Taking place on 1 July, EntreConf is the dynamic new virtual conference to inspire the region’s entrepreneurs and advisors. To help with practical advice – financial, legal, marketing, management. And to broker valuable new relationships before, during and after the event.
Free conference passes are available via the website, entreconf.com, supplied by the EntreConf Sponsors.
The Running Order for the day can be seen on the website here. It includes three unmissable Keynote Speakers:
Chris Anderson: Owner of world-renowned TED Conferences on wisdom from dozens of inspirational entrepreneurs he’s known plus his own remarkable entrepreneurial story.
Ann Hiatt: Unrivalled top-level first-hand experience as a former business partner of Jeff Bezos at Amazon and then chief of staff at Google. Ann will be talking about business strategies.
Dale Vince: leading green energy entrepreneur and pioneer, also owns the eco-friendly Forest Green Rovers plus a portfolio of green companies, and was the executive producer of Seaspiracy.
Plus highly-practical sessions for entrepreneurs at all stages, provided by EntreConf’s expert partners. Take a look at what each expert insights session will be covering here. Business strategy, start-up help, advice on funding, developing business thinking, exclusive research, futurologising – and much more.
EntreConf also features the EntreLeague. The top 50 of the coolest, brightest, most interesting entrepreneurial businesses in the region. Chosen by a panel of experts, themselves chosen for expertise across a wide variety of sectors and business types: entrepreneurs, advisors, financial companies, lawyers, academics, incubators. These will be unveiled live at EntreConf on July 1.
EntreConf is sponsored by: Bath Spa University, Bevan Brittan, Burges Salmon, Lombard Odier, Rocketmakers and University of Bath School of Management. Plus Associates and Partners: Bristol Creative Industries, Creative Bath, Digital Wonderlab, EIP, MediaClash, PG Owen and Storm Consultancy.
This year, EntreConf is running as a virtual event with a select, in real life dinner in the autumn. The event is organised and run by MediaClash, publishers of Bristol Life, Bath Life, Cardiff Life and Exeter Living and organisers of over 100 events a year, including the Bristol Life Awards, Bristol Life Business Clubs and Bristol Property Awards.
Since my earliest years, I’ve been a fan of athletics. Long-distance running in particular. I’ve watched it on TV. Chatted about it with friends. Followed its greatest exponents with fascination and even become something of an (armchair) expert on the subject.
But until a year or two ago, I’d never taken the plunge and given it a go myself. It felt like something reserved for others. Something that you needed to prepare for meticulously, before ever getting out there and hitting the pavements for yourself. It just seemed altogether too difficult to try.
Then something changed. I was persuaded by a friend to join them on the journey from ‘couch to 5K’. And, at the risk of being that annoying running evangelist, I’ve never looked back.
For many in the marketing world, account-based marketing holds the same appeal – and presents equally erroneous perceived obstacles. It looks great. It seems to work brilliantly for others. But it can also appear prohibitively complicated and quite possibly hideously expensive.
Happily, if you get account-based marketing right, those negative perceptions are some way wide of the mark. And in this article, I’ll explain why it’s an approach you can’t afford to ignore.
There are websites, books, research papers, even degree courses devoted to an explanation of account-based marketing. But for our purposes today, I’m going to keep things straightforward. At Proctor + Stevenson, we view ABM as marketing that identifies high-value companies within defined sectors, and focuses on generating quality sales leads through targeted strategy and pinpoint messaging.
It’s an approach we’ve employed to great effect over the past few years, helping clients including Panasonic outperform campaign goals by as much as 100%. And we’re not alone: Forrester research reports that 62% of marketers have reported a positive impact on their marketing performance since adopting ABM.
It comes with strong credentials then. But if that isn’t enough to help you persuade your colleagues that account-based marketing is the way forward, here are those five key reasons that should really turn the argument in your favour…
The pandemic has taught us that certain sales and marketing approaches are affected by external conditions and factors beyond our control. Exhibitions and events being an obvious one. Account-based marketing remains impervious to those irresistible forces, replacing sales meetings and product demonstrations with digital outreach and online communication. It also has the flexibility to incorporate more ‘traditional’ tactics (personalised direct mail, for example) when the time and targeting is right, making it the marketing strategy for all seasons.
