Expect innovative ideas, fresh thinking , networking and enjoy drinks, nibbles and creative conversation.

So why not come along see how you business can benefit, we’d love to meet you…

Find out more and book here

Agenda – Arrive at 9.30am

9.30 – 10.15 Open Networking and Welcome

10.15 – 11am Leigh from SKY will be talking and also demo’ing how SKY AdSmart can work for your business driving highly targeted traffic.

11am – 11.30 I will be talking  about how to drive targetted traffic to your business website.

11.30 – Midday further networking opportunity and close

Please note: Right of admission is reserved, registering delegates will be screened to ensure the correct audience is in attendance.

The post Working with Sky AdSmart appeared first on Alistair Gleave.

There are people who give up a great part of their own lives to care selflessly for others and these individuals could well deserve the title of hero much more and indeed be far more deserving of our thanks and adoration than the strutting egos that fill our screens from morning till night.

Not that these gilded creatures are unskilled people and no doubt they are much deserving of praise where it is due and of course proper financial reward for their efforts, but when compared to the individual that spends their whole life, day and night, looking after someone’s every need, I do mean every need from toilet to dressing, their achievements pale into nothingness.

The vital role that carers play in helping people on a daily basis who suffer from illness and disability and the contribution they make to our society is incredible.

In some cases carers are the glue that hold families together, helping others get the most out of their life that they can.

There is in fact an incredible number of these individuals in the United Kingdom currently somewhere between six and 7 million individuals provide care for another individual on a regular basis that is one in eight adults in the country the figure is growing constantly and these people are providing care usually without pay and provide an enormous contribution to the economy by saving the wages of a care worker to come in and take on the duties that they do for free.

The work that these carers carry out is enormous and varying from just a few hours help a week to transporting individuals backwards and forwards to put appointments, banking for them shopping for them, preparing them meals, cleaning their houses even to the point of seeing to their hygiene needs dressing, bathing, lifting and moving, even giving medicine.

It has to be that at some point the country or the government will wake up and realise what an incredible and valuable contribution these unsung heroes make every day to the well-being of our country and begin to value them for the work that they do.

The post Shinning a light in dark places and the realms of societies unsung heroes appeared first on Alistair Gleave.

It is so expensive in the competitive world that we operate in to find new customers, It is incredibly hard work to win customers from a competitor, to then go and lose a hard earned new client simply because they weren’t treated right is totally negligent.

Would you forget your mum’s birthday? What about giving your family a small gift at Christmas time, if you treat your clients as if they were as valuable as one of your own family members it would never be said that you weren’t working hard to earn and retain those clients.

There are lots of ways which you can show your appreciation of your customers loyalty first of all call regularly, A phone call it’s a very small thing can mean an awful lot and certainly indicates to your customers that they are on your mind, it needn’t be with a view to selling them anything or making any revenue it could simply be a “hi how are you doing” call.

Share new ideas with your customers, it may be that there is no immediate benefit to you or your business but simply bringing to the attention of a customer something that you think could be of benefit to them just as a favour would go a long way to making them think you truly have their best interests at heart, you have their back.

Another way to retain clients is to make sure that you are always at the top of your game, you are the go to guy for information in your field truly an authority on your subject, showing them why they chose you in the first place and reiterating to your client that they truly are in safe hands when they’re dealing with you, send them out information of any new training or accreditation you may have had in your field in order to reinforce to them that you take your responsibility to them as a client seriously.

This may seem a simple one but it is surprising how many people in business are slow and lax when dealing with communications with their email or conventional snail mail, if you get something from a client deal with it right away don’t leave it till tomorrow put yourself in their shoes, put it this way if your mum phoned you and you noticed a missed call would you ignore it till tomorrow? If the answer is no then that’s good for your clients to, let’s call it the “Mum rule”

From now on treat all your clients the same as you would your own mother and by applying the Mum rule in every situation that arises when dealing with your customers you will definitely find that you will retain customers, have happy customers that recommend you, you will also find that your business grows and thrives from referrals, as everybody will want to refer to a company that treats every customer as if it was the own mother.

