Awards – Highland Business Women’s Club
Most promising New Business 2005
Although this event was flagged up on our Home page – we failed to reveal the whole story! Most Promising New Business 2005 sponsored by Highland Opportunity was won by New Broom Software’s Simone Nelson at the Highland Business Women’s Club’s annual dinner held at the Newton Hotel in Nairn on the evening of Friday 18th March. Simone had been short listed along with Rosie O’Hara’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming business and Jackie McGuinnity’s Location Highland. As a result of being the Highland’s winner Simone goes forward to the Association of Scottish Businesswomen’s awards in November.
Simone said that when she saw who the others were on the short list she realised it was going to be a tough choice for the judges because all three were so completely different. Although interestingly none of us are in the first flush of youth – which must indicate something! You might expect new businesses to have been rather younger ladies? But we are all of us about giving very personal service to our customers – the value of which maybe only acquired with the passing of years perhaps?
New Broom Software was born out of the need for Dundonnell Smoked Salmon to become highly organised in this very seasonal mail order business, where 85% of the annual trade was done in the six weeks just before Christmas. So if you missed it one year then you had to wait another whole year to before you could try again!
Right from the start Simone felt that if she could resolve her own problems the solution might be of value to other mail order businesses. So she put in a great deal of effort and not least all her profit into ensuring that the order processing solution that was developed for Dundonnell worked as well as it possibly could do.
Entering any address was speeded up by working with Postcode software so that all addresses conformed to the Post Office criteria. Then the processing of credit cards which had become more and more of an onerous task and very much a bottle neck was automated.
She can recall when first they used the new credit card system clearly to this day – it was the 12 December and although the relevant goods had been sent out, no credit cards monies had been collected for almost three weeks. The button was pressed and the PC whirred away and later announced that it had collected £17,913.59 and what is more it reconciled with the bank! That would have taken at least two days manually – by which time Simone and her husband would not have been speaking civilly to each other!
The last hurdle was to pass information direct to the carrier’s software to produce those rather ugly but necessary bar-coded labels – another odious task which previously had to be done by hand in at least triplicate. Ian, Simone’s husband well remembers the time where he accidentally sent a very large parcel of smoked salmon to the clients’ estranged wife and left him to entertain the major of Berlin with a very small amount – the poor man was in tears – despite this he still is a customer to this day!
Now when Simone visits client’s premises she is very familiar with the problems they are experiencing and can see the stress fall away when they learn that using the TOPS system that all of this is going to be taken care of in one easy to understand and use software package. It has just got a whole lot easier too because the software has been rewritten as an online application so any PC user can access the TOPS system by just using a browser!
Simone and Peter Hayball – the original IT consultant formed New Broom Software together but Peter had resigned in June last year – leaving the company without any programming skills. Simone had taken this problem to Fusion and PICT who not only advised her but provided some funding towards the development of the new online application.
Simone explained that the last two years have been not been easy, as in any new business there had been enormous amount of work to be done. Ian, Simone’s Artist husband gets a bit grieved when he finds her working late into the evening and most weekends – he tries to remind her that she really is supposed to be retired. Not least that her beloved garden that she had put so much effort into creating from scratch - when first they arrived in Wester Ross - has been sadly neglected meantime. If and when they have a spare moment the Nelsons attend concerts at the Eden Court, the Edinburgh Festival and London Proms and have been known to go to London for an Opera – they are to be treated to their first visit to Glyndebourne this July.
Apart from her business Simone is involved in many organisations like the Inverness Chamber of Trade, SCDI and Fusion. She is a committee member of the Ullapool Tourism and Business Group, UHI and The Local Economic Forum. Simone also finds she is called upon to address Highland sixth formers about ecommerce through the Business Dynamic project which is focussed on bringing business into the classroom. They are really exciting times for young people today, she says, they could in fact be in business tomorrow with a website – never has the opportunity been so great! Those that know Simone well know that she relishes the challenge of solving problems and efficiency is her god so they suspect that ‘retirement’ will never really be an option!
For those in the mail order business who would like to find out more about the TOPS system from New Broom Software you could do not better than visiting their very helpful website. Apart from full information about the software you will find a great deal of free advice and guidance on setting up in ecommerce generally and all the other aspects that have to be taken into consideration when running a mail order business!
Simone herself is always willing to give the benefit of her experiences during the last 9 years in the hopes that she will prevent others falling in the some of the rather expensive pitfalls that can be found when first starting out in the mail order business.
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