The beauty of ABM lies in its focus. Unlike other broad-brush strategies that make marketing a numbers game, account-based marketing is lean and keen, ensuring that your financial resources are allocated only where they’re going to have maximum, direct impact. Even in those longer B2B buying cycles, there’s no wastage. Communications and marketing collateral are sent to those prospects you’ve identified as interested, via the channels they use, carrying messages you know will resonate with them.
Most ABM strategies are built with digital communication at their core. So you can account for every penny or euro you spend, and attribute every click, reply, meeting booking, expression of interest or sales opportunity you elicit directly back to the activity you’ve instigated. And there’s little that will make your board-level colleagues happier than that.
Ah, the old sales vs marketing conundrum. Should be best of friends, very rarely are. In this respect, you can think of account-based marketing as the United Nations. Employed properly, an ABM strategy achieves that holy grail – a harmonious collaboration in which marketing and sales work in tandem, generating interest, qualifying leads and nurturing prospects until they’re ready to hit ‘buy’ (and beyond, if your ABM strategy is far-sighted enough).
As I mentioned a little earlier, our clients have enjoyed great success with account-based marketing over the past year or two. Working with them, we’ve doubled projected lead targets, improved ROI, achieved better conversion rates, even generated six-figure sales pipeline. And all within the parameters of tight marketing budgets.
The final advantage of ABM that I’ll mention here is that it isn’t an all-or-nothing strategy. It looks different for every business. And we can help you take those first steps towards making it work for yours. So if you’d like to know more, don’t sit on the side lines any longer. Lace up your shoes, get in touch and let’s see where account-based marketing can take you.
More and more businesses are taking sustainability seriously.
The Purposeful Company recently announced that 14 of the UK’s top companies have pledged to put employees, communities, and broader society higher on their boardroom agenda.
In the UK, on average, one company per day is gaining B Corp certified status. Even the FT has recently said that “rewards await those who put sustainability ahead of short-term gains”.
There has also recently been a wave of books devoted to the concept of ‘conscious capitalism’, from John Elkington’s Green Swans to Mark Carney’s Value(s) via Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
The consensus is that we still need to make significant changes to the way we make, sell and buy our stuff; but change is happening, and businesses are realising that sustainability and profitability are not contradictions (in fact, they are often catalysts).
What can we, as advertisers and marketers, do to help? Well, according to the World Federation of Advertisers, quite a lot…
They’ve recently launched ’Planet Pledge’ in an attempt to create a framework to galvanize our industry to make a difference.
We need to stop thinking of ourselves as merely ’consumer drivers’ and look at the bigger picture – and who else is better placed to help shape consumer behavior and preferences than marketing and advertising specialists?
As someone who works in conversion optimisation, I’ve been considering how to add this way of thinking to our armory. We’re used to considering various heuristic frameworks, cognitive biases and persuasive mechanisms when seeking to refine customer journeys; let’s overlay the importance of sustainability factors too.
In order to do this, I found an incredibly useful resource from the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board: their ’Materiality Map’. It’s a detailed summary of the sustainability issues most likely to affect the performance of companies in different markets and industries.
These issues can act as a proxy for consumer preference and help us move away from just thinking about ’sustainability’ as a whole, and dig deeper into what really matters.
From the SASB Materiality Map we can see that under the building products and furnishings section, one of the key factors is product design and lifecycle management. As they state themselves, this relates to the way a company manages the product lifecycle, including end-of-life.
Our conversion optimisation experience also tells us that consumers respond well to reciprocity (will feel a need to give back to others if they’ve gained themselves) and also commitment (when someone publicly commits to doing something that aligns with our values).
With this in mind, you can see why Ikea’s ‘buy-back’ service could be a great success for them… as well as generate some fantastic PR.
Nationwide has always created compelling messaging built on their heritage as a building society, hence their investment in community.
When it comes to typically persuasive messages that would align with this, we’d probably lead with social proof (evidence that other people have been here before) or liking (we like to buy from people and organizations that seem ‘similar’ to us).