Always listen to your clients, we all have a point of view and although they may not be experts in your field like you, they will have what they consider, rightly or wrongly, a valid point of view never dismiss their views out of hand even if you disagree.

Never disagree openly but seek to steer them down the path that you know to be the right one ultimately they will always come back to you and say they were happy that they took your advice rather than doggedly following the route  that they saw as being the only possible solution themselves.

This will also reinforce to them that not only are you the ultimate expert in your field but you’re also a nice person who will always listen to them, take on board and consider their views, this is not always the case when dealing with companies and will make a refreshing change for your clients.

There are certain special times of the year when of course it is lovely to receive a little reminder that the company that you deal with it thinking about you as an individual and the same can be said of all your clients so at the end of the day taking peoples dates of birth and putting them in your calendar to make sure that you can send a birthday card at the right time just goes to show that you are thinking of your clients, make sure the birthday card is always personally written, handwritten letters are so few and far between nowadays that you will definitely leave an unforgettable impression on your customer.

One huge part of client relationship is managing their expectations, this is an area that lots of individuals and companies fall down on, they spent all that time creating themselves as the “go to man” in their field only to overpromise on something and make the clients expectations too high only to fail miserably to reach the promised level, however had you chosen to under promise on a solution and then over deliver, thus creating a better experience all round for your client, you will find more and more satisfied and delighted customers.

One other area of customer service that is enormously important it’s to be totally clear honest and transparent with your client at all times.

Always telling exactly and clearly what you do, tell him how you deliver your services, telling them what they can expect from you clearly in black and white and then deliver on that promise.

Customer loyalty is based on their trust and confidence in you, they buy into you as a fellow human, so the best way to keep customers is to be a nice human.

The old saying “nice things happen to nice people” is very true.

In closing let’s just say this, retaining hard earned customers is easy if you do two main things.

Be a nice person and use the “mum rule” with these two you won’t go far wrong.

The post Keeping your customers close and happy appeared first on Alistair Gleave.

Those with a positive mental attitude will work with the talents they have and be successful and those without a positive mental attitude will never succeed, why?

They tell us that we are all born equal, I am not sure if that is true, however we do all have one thing in common and that is our ability to have a positive mental attitude which can certainly help us in our everyday lives but importantly it can help us in our work lives too.

There are so many good things associated with positive thinking, not just the health benefits that positive thinking provides we can list an increased lifespan, low rates of depression, low stress levels better psychological and physical well-being, your heart function is better a reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease even remarkably such things as greater resistance to the common cold.

Positive thinking is the mental attitude in which you expect good and favourable results every time. In other words positive thinking is the process of creating thoughts that create and transform energy into reality, think it sounds mad well there are many studies that suggest that positive mental attitude really do result in these positive results.

Positive minds expect happiness and good things to happen and so invariably they do.

There are those amongst us who would even ask the question why is it even important to be positive?

Having a positive attitude allows you to be more productive at work and at home people who have a positive attitude regularly set themselves goals and go on to achieve them therefore being able to accomplish things regularly reinforces positivity and results in even more of a positive mental attitude and a greater belief that positive thinking really does help.

Let’s apply positive thinking into a simple situation where an individual might walk into a situation and have a sad or concerned expression on their face and a negative attitude towards those around them, this person might well want to fit in or make friends but we all know those people who look grumpy tend to be the people that we all stay clearer, on the other hand let’s look at that situation again where an individual walks into a situation with a big smile on their face full of confidence and expecting those around them to gravitate towards them and be friendly, invariably that is exactly what will happen. This is of course a very simplified way at looking at positive mental attitudes and the effects that they have on those around us and so therefore on ourselves as well but it does clearly highlight why positive happy people seem to be more successful in everything that they do.

