With our Wedding Flowers hotline ringing off the hook, Judith up to her chin in raffia, and our drivers up at the crack of dawn for early morning Saturday deliveries, the wedding season is now truly upon us at Flowers HQ. With the bustles of brides visiting our wedding team in Park Royal for advice [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Flowers, General, Weddings on June 30th, 2009 | No Comments »
Happy New Year to everyone! We’ve been a bit quiet on the blog of late, what with having to get all our Christmas flower deliveries sorted and having to do some very very last minute Christmas shopping of our own too. We’re back in the saddle now, looking forward to 2009 and will be posting [...]
Filed under: Customers, Ethics & Environment, Finance & Investment, General, Good Causes & Charities, International Flowers, Mega Days, Operations, Valentine's Day on January 5th, 2009 | No Comments »
Over the last few days there has been plenty of uncertainty in the global economy. Banks have failed, shares have plunged and deposits have disappeared. Even a nation has gone bust as Iceland attempts to keep the country from free falling into a recession. Not just that, the Icelandic troubles have caused ripples across Europe [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Flowers, General on October 9th, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The last 12 months have been pretty, erm, interesting for young businesses such as our own (although not as bad as the ancient Chinese curse might suggest). We now get asked almost daily “how are sales holding up?”, “are you doing better because you’re online (or worse?)?”, “are visitors converting to customers?” and so on. The [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Floristry, General, Matters Webby, Mega Days, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day on July 1st, 2008 | 2 Comments »
We often get asked by friends and former colleagues who are thinking about setting up their own business for our top tips on fund-raising for start ups. We’re no experts so, rather than give exhaustive detail of what we’ve learnt here, we thought we’d share three avenues of government funding that we’ve found interesting and [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Setting up, Start up on June 16th, 2008 | 5 Comments »
One thing I’ve learned since we set up Arena is that, if you run a business, you have to pay for EVERYTHING! Especially banking. Consumer banking is nominally free, but is rife with accusations of excessive charges, arbitrarily levied. This “free banking + costly slap” pricing model is the way high street banks bump up [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Setting up on May 30th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
This little credit card thingy is just about the most important widget in our business. We need this smart card to make all our payments – to our Dutch suppliers, to employees, to, well, everyone. It plugs into the side of my laptop. If we don’t use it when we make international payments, we have [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Finance & Investment, General on May 21st, 2007 | No Comments »
