Writing this is my way of remembering her, please feel free to leave messages for her (or me) below.

Clare Rayner The Retail Champion

For several years people had been saying I should write a book. I dismissed it at the time as not for me – primarily due to the increasing number of unknown business people become self-appointed experts simply for churning out a self-published book and then claiming that they must be an expert; after all they had written a book! That was NOT how I wanted to be perceived, and so, because of this trend, the idea of jumping on the book-writing band-wagon seemed quite abhorrent…

It was in March 2011 that two things happened that began to change my view. I met Sue Blake, a PR person whose own expertise lies in helping business experts develop and raise their profile. She has also promoted literally hundreds of business books in her time, mostly published by “proper” mainstream publishers. Secondly I joined a speaking agency, who seemed quite surprised to discover that I wasn’t a published author. Now people who were used to working with experts all the time were expecting me to have had a retail book published. Hmm...

I’d never really considered approaching a mainstream publisher, the reason was because all those people who couldn’t get a mainstream contract had told of the horror stories of approaching publishers, presenting proposals, how many months it took, how time consuming it was, how much work… They all raved about self-publishing as this liberating new route to being published – this made me feel that perhaps this was the only possibility for me too.

So that’s my past failure – believing in other people’s spin. What I know NOW is that if their book had enough commercial potential they’d have been taken on by a main stream publisher.

Lesson 1: Don’t let other people’s spin cloud your belief in what you can achieve, they’re not you, you’re not them.

Studying hard at Uni

When the opportunity arose for me to sit and think about the “successes” and “failures” I had throughout 2011, the first things that came to mind were two quotes by Winston Churchill. The first of which reads: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” which is so true, failures are both inevitable and important in life and the real success is how they are overcome.

The second quote has kept me going some days. It reads: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”. How true that is! Some people get into the mindset that they have achieved their goal (whatever that may be) and so can sit back and let the success take over. That’s all well and good in the beginning so there’s room to celebrate, but, success is not final. We have to keep working at it to keep it a success.

My 2011 was mostly a year of turbulence and unease. It was definitely not the best year I’ve had and I’m glad to see it gone.

The first 5 months or so were quite tough and, at the time, was probably my biggest “failure” to date. I had a few health issues at the time which forced me into deferring my final semester of uni. I was devastated. At the time, I thought I had failed at achieving what I wanted for my life. It was a massive blow to my confidence and forced me to rethink my goals for the year. So here I was, 12 weeks from graduating and having to defer. I had failed. Many before me, in other (and, I considered worse off) situations had graduated with little issue – why couldn’t I?? At this point, I was also failing at finding the appropriate health professional to get my health back on track.

English Cream Tea Box

My most recent Failure was about remaining calm and logical re dealing with my first Christmas without our sons around, both now having emigrated.  Despite brain telling me how many days it was until I'd see them again, heart and stomach yearned for their noise, hugs and chaos.  Sigh.  

On a more business-related matter, I also failed to finish the book I'm writing despite it being 99% complete and simply needing me to be locked up without supper until it's done.  Another sigh.   Also, I am not size 10 (not even one leg is) and my clutter remains in situ, despite aspirations for transformations.

But whatever you do, don’t allow the seeking of others’ approval, or receiving the disapproval of others to imprison you in mediocrity.  Go out and do it, whatever it is, and you’ll learn from the experience.  Implement your learning and you will be able to achieve greatness much more than if you were to stay trapped, waiting for that pat on the back, which may never come! 

Pre-approve yourself, give yourself permission to break boundaries, tread new ground, create new business.  It's only you that can ultimately make the difference to your business, no amount of approval from others is going to get the things done that you need to do to create success in your business.  

Which areas of your business are you going to break out of your self imposed prison? 

What things are you seeking approval for, that it's time you gave yourself approval for? 

Are you ready to be inspired?  Then get ready to mark this in your diary for Tuesday 22nd November.  

What do Virgin Radio and Shazam have in common?

You'll find out, straight from the horses mouth (CEO of Virgin Radio and Chairman of Shazam!)  