Having a positive attitude is often given as the reason for individual success and overall well-being, the benefits of having a positive attitude are absolutely infinite and in fact no one ever says having a positive attitude is the cause of a problem let’s look at that for a second think about it when have you ever thought yourself was that a positive minded person was getting on your nerves quite the reverse in fact they’re nice to be around.

It doesn’t just happen, positive attitudes are found in positive people and those positive people whether they realise it or not have trained themselves to look at the good in every situation This is a good thing and it means that we can all work on building a positive mental attitude and why we should begin right away , We should cease to procrastinate and grab the bull by the horns today.

If you are in the habit of saying nasty stuff about other people just stop, if you are one of those people that sneer at others be nice instead, just try for one day to be positive and to be nice and you will see the benefits for yourself, do it for a day and then another and before you know it you’re teaching yourself the habit of a positive mental attitude.

Train yourself to have a more positive mental attitude and you will find that everything in your life improves not only your health but also financially, it’s a known fact that people with positive attitudes are usually better off financially than those who live their lives under a permanent cloud, whether the positive attitude was there before or after the wealth was created isn’t really the point, what matters is the attitude is there.

That being said many people who have a positive mental attitude did in fact have a positive mental attitude long before they accumulated their wealth so it may be that the wealth was accumulated as a direct result of being generally more positive.

Positive mental attitude allow you to socialise more easily, more people want to be around you, the bottom line is not everyone with a positive attitude is a social animal but we are all human beings and we all need to have some form of social interaction, and on all levels no one wants to be around people who are negative they gravitate to those of us who are positive and because you are positive you will attract positive people and there are endless benefits to that scenario.

Being positive it means being more productive, having a positive attitude allows you to be more productive at work and allows you to earn more money creating yet more positivity.

Individuals who benefit from positive thinking invariably have an active mind having an active mind me and you have a curious mind and are always seeking to learn more about the world about you. Positive thinkers are generally people who are well read and even if they lack formal education they tend to thirst for knowledge and therefore educate themselves as they go along, positive thinkers find stimulation in all world around them.

At the end of the day it is a fact that we all start from the same place and end at the same place, what we do in between is so huge and heavy with promise it’s off the scale.

we only have one chance at life whilst we are in this world, having a positive attitude will help you unleash the power that is in that life in fact in every life.

So be positive and go and start something great today !

As for me I’m deciding to be a nicer person from right now !

The post Being Nice and Being Positive appeared first on Alistair Gleave.

What is procrastination?

Procrastination is a habit. It’s not a one-off. It’s your default course of inaction.

You reinforce the habit of procrastination anytime something crosses your desk, and even though it would be comparatively easy to do sooner, you decide to put it off. Maybe you don’t feel like doing it right now, not because you have a pressing deadline, but mainly because you don’t.

Procrastination also occurs when you plan to do something, and then when the time comes, you decide not to do it then either. It can be true of anything; not just things at work. It could be losing weight, starting (or continuing) an exercise programme, reading a book instead of watching telly, or going to bed earlier. No doubt you can think of a myriad of other examples that are true in your own life.

In this article, I’m going to consider habits that you may have, all of which result in putting off what you should do now for another, usually unspecified, time.

They’re not in any particular order. Rather than thinking of some as being worse than others, instead, consider them all to be bad habits.

You’ll achieve more in the future if you view them that way.

Hard tasks and activities, and difficult conversations.

The first bad habit to mention is that of putting off hard tasks and activities, and difficult conversations.

Human beings naturally look for the easiest way to do anything. That in itself isn’t a bad thing. In fact, we have a name for it: efficiency. We want to make the best use of our time and resources, and we have to in any case because we don’t have an unlimited supply of either.

The thing is that you can’t substitute effectiveness for efficiency. You can’t choose what’s easy or avoid that which is unpleasant if doing what’s hard is what’s needed.

And that’s where the problem lies.

You see, if you make a habit of avoiding effectiveness, the only thing that will happen as a result is that you’ll become more ineffective.

The Internet. Can’t live with it. Can’t live without it.

