The organisation A charity working to connect surplus food from shops and restaurants with families who need it. Small team, meaningful budget by charity standards, and an idea that was more ambitious than either. The brief The charity wanted to build an app. Not just a matching service that pairs a food donor with a
Ask around a couple of years ago and carers and families told you the same thing. After a dementia diagnosis, nobody hands you a map. The diagnosis gets delivered, sometimes gently and sometimes not, and then you’re left to work out what happens next on your own. The support does exist. There are services, charities,
When people hear “digital strategy” they picture a thick document, a big agency and a bill to match. It doesn’t have to be any of those things. A strategy is just a set of decisions about what you’ll do, what you won’t, and in what order. The good ones fit on a page. The reason
Ignore most of what you’ve read about AI. The interesting bit for a small business isn’t the robots and the hype; it’s the dull, repetitive admin that eats your week and never shows up on an invoice. That’s where the easy money is, and you don’t need a tech team to get at it. I’ll
I get this one a lot. “We’re getting traffic, the numbers look fine, but the enquiries aren’t coming.” Traffic that doesn’t convert isn’t a traffic problem. It’s an experience problem, and it’s usually fixable without spending a penny more on getting people there. Here’s what gets me about this. Most businesses pour money into the
Every business loses people between “interested” and “paid”. That’s normal. What’s not normal, and what costs you real money, is not knowing where it happens. If a tenth of your would-be customers give up at the same point, fixing that one point is worth more than any amount of new traffic. I keep coming back
Most SME owners I meet aren’t short of digital activity. There’s a website, a couple of ad campaigns, an email list that someone set up two years ago, maybe a social account that goes quiet for weeks at a time. What’s missing is a straight answer to one question: which of these is actually making
20 of the 55 businesses I audited were directly affected by Covid in ways that demanded immediate digital change. Not in the general sense that everyone was affected. These were businesses whose entire operating model had to pivot. The pivots A translation service that had been delivering 90% of its work face to face suddenly
32 out of 55 businesses I audited had Google Analytics installed on their website. Barely any of them were looking at the data. I understand why. You log in, see a wall of numbers and graphs and think “I have no idea what any of this means.” So you close the tab and get on
I heard this more often than I expected. 11 of the 55 businesses I audited had a broken relationship with their web developer or agency. The person who built the website was no longer available, and the business was stuck. How it happens It happens gradually and then all at once. One business had a