Are Trade Shows any good?
29 March 2017
This month, thousands of people will flock to Cloud Expo, which has conjoined with Cloud Security Expo, Big Data Expo, Data Centre World and Smart IoT Expo. It’s at the Excel in Docklands.
Google Vs Insight
10 March 2017
Interesting client situation this week. Received a call from a client who was in desperate need of some colocation space. The call went like this:
How to pay for Procurement Consulting
24 February 2017
I run a consulting business. Some would say I am probably not best to give impartial advice on commercial constructs for buying consulting advice. But the reality is the industry is going through some shifts and I think it’s worth debating the pros and cons of the different approaches.
Consulting at its simplest form is paying someone to do something. Generally speaking, that person is either doing what you tell them, or working on an outcome. Is there a better way of getting access to consulting skills though?
Procurement consulting, e.g. paying someone to help you buy something, has several models. Below are the 5 most common in my view.
Contract Management
03 March 2017
One of the aspects of consulting we undertake is assisting clients with the overhead of managing their supplier contracts. Why on earth would you pay someone else to manage contracts for you? Surely, they are just the bi-products of the services you buy that you “stick in the drawer and never get out again”? Well that beautifully summarises the problem.
Man Shopping
10 February 2017
I am fortunate enough to be happily married and have four kids, of which two are teenage ladies. I am therefore qualified to write a small piece about the difference in shopping habits between men and women. I make no excuses for the generalisations, as I don’t think I have found any exceptions.
I have a requirement for clothes. I travel the least possible distance to the clothing establishment that is likely to stock my requirement, walk through the door, avoid all eye contact with sales people, pick up something “that’ll do”, maybe try it on, buy it and leave. The process of shopping is not in my psyche. Why think about it too heavily when a simple answer is right in front of you?
My wife, and daughters, clearly have a fundamentally different psyche. They have a requirement for clothes. They spend hours, researching the range of garments they could acquire and book out days of time to travel around various establishments that stock their required garments. They subscribe to magazines (paid advertising), take inspiration from “celebrities” (paid advertising), consult all knowing social media advice gurus (generally biased if not paid advertising). Once in a general retail area, they enter an establishment and chaotically trawl around the shop, stroking things, talking to shop assistants, looking in the mirror, facetiming their friends, and then leave – with no garment in hand. This drives me NUTS!!
So, imagine my surprise and delight when a “brokered” shopping experience came along and made my life easy. Apologies for the blatant plug, but you should all try either Thread.com or The Chapar, (or both! prepare to part with your cash). They are both addressing the market need for men to buy clothes in the easiest possible way. I shall explain.