There are times when you’d probably like to unplug yourself from it. Short of cables being cut on the ocean floor, it won’t happen. How do you feel when there’s a system upgrade, implemented by your friendly IT department or operating system, and you can’t get your computer to work properly?

Or how do you feel when for some reason you are prevented from accessing the Web?

Are you elated? Jumping for joy because now someone won’t be emailing you every five seconds?

Not a bit of it. You go into a tailspin. It’s panic-stations. And you know it.

Now the thing is that when you get a little dip in your energy, or you’re interrupted, or maybe you just get a coffee, when you sit at your desk, you may wonder what the football scores are, or what the weather will be like this weekend, or where the weather might be nicer than it is here.

And so you open a new tab to find out; and while you’re checking that, you see a link to something else. Maybe it’s an advert for a holiday abroad, and as you’re checking the weather anyway, it makes sense to see what the prices are, after all – there’s a special deal on. Maybe you could get away for a few days.

And, oh look, the beaches are lovely, the sun is shining . . . you get the idea.

The best websites make it easy for us to become distracted. That’s what good navigation looks like. And you’ll get sucked into it every time if you don’t avoid it in the first place. This habit is fairly easy to break. There are numerous free tools available online that let you block certain websites or even prevent you from surfing the web.

The question is, do you have the courage to use them, or are you still convinced that you have the self-control to avoid them?

Perfectionism, another bad habit that reinforces your procrastination is perfectionism. Maybe you never thought of it like this. Perfectionism is the unwillingness to stop working on anything because it’s not as good as it could be.

Now here’s the thing.

What’s perfect to you isn’t perfect to others. What’s perfect to you probably isn’t even important to others. And what’s perfect to you doesn’t matter because if it’s perfect now, then it won’t be in five minutes. Why? Because nothing stands still.

If the Total Quality Movement taught us anything it was that total quality was a waste of money and a waste of time. High quality is one thing. Total quality is quite another.

Does it make sense to spend four times as much time and money to achieve only 20% of your results?

Of course not.

But that’s what perfectionism looks like.

Indecision is procrastination. It’s the fear of doing the wrong thing. There seems to be this crazy idea that good people never change their minds. That’s rubbish.

Good people make decisions based on the information they have at the time and, when they get better information, they change their minds if that’s the smartest thing to do.

Procrastinators stick with their original decisions regardless of any new information they receive.

If you’re trying to decide what to do and all of your choices seem to share an equal amount of benefit and risk, then it doesn’t matter which one you choose. This may sound irresponsible, but just choose the first one, or flip a coin, or throw a dart at it.

Do something.

Indecision is a decision. It’s a decision to do nothing; to leave things as they are.

Make your choice and, if you get better information, then act in light of it..

The next bad habit that so many people have, and which is a form of procrastination, is the unwillingness to change.

Have you ever heard this: “This is the way we’ve always done it” or “This is how we do things”.

If that’s what you say, then what you mean is that “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

If that’s your belief, then you’re already in trouble.

The truth is that it’s always broken, whether you’re willing to admit it or not. And your habit of refusing to update your equipment, software and / or methods will put you further and further behind. It will make it harder and more expensive to change when you’re finally forced to do so.

It’s unreasonable to expect that you can do things the way you’ve always done them and simultaneously become an innovator .

In other words, you have to practice what you preach.

So there you have it.

bad habits that reinforce your propensity to procrastinate. Procrastination costs you in productivity. When you’re less productive, everything is more expensive. It takes you longer to create and longer to deliver. It uses more time to do your administration. It adds cost to what you sell, and that makes you less competitive.

Create a plan for breaking this bad habit then execute it.

Become your own best friend instead of your own worst enemy!

What are you waiting for ?

Let today be the day that you change things round ! Let today be the day that motivation becomes the assassination of procrastination.

Let today be the beginning of you being the best version of you that you can be !

The post Procrastination is the assassination of motivation ! appeared first on Alistair Gleave.

