Monthly Archives: November 2008

Christmas is coming: it’s time to think how to send Cards & Presents!

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Christmas is coming. London starts to be decoreted and people are ready for the long month of advent.
During this period the economic problems will be pushed to the back of people’s minds by the organisation of Christmas details: buying presents and sending cards, attending parties and organising dinners, choosing the tree and finding the decorations.

Sometimes gifts and cards have to be sent far; so here some indication and links to organise your Christmas Mail:

Royal Mail – This year Royal Mail wants to make things a little easier extending enquiry office opening hours between the 15th December until Christmas. To make sure that people receive all their packages they have introduced new evening deliveries on Monday 22nd and Tuesday 23rd December and redeliveries on Sunday 21st December. Here more about prices.

DHL – DHL is the global market leader of the international express and logistics industry, combining with worldwide coverage and an in-depth understanding of local markets. This international network links more than 220 countries and territories worldwide.

City Link – The English company provides services in UK, Ireland and around the world and plans extended hours and special prices to satisfy its customers during the Christmas period.

FedEx – Fed Express offers special holiday shipping, including exceptions money-back guarantee.

Timing and prices depends from destination, size and weight. Don’t wait too long to be sure that your family and friends will receive your Christmas Gifts in time.

Interest rates, taxes, mortgages and the new Budget…

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…the four key words of today. Everyday we receive new dark reports from the economic world about the imminent financial crisis in Uk. For example? The Guardian underlines again: “Britain will be one of the developed countries worst affected by the severest recession to hit the global economy since the early 1980s. The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said it expected unemployment across its 30 rich-country members to rise by 8 million to 42 million by 2010 as all parts of the West felt the effects of the financial crisis”. “Britain’s economy may not begin to grow again until the end of next year”, – explains The Timesonline.co.uk agreeing with most international opinion.

The Guardian goes on to say that the Governor of the Bank of England may work on the interest rates: “Interest rates may have to be cut more aggressively to ensure that businesses and consumers benefit from cheaper borrowing”. The Timesonline.co.uk states: “mortgage lending slipped back towards a record low in October, as consumers turned to their deposits to fund other spending”. In the meantime “Prime Minister Gordon Brown swept aside three decades of economic orthodoxy with tax increases on the rich” and plans that, Bloomberg says, “will double Britain’s national debt”.

BBC.co.uk publishes all the documents about the Pre-Budget Report: the latest tax and economic forecasts and future departmental spending plans. Have a look at them and let’s see what they will mean for us.

Some more about the Director

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The Director requirement has changed! To follow the new legislation every UK company is required to have at least one natural director.

Obviously this presents a problem for all the old companies that were not set up with a person as Director and for all the new ones that would prefer to have a company as Director.

Making the right change is possible with Companies House or even easier if you incorporated your company with Companies Made Simple!

If you incorporated your company with CMS it is possible to change the current director in less than 5 minutes, just login to your personal account and make the update. The update will be sent electronically to Companies House.

Companies Made Simple also offers the option of a nominee director. This can be purchased from the website

All you need to know about the Director’s Role

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What are the main responsibilities of a Company Director? Here is a list of the 5 primary duties:

1. Act in accordance with the company’s constitution
2. Exercise independent judgement
3. Avoid conflicts of interest
4. Not accept benefit from third parties
5. Keep other directors updated about transactions or arrangements

The general duties of directors were previously contained in case law, you can find more about this topic on www.berr.gov.uk, the Department of Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform website.

Can anyone be a director? Yes, of course. Companies House lists only two restrictions, (unless given special permission from the court):
a) The Director must not have been disqualified from acting as a company director
b) They must not be an undercharged bankrupt

Since 1st October 2008 there are no longer any directors under the age of 16; any person who has not reached the age of 16 will cease to be a Director – Companies House will put a notice on the public register to show that the appointment has ceased. The company will have to amend its register of directors’ to show that the appointment has ceased. Consequently, if the company is left without an eligible director it will be in default and will need to appoint at least one director.