But if we consider the sustainability factors, it reminds us that financial institutions are judged very closely on factors such as privacy and data security – remember, sustainability isn’t just about treating the environment well, it’s about treating people and society well too.
If you take a look at the Nationwide website, and many of their advertising campaigns, you can clearly see plenty of references to the crossover between data security, privacy and community. It’s not at all surprising why this is impactful.
Sustainability has always been a core part of the mission for Bamboo Clothing (you can read their story here), so messaging around sustainability obviously features significantly along the customer journey.
However (and I’m trying to be objective because they are a client of ours), they display these messages in some fantastic ways.
From a conversion optimisation perspective, the journey contains prominent, product-level, third-party reviews that provide reassurance.
The website has loads of great content around sustainability, which cements their value proposition as a leader in this area; plus, they do a great job of reducing anxiety by providing clear messages around their flexible delivery and returns policies.
But it’s one specific sustainability element that I want to highlight.
If we go back to the SASB Materiality Map, we can see that in the apparel, accessories and footwear sector, two of the key factors are supply chain management, and materials sourcing and efficiency; consumers want to know their product has been produced in a truly sustainable way.
What better way to do this than show the impact of every item’s production on the environment? Bamboo Clothing has worked with Green Story, a Canadian business specializing in supply chain evaluation in the fashion industry.
The objective credibility of this is great, but it’s the execution that’s brilliant. For each product, they then display the positive impact the consumer will have if they purchase this product from the supplier in question compared to a regular fashion retailer.
Sustainably-conscious customers can toggle between a view that shows the ‘equivalent’ impact (for example, water saved is shown in ‘days of drinking water’) or the ‘actual’ (water saved shown in liters)
Each of these businesses has taken an approach to sustainability that is more meaningful and widespread rather than using it simply as a tool to nudge someone along the customer journey; for an increasingly sustainability-conscious consumer, that authenticity is key.
However, it’s the way they are then leveraging that approach, inserting compelling signposts to improve their website performance, that is impressive.
I expect to see more and more of this over the coming year; as such, maybe those of us working in conversion optimisation just might be able to do our bit extra to help save the planet.
Enter, Digital Agency Coach’s Agency Accelerator Canvas, or AAC, for short.
Put simply, the Agency Accelerator Canvas is a template for designing your very own growth strategy. Designed to help you and your digital marketing agency create a considered, thorough and actionable roadmap for stratospheric growth.
The AAC prompts thinking and understanding across ten core elements of your agency growth strategy; Purpose, Customer, Value Proposition, Services, Vision, Goals, Strategy, Objective, Milestones & KPIs.
With handy guiding questions along the way, the AAC is easy to follow and easy to complete.
Our Agency Accelerator Canvas demands focus, defines your vision, establishes what it is your agency is trying to achieve, but most valuable of all – it produces an actionable roadmap to get you there.
Free from business school jargon and written in plain English – the AAC is designed to be helpful, straightforward, and easy to follow. At each of the ten stages, you’re offered a handful of guiding questions to formulate thorough and rounded definitions for each component.
While it all sounds so simple and straightforward, the results that populate from the AAC are powerful. At the end of your AAC strategy workshop, you will have defined objectives and measurable KPIs to drive your digital marketing agency forward and measure your success along the way.
Finally – a business strategy document that you can take action on!
The Digital Agency Coach consultants recommend hosting a workshop with your fellow directors or senior management teams to complete the AAC as a group.
Once you have defined your strategy, share it with your employees and wider team – print and mount it within the studio to encourage daily interaction from your cohort.
If there is anything the last two years have taught us, it’s that our world can change in an instant and we, as business owners, must be nimble and adapt our strategy accordingly.
While your AAC will be right for the time, as the seasons change, your strategy will require regular revision. We recommend reviewing your AAC quarterly, asking if any changes need to be made and if you and your team are meeting the objectives.
Use these quarterly reviews to nudge your agency’s strategy back in the right direction, then host a full review workshop and overhaul the overall strategy annually.
First things first, print out the blank AAC template and supporting documents and begin your workshop with our short explainer video to get your meeting off to a productive start.