The roads up and down our beautiful Britain are now some of the dirtiest in the whole of Europe.

It never used to be the case but travelling up and down the road network of Britain, all over England, Wales and Scotland I find this depressing fact is undeniable.

I am convinced that a Briton’s street is now his dining room and litter bin.

The remains of thousands of meals of junk food are everywhere.

Bottles of drink, alcoholic or sugary, strewn with abandon into flower-beds, or on to lawns, from which the house- owners or tenants do not bother to pick them up.

It’s not just poor areas either the rest of the country is not much better, up and down our road networks where we once wouldn’t have expected to view such a mess, there appears to be an epidemic of litter everywhere, in some cases the whole of the roadside green verge is obliterated by plastic waste, tyres, cans and bottles, even on roundabouts we can see where drivers momentarily pause to see if there is incoming traffic there is a mound of discarded junk.

Chewing gum is trodden into the pavements of even the most exclusive areas and it sometimes seems as if we think that what a beauty spot really needs is an empty, glaring coke bottle or a black bag full of dog poo, either discarded at the gated entrance to the beauty spot or even thrown out of the reach of any well meaning attempt to clear it away into a nearby tree or hedge.

People often drop litter without awareness of the alternative. Sometimes, though, they are not so thoughtless: they give the matter some thought and then decide to drop the litter anyway.

I have seen all sorts of  people go up to litter bins with wrapping from something that they have just eaten, look at the bin and then drop it not in the bin but next to it. That is why litter bins, though empty, often have litter around them, do these individuals have no shame, are they deliberately defying society or is it just that they know that bins have something to do with litter but cannot quite work out what it is for.

This is a beautiful country, more beautiful than most in fact, however it is fast becoming a steaming muck pile littered from lands end to John O’ Groats with a dazzling array of virtually unimaginable quantities of rubbish.

I read somewhere that in the UK alone there is over 100 million tons of cigarette ends thrown on to the ground every day !

I simply refuse to believe that we have so little care and concern for this lovely country that we will be the generation that will sit idly by and watch as the country is buried under an ever growing pile of junk, can it be that the state of the littered country all around is actually a reflection of what we Britons have become, tatty, slovenly and unkempt with o self respect?

I can’t believe that, not for one moment. There is a minority that simply needs to be educated on littering and this will have to start right back at basics once more, let’s start teaching our 2 and 3 year olds that littering is just plain wrong and you never know in ten or twenty years we might just have cleared the rubbish up!

Fellow Brittons I beg you, please stop this !

For all our sakes and for the sake of our children please , let’s keep our nation tidy !

STOP LITTERING!

The post Why are we drowning in litter ? appeared first on Alistair Gleave.

Despite some rather odd factions within the remain side of the debate still strangely ranting nonsense about it being reversible and that we may see the Brexit process come to a grinding halt or even go into some sort of back peddling action, Brexit is most definitely going forward and happening, it will become a reality in a year and I don’t know about anyone else but when I look at a year , which sounds a long time, I always think of my children’s first year, it goes by in a flash!

No sooner are they born but they are toddling about and getting into mischief, that’s a year, not long when you put it like that is it !

To follow the baby and toddler analogy, there are some of us that seem to think the two year transition period is some sort of betrayal of the majority of the citizens of our great country who voted to leave the EU, well in fact if you stick with our example toddler until he or she goes off to a preschool, then you have just about got the same timeframe of the transition period as well and as we parents also know, that bit of time also goes by in a breathtaking blur that barely allows time to snap a few photos as you all sprint through it.

In fact once we are out in a years time then a bit of time allowing us all to draw breath before the next exciting step might not be such a bad thing, I mean at the end of the day we will be out of an organisation that we took 40 years to become to become so entangled in, so a couple of short years to disentangle is not really anything much to worry about.

That is, I suppose, unless you are a very patriotic fish in the sea and you have an objection to disappearing down a French throat as opposed to an English one, I’m not sure myself which I would choose, a nice creamy gourmet sauce or a bag of humble chips as my final bedfellows?