What responsibilities does a director have towards Companies House?
Every company director has a personal responsibility to deliver statutory documents to Companies House as and when required by the Companies Acts. These include: accounts, annual returns and notice of change of directors or secretaries or in their personal details.

Today News from the Financial Times

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Good afternoon. London Presence is back today, flipping through the pages of the Financial Times- the UK’s best business newspaper.
Founded in 1888 by James Sheridan and his brother, the Financial Times has specialised in reporting business and financial news while maintaining an independent editorial outlook.
Printed as a broadsheet on distinctive light salmon-coloured paper, the FT is the only paper in the UK providing full daily reports on the London Stock Exchange and world markets.

Let’s see the 3 main news stories of today:
The main UK headline reads, “Inflation falls for first time in 15 months”. The article reads, “Consumer prices tumbled in October, justifying the Bank of England’s dramatic 1.5 percentage point interest rate cut earlier this month and opening the door for further reductions in the costs of borrowing, according to economists.”
We find another newspaper in more business news of the day;

“The Independent to shed quarter of journalists”. Reading on, “The Independent newspaper and its Sunday sister title will cut up to a quarter of their editorial staff in one of the most savage cuts to hit the UK newspaper industry in recent years as management seeks £10m of savings, the company said on Tuesday.”

From Business Life – “Epicentres of new austerity”. The article begins, “The party is over and the hangover has kicked in. In economies all over the western world, corporate executives and the rising stars of finance are beginning to think that this downturn could be different.”

The Prince of Wales turns 60 today: happy birthday Charles!

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If you live or work in London, here is an update on some Royal Gossip and News: the life of the Royal Family is the life of the most famous family of any country. Today Prince Charles turns 60 years old.

To discover something more about the heir to the throne, you can find the 60 most important facts of his life, as reported by the Telegraph.

We would like to provide a bit of background information about the Prince’s Trust, a charity created by Charles to help young people overcome barriers and get their lives in order. It offers loans to groups and business people who’ve had difficulty in gaining outside support. It regularly organises concerts with leading pop, rock, and classical musicians to raise funds for their worthy causes. This foundation is a worldwide organisation that has also supported humanitarian projects. And Prince Charles with his two sons, takes part in many events to help the foundation and many others.

To know more about these fundraising projects please visit the Prince’s Trust website.

Are you looking for a job?

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You are not the only one. Everyday we see reports on the crisis, the recession and the uncertain times for business and employment. Today BT shed 10,000 jobs as profits slide; British Telecom are of course one of the main service providers of UK broadband, phone lines, mobile products, digital TV, web hosting, online security and networked IT services for the home. These measures are symptomatic of the present economic climate and are unfortunately being implemented on a large scale, as reported daily.

This meltdown is forcing the Government to take more than just a position; they must take action. Mervyn King is determined to kick-start the economy, focussing on inflation he said that he will cut rates again and again. Gordon Brown said last week that he wanted to cut business taxes. The Opposition has said that this would help 350,000 people back into work, as well as reducing the tax burden on business by £2.6 billion and saving as much in unemployment benefits. Could it be a good solution or an unfunded tax cut? To find out more about this topic please follow this link to the article on westbury.co.uk!

How to save money – Lesson 2

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Today the Bank of England has said (again) that next year the UK will have to prepare for a recession. The experts have predicted that inflation could fall to 1% in 2010. All the while unemployment soars above 1.8m.
It’s time to save money for the ominous future, because every penny saved is a penny earned. And you can easily save money with a bit of control over your food, at home, going out and finance.

Last week we touched on food, now here are our suggestions to save money at home:

• Turn off the lights when you leave a room.
• Fit energy-saving light bulbs: they’re kind to the environment and they save you money in the long run.
• Take a shower, not a bath: it uses a lot less water and therefore saves on heating.
• Hanging out the washing is free: don’t use the energy-thirsty tumble dryer.
• Turn down the thermostat on your central heating by just one degree when you leave the flat.
• Check always your gas and electricity bills.
• Gently heat rooms you don’t use.
• Ensure that you don’t have leaky windows and doors.
• Fit loft insulation: some councils offer grants.
• Don’t leave electrical equipment, such as TVs and stereos, on standby: it wastes electricity.