John Pearson will be sharing about inside the Virgin brand, how is Richard involved? And how does having the brand effect business (for good and bad),  but not only that, he'll also be sharing the inside story of a modern day start up. 

“Hear a song you don’t know? Shazam identifies it instantly. Free and Unlimited usage.”

From concept to 150 million users – a brand built from scratch.

I am really looking forward to hearing John on Tuesday, and if you're in London on Tuesday, I'd highly recommend that you be there too!  

You can book tickets online from The Inspired Leaders Network

If I'm lucky, I'll see you there!  

As my regular readers will know, I use the internet "quite a lot", in fact I'm usually on line 70% of my waking life.  I tweet a fair bit (a modest assessement of my volume of tweeting), I email, I use facebook, I Skype, I blog, I don't own a Tv, instead when I do watch programmes, I do so on line. 

So having a good internet connection is rather important to me, which is why I chose to pay Virgin Media for a service which provides 50mb download speeds.  

You'd think that would ensure that I wouldn't have any issues in my having constant quality access to the internet, wouldn't you?  Well that was my expectation; however it's not always the case.  "Up to", (to be accurate) should contain almost the speed that it declares it's "up to", i.e- I expect to have speeds which include 49 mb, at least occasionally... 
The reality is different though; I've tested my download speed on quite a few occasions and the fastest I've seen is about 28mg (Average is about 15 mg).  


But that's what happens in life so often, we have expectations and the reality falls short. I've resigned myself to slower internet speeds than advertised, that are inaccurate, misleading and they certainly appear to violate The Trade Descriptions Act. 

For example, if I bought a jug that measures liquids “up to” 1 litre and it could only hold 1 pint, I wouldn't be satisfied with it.  Why?  Because it is simply not as it was described, it is not fit for purpose, and I would be well within my rights to request my money back.   

So on Sunday afternoon, when I wanted to watch “Have I Got News For You” on BBC iplayer, and wasn’t able to due to “insufficient download speeds” I tweeted @VirginMedia to express my concerns that I’m not getting what I paid for.  

We’ve had a few tweets backwards & forward and it’s been suggested that I ring Virgin Media.  I won’t.  Why?  Because I’ve done it in the past, and each time I’ve had to search for the number on their website (not easy to find) because they expect their customers to have Virgin phones (either land line or mobile) which I don’t have.  Then when I do ring, I have to pay for the privilege of being on hold for 10-15 minutes before I get to speak to a human being, and that's after I’ve gone through a series of menus, and them asking me for a reference number that I can never seem to find on my bill.

Paying for a call isn’t such a big deal, but it’s not standard land line rates, if it were I wouldn’t mind, I’d just be able to make the call through my Skype package, which allows me to call unlimited land lines numbers worldwide for under £10 per month.  (That’s the reason I don’t have a Virgin phone, I simply don’t need it).

So I suggest nicely to the person tweeting from @VirginMedia that getting someone to ring me to help me would be good customer service.  It’s suggested that I ring them first.  I say I’ve already done that in the past, I don’t wish to pay for being on hold for 10-15mins, or waste that amount of my life on chasing a company that has issues providing me with the service they promised.

Then I’m tweeted a link to an online form, which needs to be completed before anyone can call me.

I look at the questions, and I decide I really don’t want to spend the amount of time it'll take to complete the form on this issue.  I tweet again about someone ringing me.  I’m then told it’s not safe for me to send my number to them via twitter.  I feel a little bit irked at this point; having someone chose for me what method is safe, or not safe.  The number I can give them is a publicly known number and it’s on my website.  I agree that DMs on twitter are not 100% safe, and I warn clients of the same, however this is MY information and should I chose to send it, that’s my choice.

I’m asked again to fill in the form, so they have all the details they need to get the right person on the case, that they’re confident they can resolve this for me.  I was asked a third time, to which I responded that it felt very much like they weren't listening to me at all. 

They could have rang me this morning & got the details they needed in under 60 seconds verbally.  The “right person” could have rung me back by now.