All humour to one side, my own feeling on the matter is that we are moving forward as a nation and we now seem to have all come together, more or less, and understand that we are facing our future as one, the good news is that all of the predictions of total doom were incorrect and if anything it seems our national prosperity will grow as we reach out to other nations across the world, that were in effect forbidden to us previously under our EU ties and take advantage of opportunities newly available to us.

The post BREXIT ! Well we only have a year to go and still it seems we have so much to do ! appeared first on Alistair Gleave.

As the so called beast from the east persists and we continue experiencing the worst of the UK’s big freeze, with copious amounts of snow, wind, ice and freezing temperatures a few things tend to pop into my mind.

There’s the obvious and possibly slightly worn view that we really should be able to cope with a bit of bad weather, after all what about those people that live in countries that are snowbound for months on end with temperatures that rarely climb above -10 on a warm day ?

To them the weather here at the moment might appear slightly chilly and probably totally commonplace.

We moan that our councils could do better and so on, but really the fact is that we are just not used to this sort of weather and actually sometimes we lose sight of what is obvious, in favour of engaging in that popular British pastime of moaning about the weather and being shocked that things are quite so bad.

The other thing that pops into my mind is how many people will be suffering because of this short term weather blip that was so totally unexpected it caught many by surprise.

Are  the old couple down the road warm enough? Do they have enough food to get them through the next few frozen days?

It might seem obvious but because this sort of spell is unexpected in the uk, keeping enough supplies of food in the house doesn’t really seem important when the weather is ok, but it’s amazing how quickly it runs out when you can’t get out to replace it.

Spells of severe weather in snowbound countries are greeted as the norm and everybody keeps enough supplies of dry goods to last weeks, as they expect to need them at some point, we in the uk don’t, it’s as simple as that.

Residents of snowy places have vehicles equipped with the right tyres to get around, we don’t.

This is all quite normal and in my view we should try our best not to complain about the authorities seemingly bungling attempts at coping with unexpected spells of bad weather but rather try our best to help where we can.

No unnecessary journeys by car is a great start, check on elderly or vulnerable members of put community that we think might be struggling is another good idea.

Above all stay warm ourselves and rest easy in the knowledge that most of the time we have got it pretty good here in our lovely United Kingdom.

The post We’re all doomed ! Snowstorms, windstorms, freezing temperatures! appeared first on Alistair Gleave.

The thought that struck me was this , how on earth can it be possible in today’s climate of technological advancement that we are still using a substance that was invented 6 decades ago ?

Why haven’t we come up with something better that nature can deal with easily, why don’t we simply ban plastic bags ?

I decided to do some research and find out what I could about alternatives and lo and behold I found some incredibly wonderful people doing some brilliant stuff to solve this exact problem, I found some geniuses in Holland making a plastics alternative out of seaweed that looks and feels just like plastic and does the same job but totally biodegrades in the environment.

https://www.dezeen.com/2017/12/04/dutch-designers-eric-klarenbeek-maartje-dros-convert-algae-biopolymer-3d-printing-good-design-bad-world/

I even found a wonderful designer who makes chairs and seats out of recycled cooking oil and fallen leaves, which when it’s worn out can simply be composted and spread on the ground to feed the next generation of tree who’s leaves can in turn be made back into a seat, unbelievable, wonderful and so clever.

https://www.dezeen.com/2017/02/26/simon-kern-design-chair-recycled-fallen-leaves-bioplastic-chair-furniture/

The end of my digging into the plastic nightmare made me come to a couple of conclusions, which are as follows, big industry does not even have to use plastic as there are real and totally viable alternatives if only they would make the effort to use them, humans are wonderful, innovative and clever at finding solutions.

I feel so much more confident that we are on the cusp of removing the desperate problem of plastic and can’t wait to welcome some of these new and wonderful alternative to plastics into my life.

The post Sir David Attenborough, legend in our lifetime appeared first on Alistair Gleave.