Supercod - Personal Blog

As many of you know I lead a busy life being a director at a few Internet companies, my typical day will start after dropping off my son at school I go in to the office, solving problems, reading blogs, coming up with ideas and working away on various projects with the odd meeting thrown in for good measure.

Getting closer to lunch time when I get an MSN message from Fraser “why are you not out finding the liveguy?” what on earth is he on about, so I ask and sends me a link to his blog post on the Vodafone Liveguy. The day before he was in Edinburgh and Fraser decided he would go look for him after it was clear that very few others had taken the leap from desktop to out and about. So what did I do, went off for lunch and decided I too would track him down, and I did. With Frasers help back at his Affiliate Command Centre he guided me like a Cruise Missile straight to the building the Liveguy had ducked in to, however when he came out of the building I was just up a bit outside Scottish Screen’s Glasgow HQ and missed him by like 10 seconds as someone else who decide to take the afternoon off work got in with the magic phrase.

So we have one Affiliate Marketing winner in Edinburgh, I have let the side down for Glasgow but Newcastle is next, will Kieron strike another blow for people who work but when something interesting Internet wise comes along go running from the office with any excuse just to take part even when they don’t actually want the prize, they just want to win!

With so many business going under you can’t beat about the bush when getting paid invoices. The Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 allows you to act the very day after an invoice has been paid late, you can claim a recovery free along with interest for each day the payment is late. I have wrote a huge big article on what Scottish Companies can do to recover money but the legislation is the same in England and Wales so it’s well worth a read.

Some companies act like it’s a privilege for them to pay an invoice on time, while mistakes can happen, being a constant offender of not paying invoice on time should not be tolerated and you have to use the law to send the message home to these dodgers of payments that your not going to be walked over, they will soon listen up and start paying on time.

Anyone else wondering who “BIBIT INTERNET PAY BGC” is paying money in to your Business account but don’t know who it is?

Wonder no more, it is WorldPay and looks like they are using a bank funds clearing company from another country to pay out any payments due to you via WorldPay. Would have been nice of them to send Merchants using the system an email and let us know. My company UK Internet Sites use two systems these days WorldPay and Protx, have to say Protx is much better system if you can get your own Merchant Services from the bank, if not WorldPay is a one stop shop however Paypal seem to be offering a better deal for all in one services when you need to take payments online.

At the start of the year our landlords served notice on our city centre offices giving us 6 months to find a new place, as we already knew in advance that our office block was to be made in to flats we had started searching before, however it took until April before we found a half decent place. We acted quickly to make sure they had the information they needed and everything was going fine until this week, when all of a sudden the landlords of the new place stopped replying to our emails, and phone calls, we found out from another source also looking at the same office they where told end of last week that the office was no longer on the market as they where in final legal stages with new occupants, sadly not us, basically looks like either someone has come in after us with a better offer or we where getting strung along in case the other people pulled out. So that leaves us looking for a new office again (and legal costs from the other, gits), and we have until middle of August to find, and move in to a new place. Thankfully we have a few back up plans none of them ideal but then if you could see the state of what is on offer in Glasgow for a business of our size you would actually think the back up plans where very, very nice indeed.

Ah the trails of running a business, thankfully got few people around me who can deal with checking out offices to save me seeing the crap ones (however I have seen a few so maybe they need to vet them better LOL) but all in all moving offices is not top of my “want to do list” but certainly creates a challenge for a business that has expanded every year since we started, especially when we had pretty good, well priced and very centrally located office right on George Square. I guess it doesn’t help with everyone else in the building all looking for offices of similar size at the same time, so I won’t be letting on where we are thinking of moving to at this stage, just in case they stumble on this page LOL

My company, Paid On Results has been shortlisted for two awards at this years Affiliates 4U Awards. Its split in to two sections, the judge based awards and for this we are up for Best Network Innovation 2008, not bad when you consider how many Networks are in the UK, and even with the least amount of investment Paid On Results still manage to bring out new innovations all over the place. And the section picked by the community we have been short listed for Publisher’s (that’s Affiliate to the man in the street) Choice of Network 2008. This one has more respect as it’s voted by the people who actually matter, the Affiliates themselves. However I don’t hold out much hope of us actually winning as we don’t have the budget to beg for votes, currently a couple of the networks are doing the rounds begging for votes, so all the best to them

It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part, yeah that’s a load of rubbish, it’s all about the winning but at least we got selected, many “bigger” Affiliate Networks with money to burn didn’t even get picked either by the judges or the Affiliates, that speaks volumes in it’s self, so while winning is better then taking part, at least we got selected for 2nd year in a row so I guess we must be doing something right

On Friday night I enjoyed an evening at Hamilton Park Racecourse with some of the crew from Paid On Results, was one of our works trips out that we try to arrange every month or so, this being the first one I actually made it to, last one was Ten Pin Bowling.

It was a really good night out, Hamilton is just South East of Glasgow, so it was a quick train ride from the office, I let everyone leave 30 mins early to attend (should get employer of the year LOL) when we arrived we got our passes, headed off in to the ground for a couple of pints, a look at the first horses being walked around the paddock before it was off to select our bets.

We had a great view of the finishing line from the bar and there was plenty of bookies on hand to take bets close by, after the races where over, 6 in total (I managed to get a 50% strike rate, winning 3 out of 6 races) we went outside to watch Sophie Ellis Bextor doing a small performance on the stage at the racecourse, pretty much everyone was in good spirits, dancing away especially when she rounded off with Murder on the Dance Floor, when I was looking around me I was thinking, if the kids of these parents all dancing away could see them now they would be mortified, classic dad dancing from every quarter, don’t get me wrong wasn’t all mums and dads, loads of young people attend the horse racing, was a far few hen party’s and a couple of girls had the designer dresses with big hats on, I think they have got confused thinking it was ladies night where you are expect to wear that type of stuff, the night we went along was called Braveheart Night and can pretty much where what you like. Anyway was time to head back to Glasgow, quick stop off at Bar West next to the train station, a small band playing cover tracks was on. All in all a very good night was had by all.