My customer service issue could have been resolved already and it’s not.  Why?  Because Virgin Media haven’t quite got the hang of understanding that it’s really a good idea to communicate with the customer through the medium in which the CUSTOMER finds most convenient.

I even tweeted about it earlier: #Twip allow your customers to contact you by the method that is convenient to THEM, not you!

Am I being as stubborn as a mule..?

I’m now being stubborn, refusing to complete the form, or ring them.  I have the luxury of doing so because I do have internet connection, albeit slower than I’ve paid for. 

It’s annoying though.  I love the Virgin brand, I researched a lot before going with VirginMedia broadband, and although when I have gotten through to customer service I have received some great service, getting through is a huge hassle for me that I’d rather not experience.  (NB: I have also received some atrocious customer service once I’ve gotten through on the phone too.)

I don’t want this to be a Virgin Media bashing blog post, but I do want to highlight something that is relatively simple- TELEPHONING your customer when they have requested it, is probably a good idea, if you consider customer satisfaction a priority. 

Having a social media presence, and using it is a good thing.  It would be even better if it were to be used to listen to what the customer wants. 

Am I being unreasonable asking for Virgin Media to call me?

I’d genuinely love to hear what you think, because I am aware that do have a bit of a stubborn streak in me, and maybe I’m being a bit unreasonable in this situation, just to make a point? 

"Is there a way that I can send out a tweet to all my followers individually, without having to do it manually?" was the question I was asked by an entrepreneur recently. 

This was my response: 

There are software applications that do that, however it's not something I recommend doing, as it's considered very spammy and alienates people. So I'm afraid I can't recommend anything to you.

They thanked me and said they'd been "umming and ahhing" about it for some time, but they would follow my advice. 

I continued by explaining what I see as the fundamentals to successfully using twitter for business: 

The key and power of twitter is building relationships, especially with key people of influence, have them on your side and they'll tweet and ReTweet for you, because they like you and they like what you're doing.

Build relationships with people, so that they become your raving fans, doing your marketing for you.

Do not waste time with people who don't like what you do, they will never be your customers and you're investing time with them, when it could be better spent elsewhere. 

Being keen to learn, the budding entrepreneur asked who would be the key people of influence on twitter, to focus on building relationships with? 

My response:

Well that's a bit of research I'd recommend that you do, because it's different for each business. 

Have you identified who your "ideal customer" is? 

Once you're clear on who your ideal customer is, the next step is to research the people that they are most influenced by, in terms of people in the mass media as well as social media.

These are the people that you need to build relationships with. Chances are if you're doing something similar, but not in direct competition with them, they'll be happy to share what you're doing with their customers.  Because they know their customers will like/enjoy/value what you're doing.  Sometimes it sweetens the deal if you have an affiliate scheme running as well. 

Social Media marketing is all about building goodwill and to receive goodwill you need to give it. Find ways to help those people who have influence on your ideal customers.  (I highly recommend reading Go Givers Sell More by John David Mann & Bob Burg to find out more about this kind of approach.  And you'd do well to follow Bob, he uses twitter extremely effectively!)

Be genuine, be helpful, be friendly.

Share quality, valuable information that is interesting and useful to your target customers. They will enjoy following you and then will start sharing with others about you. 

The most important thing to remember about social media is that people are there to be social, not to buy your stuff!

Be sociable, share about your life and what you do, don't just spew out your self-promotional material (people get tired of that very easily). 

Having Fun with Twitter

So... whatever you do on twitter, whatever you're selling or promoting, please don't be spammy. We come to twitter to hang out & chat about things we like, not to be constantly be sold to!  Make sure you play nice, but most importantly, be social and have FUN!

(In the picture above, you'll how Simon The App Man and I are having Fun with Cutting Foam's Twitter sign that was specially made and sent to me by Fran, thanks Fran!)

This is exciting, first steps to bringing to life a concept & business model I've been working on for over three years! 

Watch this space to see the website develop and grow, as the business and team grows too.

Success Matters is unlike any other business model, it's heart is the principle of win win, creating supportive team sharing resources so that all involved succeed, achieving their goals without the pitfalls most entrepreneurs fall into.