New Office, New Friends, New Plans

The big event of the week was our move to our fantastic new office in The Palace Hub, Redcar. Obviously this made last week a stressful and busy few days and with Peter taking a sneaky holiday to avoid carrying furniture it was even busier.

The first part of the week was business as usual with a certain amount of packing thrown in. Wednesday was frantic with a BNI meeting early morning and then a dash to the office to finish packing before the removals people arrived. Richardson's Removals turned up on time, well slightly early, and swiftly and efficiently packed all of our stuff from our Wilton Centre office into the van. With me and Steve jumping in we were then off to Kirkleatham Business Park to pick up our tables which were a lot more solid and heavier than I expected. And so to The Palace Hub on Redcar seafront.

Upon arrival we were informed that the lifts were not yet in operation so the transfer to the 3rd floor would be fun. Luckily for me and Steve we were informed we had to do the full tour of the building for health & safety reasons. Now we often hear the phrase "health & safety gone mad" but I'd like to introduce the phrase "health & safety is a godsend" as myself and Steve mooched around the building and the removals guys did all the carrying. Not only that, they had also put together most of our desks by the time we got back from our tour. So folks if you need a removals firm I recommend Richardsons Removals very highly, they did a fantastic job and did more than we asked plus they were great people with great craic whilst we were with them.

The rest of the week was largely spent catching up with the stuff that would have been done instead of moving but we expected that kind of disruption. The folks managing the Hub and putting the services in, all from Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council, have also been fantastic throughout the move, from cups of tea and biscuits on the moving day, to having all our networks up and running by the time we had the tables assembled, including our own wireless network with name and passwords chosen by us when we arrived. Plus our new neighbours are great as well (our old ones were too).

Friday also saw me at the Cleveland Creatives network event and it looks like there may be a group of us who will be working together to develop something on a much more commercial basis which is an exciting prospect I'm looking forward to being involved in. We've already got a great limited edition photograph of the Wilton site at night on our new office wall purchased from Paul at Peak Image Photography and an original painting of Roseberry Topping  from Di Fox up as well. There are some great creative business out here you'll be hearing more of.

Moving Forward & Moving to Redcar Seafront

Another quick post this week as I was out gadding about a fair bit last week and we're moving offices this week to The Palace Hub on Redcar Seafront but we still like to maintain our good service for our clients so it's a weekend of working.

In-between the regular work of web design, SEO, graphic design and networking we were at 2 key events this week:

On Thursday I delivered our "Dragon's Den style" pitch to 3 local entrepreneurs and a guy from the Evening Gazette as a short-listed business in the Local Business Accelerators competition. I have to say it was really nerve-shredding but I survived to tell the tale - I did however forget the name of one of our clients and the Manchester building our servers are in under questioning, then remembered them immediately I got outside the building. Funny things nerves.

Unfortunately we didn't win but the whole exercise was very useful. Not only did it make me sit down and review plans, targets and how we will achieve them, I also got some great feedback from the "Dragons" on how we could improve and some of that has already been implemented. I would encourage any young business to enter at the end of this year, we may do so again as if still fit the entry criteria.

Friday saw something of a role reversal where, instead of me pitching to experts, I was on a panel of local creative industries employers helping Redcar & Cleveland College encourage young people to come on web and design courses and get involved in the local creative industries. A really good event I was pleased to support with a number of bright young people in the audience who asked the panel some very good questions.

As someone fiercely proud of being from Teesside I'm always happy to help nurture the next generation of talent who will help the area grow as a key centre for digital and creative industries.

Local Business Accelerators

A quick post  this week as I've got a lot of work to do today and also fit in Ireland v England rugby on TV.

The main thing we'll be concentrating on this week is the Evening Gazette's Local Business Accelerators competition. We are one of six short-listed businesses and on Thursday we have to a Dragons Den style pitch after which the 3 winners of the local competition will be announced.

Despite the fact that I used to stand up and talk in front of people for a living, I'm worried it will be more like this:

Moving Ahead

Yes the plans for our move to The Palace Hub on Redcar seafront are moving ahead as it's now 17 days until move date. So a couple of contract "wrinkles" have been ironed out, we've received the contracts and we've put our notice in to Wilton Centre and paid up until the end of February. We've also sorted out our new desks and provisionally arranged for the good folk at Richardson's Removals to move our furniture for us - thoroughly recommend their friendly service.

So there'll be a bit of disruption during the w/c 18th Feb as we get moved across, especially as we don't yet have our new land-line number, the old one is owned by Wilton Centre so we can't take it with us. All emails and mobile will continue to work throughout the move and the old land-line will transfer calls across to our mobile until the end of Feb - please be a little patient with us during the latter part of that week. We will change the website and send out an email to all clients and regular contacts once we have the new number.

The move does not effect websites in any way as all our hosting packages are on servers in a data centre - we haven't stuck everyone's site on a server on our office floor, it's done properly.

Got a lot on so just a quick update on other stuff we've been up to. Our social media work including the running of #ClevelandHour on twitter has been growing well and is largely run by Peter our e-marketing assistant who is doing a great job. We also launched a new website for a local gas engineer and plumbing company, Cleveland Gas Services, via our Small Business Solutions service that provides packaged budget, but quality, web services.

And finally, a great win for England in the Calcutta Cup :)