Smiles All Round

There are some days, which turn into some weeks, where everything looks good and you walk around with a silly smile on your face. I've seen at least two clients each day for the past week who on each occasion (that's to say the pair of clients I've seen on any given day) have brought good news into the meeting.

Whilst the headlines may all be doom and gloom, down at the smaller end of the business world, and it's worth repeating that 90% of all businesses in the U.K employ 10 or fewer people, things are looking up. Not just in the service sector, although our new pizza franchise is doing silly business, but in manufacturing and engineering.

I had a meeting yesterday afternoon for a client we have acted for now for about seven or eight years, to begin with it was a struggle but the company discovered it was operating in a market where it could quickly diversify without too much additional investment and become successful. In the early years, it's all relative, it was exclusively manufacturing for the aviation industry. Last year the company decided to go for ISO 9000 accreditation and whilst I am loathe to applaud anything that is an exercise in form filling this really works. It shows your prospective customers that you are complying with a set of universally accepted guidelines and removes the need for pages of form filling by customer and supplier alike. Clients who have gone down the ISO 9001 route have found the same thing.

Anyway, and without giving too much away in terms of confidentiality and contravening possible patent legislation, this client yesterday secured the first tranche of a £1 million contract with a supplier of the MOD. I was shown the piece of kit they are manufacturing and it is quite mind boggling for a non-combatant like myself. The only possible black spot on the horizon is if a change in Government precedes a military expenditure review which decides that investment in the war on terror is going to be cut back. Now our client is providing a quarter of the total contract value, in terms of units, and it is small beer when compared with the cost of say a helicopter. The point is that it will guarantee cash flow for a year to begin with and the jobs of 10 people at this one client, multiply that out by the number of contractors and sub-contractors involved and you can see how important Government spending is to the private sector. That's not all, this contract is for the British Army but other contracts will follow from SAS, SBS, possibly NATO and the biggest non-military interest is from the States and the NRA. After all as the song says, "If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists."


and in other news..... as a result of my photographs of Tasha I have got be two more shoots to be arranged later in the summer. It's not just the clients who are wearing silly grins at the moment.