Week 534

Business development

Business development continues to take up quite a lot of our time and mental energy. We’ve got a number of things in progress and are hopeful that at least one of them will turn into paid work soon. In the meantime we’re available and ready to work. Get in touch if you think we can help.

We’re continuing to collaborate with another organisation on a DO&S opportunity. It amazes me quite how much work is required to prepare and apply for these things. We understand that it’s also a lot of work for the buyer. Presumably this goes some way to explaining some of the larger DO&S opportunities that are starting to appear. It feels as though there’s a trend toward procuring suppliers that can provide a number of multi-disciplinary teams at short notice based on the buyer’s needs at the time. This will almost certainly disadvantage small suppliers: the amount of time/overhead it would take to create a consortium of enough small businesses makes it impractical.

We’ve started an application for the latest round of G-Cloud to see whether that opens up any more suitable opportunities.

We’re collaborating on a bid for some Innovate UK funding with a different organisation. It’s with an organisation we’ve known for a while but haven’t yet had the opportunity to work with. I understand that the application process is almost as time consuming as for the DO&S opportunities but I’m interested to see how it might work out.

We met someone at the TUC to talk about their new Digital Lab.

We were due to start some work with Outlandish this week but it had to be postponed because the customer wasn’t available. We’re looking forward to working with them in a couple of weeks when the team is all back together.

Mission Patch

We celebrated stickering over 1000 laptops by dog-fooding Mission Patch and printing our own stickers :-)

We met someone to chat about PPC advertising for Mission Patch: we’re interested in learning how to reach more of the same sort of people that have already made and purchased stickers. He had lots of useful suggestions and we came away with a number of things to try. Interestingly PPC is quite far down that list.

We’ve arranged leaflets to be printed and distributed at the Agile Lean Ireland conference next week. This is an experiment to see whether it helps us reach the intended audience of Mission Patch.

Formalising our coop structure

This has been on hold for a while now. Initially because we were busy with client work, and then because we were busy trying to find client work. We unblocked it this week by agreeing that we want to remain a company limited by shares but adopt some coop compatible Articles of Association. We spent a while going through the model articles from Coops UK and sent a giant email of questions to Sion. Sorry, Sion!

CoTech

The Spring Gathering in Sheffield is just over a week away. Chris has recently agreed to give the opening talk! I’m disappointed that I won’t be there to see it but know he’ll do a great job.

Until next time.

– Chris