The AAC is then separated into two focus areas;
We start by defining your digital agency’s purpose. There’s no right or wrong answer here, but it’s important your purpose aligns with your passion – so keep it true to yourself.
Secondly, the AAC takes a look at your customers. You’ll define a specific and targeted niche that your digital agency can approach and service.
Then, we ask about your value proposition. Which problems and pain points do you solve for your clients?
Then finally, – you’ll define your services. This is super important, as this defines your agency’s skill set and the work you agree and disagree to take on.
Then, we move on to…
The AAC then asks you to define your digital agency’s vision and articulate top-level, measurable goals.
Next, strategy. You’re encouraged to think about how you are going to achieve these goals? What are the big moves you’re going to make this year?
Once the big moves are defined, it’s all about the objectives. What daily tactics and functions will your team carry out in order to make the strategy happen.
Then you define growth milestones, or success indicators. What will illustrate that you’re on your way to success?
And then finally, what are the KPIs? How will you measure success and keep your team accountable? We’ll help you define realistic, aspirational and measurable Key Performance Indicators to pull your entire AAC together and ensure it’s the actionable document we promised.
Now you know how it works, it’s time to download the template and start formulating your growth strategy.
Each download includes a ready-to-complete AAC template, a supporting document with key questions to kick-start your thinking and a link to a short explainer video to walk you through the process.
Of course, if you need any help or guidance or you would like a Digital Agency Coach consultant to host an AAC workshop for you and your marketing agency please get in touch via our website.
At Proctors, our people make us who we are. Bold. Brave. Imaginative. Resilient. But resilience doesn’t mean things are always easy.
It’s truly taken a village to see us through the last 12 months. And this article explains more about how our team spirit and collaborative culture have helped us to balance the books throughout these difficult times – and flourish, rather than just float.
When COVID first hit in the beginning of 2020, the consensus was this epidemic would be around for three months in the UK, and we should start to see signs of economic recovery beginning in July 2020. (No comment!)
At the time, we’d just finalised our financial forecasts for the year ending March 2021, but it was clear we needed to review these figures.
After revisiting our forecasts, we worked on a realistic model which would see a dip of around 30% in the company’s income for the first quarter of 2020, before gradually returning to 100% by the summer. We then expected we’d see an uptick in work – to around 130% by the end of the year – as clients rushed to spend already -approved budgets.
Despite knowing now that the information on the pandemic’s duration proved to be inaccurate, this approach placed us in excellent stead.
Our biggest challenge was managing cashflow. With fee income dropping, we still had to cover our business costs. It became crucial to cut costs wherever we could – and quickly.
We reviewed our overheads, and any payments deemed non-essential were stopped or placed on hold. The government also launched an initiative called the CBIL Scheme, and allowed us to defer our PAYE and VAT payments, helping us manage cashflow.
We also made the decision to place any money received from loans or PAYE and TAX deferments into a savings account. As we knew the funds were always going to have to be repaid in March 2021, we decided to only use them if we had to.
Employee utilisation is something we’ve always used to measure productivity across the business at Proctors. It describes how much time any staff member is spending on achieving paid work each month.
During the pandemic, we were able to use our employee utilisation data to forecast upcoming work, and quickly identify the staff members who would be under-utilised over the coming weeks and months, and the skillsets where there wouldn’t be a lot of work coming in from our clients. We could then place those affected employees on furlough, whilst ensuring all other staff had high utilisation levels, reducing our costs while keeping our clients happy.
Over the last few years, we’ve introduced a number of KPIs to ensure we’re always performing efficiently, aiming to be within the top 10% of agencies of our size, financially. This has given us a strong financial foundation, allowing us to continue to support our clients who were also struggling though uncertainty.
Our relationships
Externally, we’ve been part of a working group of Financial Directors within creative agencies for the last four years. Pre-COVID we would meet quarterly, discussing all things financial and operational as well as sharing ideas, best practice tips, and KPIs.
At the beginning of the pandemic we met via Zoom, and as usual shared our latest updates – only this time, we discussed how to approach the upcoming challenges which would affect all of us.
