It’s a strange little world us chaps at Advantix live in. We turn up at a client’s place, ask them about 50 questions, write down everything they say then vanish off into the night for the best part of 2 months. Suddenly, we resurrect ourselves from the Dungeon of Shoreham (that’s our offices) and rock up to the nerve racking meeting of glory. Did we miss anything? I can’t remember if the invoice request should include VAT or not? Did we put the final change on the logo on all the pages? How does it show up on the iPad?Read the rest of this story…

Last year, we did this for the first time and it was a great move. In late December 2010 I thought about all of the products we were going to be launching, the content we wanted to get out there, the events we wanted to put on and I wrote a list of every email I wanted to send and put them in a list like this: January: 3rd: Happy New Year 12th: Blog post summary email 25th: Free PDF on Business Automation Then, the same thing for February through to December. What I did next is go through andRead the rest of this story…

How long does it take to stop reading this post, answer the phone, read your email then send a text and get back into the flow of the post again? Apart from the added stress of jumping between so many different tasks, it’s not just the time it takes to do a task. What’s often not considered is the amount of time it takes from being in the flow doing one task, stop doing that, start doing something else, then get in the flow doing the new task. I call this ‘set up time’. The way to avoid this greyRead the rest of this story…

Bookkeeping is one of the easiest things to outsource. If you use an online system like KashFlow then you shouldn’t really need to outsource the invoicing; but sending a virtual assistant (VA) an email saying “Invoice Matt Jones £300 for consultancy, due in 7 days from today” and firing it off is a lot easier than messing about in Microsoft Word making your invoices. Your job as business owner is to set these things up, not necessarily use them day in and day out. What about expenses? Just an idea, but how about keeping all your receipts in a box,Read the rest of this story…

A little story… I was in Tenerife enjoying a nice 4 week break from the day-to-day of business (yet it kept running as if I was there), and the phone rang while at dinner. It was the Police. They told me my apartment had been broken into and looked like the place had been robbed. I couldn’t help but feel relieved that my family hadn’t been butchered or something. I lost two TVs, two games consoles, two of our computers, a server and all my DVDs. While the TV’s and games consoles being stolen were annoying, they were certainly replaceable.Read the rest of this story…

Whenever I offer any business advice in this area, it follows a very simple pattern: Discover all the problems you have (some you’ll know about, some you won’t), propose solutions and then put them into action. The problems are an essential starting point and cannot be ignored. Our first ever Business Automation system came about almost by accident when I went into Sussex Academy of Music who were existing website clients at the time and started having a conversation about their online shop. I can’t really tell you how it happened but we spent the next 24 hours, all 3Read the rest of this story…

1. Tighter integration We have several systems and apps, which are awesome on their own but when tied together could be 50x more powerful. We aim to spend a lot of time making our existing systems amazing 2.  Better Marketing Simply put, we haven’t needed to actually do any marketing this year. We’re always busy, and our events have always sold out. Expect more promotion of SignBase and AddBook and videos to explain how they will work in your business. 3. Events Our event series, Automate My Business is going to become our main source of generating leads and business.Read the rest of this story…

It’s been a pretty wicked year for us at Advantix and I have a few “end of year” themed posts prepared to keep you readers happy over Christmas. I set out this year to launch both SignBase and AddBook, and win 2 more BusinessBrain customers. By the end of the year, I’d done all those things and more. We’ve shifted the businesses entirely to almost completely eradicate web design and stick to doing what we do best – Save people time. I’ve decided that our marketing mix is going to consist of 3 things: 1. Word of mouth, and aRead the rest of this story…

I’m just about to vanish off the face of the planet for 2 weeks, ignore all calls and emails and wind up my entire customer base. Or am I? Over the last 3 years I’ve spent 4 and a half months abroad (18 weeks) and taken a 4 week break around September/October time and I’ve only ever had one issue… I was in Tenerife and got a call from the police that my flat got broken into and all my stuff stolen. I called my brother and instructed him to go over and secure the door (not that there wasRead the rest of this story…

Written Sunday 4th September I Woke up this morning with the intention of doing absolutely nothing. Good start for a Sunday. Thought to myself that I’d written 5 months worth of auto-responder content for our business automation service, it’s a crime for me not to be giving that to people who sign up to the Advantix email list. So I took a 40 page word doc of random nonsense that I wrote in Berlin and copied it into some seriously cool looking emails. Go to www.advantixgroup.com/start to see them. I listened to a webinar with some internet marketing bloke calledRead the rest of this story…