Our monday review

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Good morning. Let’s start the week with a quick update from the Business World:

1) “London rallies on China’s £375bn stimulus plan,” says the Timesonline.co.uk today. “Shares in London rose by over 130 points in early trading as mining stocks soared on China’s surprise plan to pump four trillion Yuan (£375 billion) into the world’s fastest growing economy.”

2) “Gordon Brown hints at tax cuts,” writes the Guardian.co.uk. “Prime Minister suggests taxes will be reduced to push the UK out of recession. At the weekend the Financial Times reported that ministers were drawing up an emergency package of tax cuts. It said that, according to experts, cuts would have to be worth about £15bn to have much effect.”

3) “Jobless total set to soar to 1.8m,” reveals the Financialtimes.com. “Unemployment is likely to have risen above 1.8m, the highest level since 1998… Economists at the Royal Bank of Scotland and BNP Paribas expect that unemployment will continue to rise sharply next year and could reach 2.7m by the first quarter of 2010.”

4) Reuters.com writes, “Circuit City Stores Inc, the No. 2 U.S. consumer electronics retailer, filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday, falling victim to tighter credit terms from vendors and a loss of market share to Best Buy Co, Wal-Mart Stores Inc and other rivals… Circuit City filed a week after saying it would close 155 stores, or more than one-fifth of its retail base, and eliminate 17 percent of its U.S. workforce. It also said it was considering all options to restructure.”

5) The Christian Science Monitor starts its new life today: from daily-print format to a multi-platform news organisation with a 24/7 daily online publication, a weekly print edition and a daily electronic subscription product. Here we have the future of journalism: this event marks the definitive step to the digital age, as Marketwatch.com explains.

Advertising to a new generation

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This is the last day we’ll talk about Obama. We promise. Like yesterday though, we want to focus on areas which are relevant for everyone in business. In this case there was another key factor that aided Barack Obama in securing his election win. Having accrued funding so successfully, he was able to tap into a younger generation, successfully encouraging the American youth to vote in unprecedented quantities.

Submitting regular videos onto YouTube was a must for his campaign marketing and certainly his republican counterpart used the same approach as one would expect of the viral infested web. Companies regularly use the online broadcasting site to popularise their name and products.

Moreover, a group on Facebook called the Obama Volunteer Corps tapped in to the zeitgeist via social networking, an approach that is becoming more and more popular for commercial bodies and company marketers to generate publicity and support.

The appointment of Chris Hughes, one of the founding members of Facebook as one of his senior advisers also represents his shrewd campaign management. Hughes has been running Obama’s online campaign at my.barackobama.com, in itself a kind of social networking site. With democrat blue, the site is similar to Facebook in both style and functionality.

He was able to recruit an army of volunteers (1.5 million strong), facilitated by the Facebook-like process of inviting friends to join, allowing a form of peer to peer recruitment process to unravel.

He did not stop there. Unlike any presidential candidate and indeed any politically motivated advertiser prior, Obama sought to subliminally infiltrate the gaming community. The relatively new real estate found within video games was bought up in 18 different titles featuring Guitar Hero, Madden 09 and Burnout Paradise.

A spokesperson for Electronic Arts Inc, responsible for some of the games said, “In general, the Burnout audience is typically male, aged 18 to 34. I think the sweet spot age is 27 or 28. The attractive benefit any advertiser sees in advertising on a game like Burnout is reaching that demographic.”

The most surprising aspect of this is of course the variety of methods chosen considering the product being sold. Obama and his team have entered the marketing history books with their strategic and creative approach to reaching a broader political audience than ever before. Take note.

CMFL