small and nimble, always flexible, always adapting and most importantly we need to be able to demonstrate value to our clients.

The power of the web to spread the word…

Now I am sure that everyone has heard at some point something similar to: “You must start blogging! It’s an incredible tool to spread the word!” and equally we are all constantly hearing things like “Twitter can project your voice instantly to huge audiences.”

Well I want to share a couple of examples that I’ve come across. Yesterday, we probably all heard about the amazing job done by a brave American Airlines pilot, dumping his plane into the Hudson river without any loss of life. What is different though, is a large number of you probably heard about it first through twitter. It turns out that one of the first ferry’s on the scene happened to have a man by the name of Janis Krums. Mr. Krums by luck had an iPhone on him and was in his twitter application so as the Ferry approached the plane to help the survivors he took a picture which went straight onto twitpic (the photo part of twitter) and the word was out…beating any professional reporter even though this is NEW YORK!

Now at least I can say that Mr. Krums didn’t take his micro-blogging quite as seriously as a certain Mike Wilson did in December. Mr. Wilson was actually in a plane crash and twittered updates throughout the entire ordeal leaving some to question the state of mind of a man that is trying to save his own life. The initial message of “Holy bleep bleep – I was just in a plane crash!” was followed with peaches like “Ugh … My glasses fell off in the mass exodus getting off the plane .. Can’t see very well” and “Continental keeping us locked up at the presidents club until they can sort everything out. Won’t even serve us drinks. ” (Another link but be warned of no censoring!) Now this is obviously the other extreme side of the scale, but it is facinating as news agencies will give their right arms for eyewitness and survivor accounts. Well I would be scared if I were them, because now these eyewitnesses and survivors have their own voice without the need to use a news agency. Powerful stuff!

Lastly I want to share with you a little story that demonstrates the power of blogging. If I told you that I could create life with a blog you probably wouldn’t believe me. What if I told you, not only could I create life, but I could do it in the form of a prodigal 16-year old Moldovan football star that will be the next big signing for a team like Arsenal or Real Madrid. I kid you not…it’s happened. Now fortunately the scandal has been uncovered as a clever ruse – they still don’t know who was behind the scam or even the motivation – but through a series of blog postings, an update to Wikipedia and some other clever uses of imagination, certain news agencies were fooled into thinking Masal Bugduv was the next big thing, even going so far that the Times listed him number 30 in their list of fledgling superstars. Of course this has left a lot of red faces, and even yesterday (24 hours after it was discovered to be a scam), the cleanup operation had begun and poor old Masal is being wiped out – although an amusing apology can be found at the bottom of this page from goal.com. Well it just shows the power that each and everyone of us have to communicate to the world…so why not start using it?

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