Lee

Business has done well for me the last few years, this week quiet. I sell a lot of secondhand bikes now & stack up ones that need more work than the easy ones & do these up through the winter for the spring and always leave one in the van for a slack hour or two. this week I've done up 4 already, usually I do one a week through the winter. Once everyones paid next week it will pick up but looks like we've all had a slow week. Good old cyber monday!

I'm no longer doing mechanical watches Mick. to time consuming for me. I can make more with the time spent in other areas now. Lee

I don't want to spend £250 a year for this luxury. I can stick with what we are doing for a few more years! Paypal have an epos scanner via an ipog camera but I feel its to slow for day to day.

We were pricing up today and my son said “we could do with epos” i replied “ya but that would cost thousands” he said “when did you last look” i said “years ago” he said “exactly you can probably get it for a couple of hundred now” i said “if I could get it for two hundred I’ll order it now” googled and found this £149!! https://www.envy-tech.co.uk/retail so joking aside & on a low budget probably sub £500 can a system be brought? I need cash draw, receipt printer, touch screen, scanner and price clips for my hooks I don’t need software for stock taking or anything just want to scan all my regular bar codes and enter manually anything that hasn’t got a bar code. what you using?

personally for a £2.50 padlock I would have sold him it again & here's why... the chances are someone is monitoring his money & giving him a budget & sending him out the door. its probably the only thing left as normal in his aging & deteriorating health. if you start saying no, it might end his pattern. there could be a good chance he comes to you because his comfortable around you & the habit its deep routed. if you was screwing him over the story would be different. if you was a sweet shop & he came in two days running for a £2.50 mix you wouldn't bat an eyelid. you to him could be a sweat shop & you might just have broke his mind one tiny piece more. I have a customer who never touches anything. including his own money. he wears two layers of gloves & we chat about football (something I have no clue about) or rather I listen to him when he comes in. A few years ago someone brought in some sticker books from him (because he couldn't touch them) for my children. they where flabbergasted he gave them away & even more shocked he new i had children the reason.......... no one ever talked to him because of the way he was.

Also my Son & I do a few videos on youtube and this weekend he just secured his first professional job promoting a local business, its a 60 second ad that the chap in it is using on his own social medias, all these snippets like ads & pages are what make the small business so unique.

THIS:- IS your strongest weakness IMO GET COMPUTER SAVEY.... I've worked tirelessly on getting computer savey over the years. Facebook groups are a fantastic way of promoting your business with the "looking for recommendations" but it requires a team of eagle eyes to spot these and tip you off so you can respond quickly & timely with a link to your page and the personal touch of a reply, family and friends are great for this. Take your phone to work and photograph all day long, make it part of the routine. start a social media page for your images and get your name out there, larger companies just can not compete with a local entrepreneur on local level concentrating heavily on media has seen massive growth in my business in the last 3 years, people have always got a phone in their hands. If you have Children, get them on board they've grown up with social media and know all the moves, my Son who's now 16 does my instagram entirely & the work we've gained from that has staggered me, he more than pays for himself. We do the whole nine yards on socials between us both. we all have the skills to pay the bills & we are all watching Timpson grow at an astonishing rate but if the business wasn't there they wouldn't be either, so we as smaller concerns have to be very pro-active to deal with it & maintain our market share. Lee

I got my own show...... fake it till you make it.

I was so busy in other areas of my business I didn’t get a chance to switch on my machine yesterday, but the shoes piled up. It was a visual realisation how busy repairs still are. not up and coming granted. But stable it most definitely is. for me cutting edge damaged the show themselves, with all the attempts to do fund raising and sinking money into and the buying the SoMSR far from being respected they became a bit of a laughing stock. colledges are respected well and so can promote and produce a credible show that people want to attend. cutting edge should have stuck to a magazine and a show imo

How my life has changed in the past few years!' We've just published the first of 4 programs on YouTube (Sunday 6pm), featuring local cyclists (myself included week 4) Its amazing the response we've had at the local level, a great piece of marketing. Given the internet never existed when I started my journey as a cobbler, it still seems bizarre to me the growth I've achieved in the last 4 years by doing bike repairs during a quiet period. I'm now flat out morning noon & night! & bikes account for the majority of my turnover through the Spring/Summer & early Autumn period. Anyway we brought a load of lights (We, being my Son & I) a fancy camera & a macbook & a few thousand pound later we put this together!

£39.99 no one says no. I have one in stock, but it would cost you the same as getting it from Cousins & I couldn't dispatch until Saturday. Lee

word of mouth is still strong but screens is where it’s happening now. But you’re missing a BIG demographic if you haven’t got Instagram. none of my Children (13 to 20) have Facebook, it’s out of vogue for the sub 25 category. I also spend far more time on instagram than Facebook & wouldn’t bother with it at all if it wasn’t for my business page. in 10 years time conversations will be “do you remember the yellow pages and Facebook” Lee

I set up an e-commerce site which include online slot booking for bike servicing, online booking for bike box hire but the page that’s most successful is a used bikes page because we link to bikes on Facebook groups and now on a local level it’s constantly being looked at and referred too. It’s a case of thinking outside the box sometimes. i didn’t look at cracking a national market but focused on a local one. Its upscalable as I grow. I used free software and it only cost me a couple of days work to set up. (www.bikespeeds.com) Lee

Agree with da miller the sovereign range are bang on the money at the minute for range and packaging.

I always grind mine on the tormak sharpener. Takes a bit of practice and it’s not something I’d want to do trade but if your patient you can command a good price for something few others can do.