Many agencies cut back on their non-fee earning staff, including new business and marketing. But our own stance differed: as long as we weren’t at a net loss, we would continue to look for new clients and deliver new initiatives to our existing ones.
We kept our new business and marketing team together, giving them the creative and technology staff needed to work on pitches and ideas – and for us, it paid off, resulting in new clients and new business.
Despite a number of businesses in the aforementioned Financial Directors group making different decisions based on what might work best for them, being part of a community that shares knowledge, resources and support has been invaluable.
Those invaluable relationships have extended to our clients too. Like many other businesses, we’ve been there for our clients – and vice versa – during an incredibly testing year. In most cases, we’ve gotten to know each other even better, and have built even stronger business and personal relationships with many of them.
A challenging time for the world, for our business, and for our people. It was so important to us to ensure our employees felt valued, informed – and were able to have just a little fun wherever possible.
Over the last year we’ve introduced a number of new staff initiatives, including our Quarantine Quiz. We originally introduced the quiz to raise money for the Quartet Community Foundation, donating to their Coronavirus 2020 Response Fund, as well as to boost our teams’ morale while we’ve all been forced to work remotely.
And unlike many of the Zoom quizzes we might have held in our personal lives, to this day The Proctors Quarantine Quiz lives on! The format has now evolved slightly, with different staff members hosting each Wednesday, and one lucky winner claiming a £50 Amazon voucher in a nice little midweek boost.
We’ve been rewarding staff for more than just their general knowledge, too. 2021 has seen the return of our famous Proscars awards. The Proscars are our quarterly awards by employees, for employees, with every staff member able to vote for three colleagues they believe should be rewarded for their hard work. Our three winners then get to choose a prize – either £250 in cash or £400 in vouchers.
To get us all moving, we’ve been further breaking up the working week with weekly lunchtime fitness and yoga sessions, hosted by a personal trainer online. And if you’d rather gin than gym, on Fridays our weekly virtual social kicks off at 5pm – although, it’s strictly BYOB!
If all that wasn’t enough, each Friday afternoon our Chairman, Roger Proctor, sends out his weekly ‘Good News’ email. Just as it sounds, it’s a cross-department weekly catch up about all things good – inside and out of work – and an informal welcome to the weekend.
As well as looking after our finances, it was also critical our staff had access to the support they needed to look after their personal wellbeing.
We engaged a psychotherapist and Mental Health Consultant to run a series of wellbeing workshops and Q+A sessions with all Proctors employees. This was followed up with a further series of workshops with our managers, providing them with additional tools to guide and support their team, as well as handouts on working from home, managing stress and more.
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve continued to promote our Employee Assistance Programme, offering 24/7 GP, legal and financial helplines, with options for counselling and psychiatric therapy available through our private medical insurance.
We also felt it was important to offer extra help to those who might be struggling with the pressures of family life in lockdown. Therefore, we sought to share helpful guidance and tips to P+S parents for effective home school and balancing with work as well as providing additional flexibility for maintaining work balance and wellbeing during additional childcare and home schooling. We even set up regional and international remote working agreements for those who benefited from being with their family outside of Bristol.
Christmas looked different in 2020, but we still managed to celebrate in style. In lieu of our traditional knees-up, we sent a hamper brimming local treats and bubbles from The Mall Deli in Clifton to each of our staff. But it was also important for us to give back too.
We joined forces with Caring in Bristol to donate a video in aid of homelessness in our city, helping to raise over £20,000. And we’ve kicked off the new year in a similar way by sponsoring Lebeq Ladies – a local women’s football team, in our community of Easton, Bristol.
Our future
None of the positive action we’ve taken should be viewed as temporary.
We intend to continue treating Wellbeing as a priority across the Group, and are continuing with initiatives in this area, such as with Mental Health First Aid training for select staff in June.
Above all, our people will continue to steer our direction moving forward: whether that’s via team surveys, policy and process updates or with lots of creative ideas. Because this has been one of the hardest times in recent memory to manage and market a business. And tough times lie ahead. But with a strong foundation, and an overwhelming commitment to your original values, it is possible to stay above water – even in the most testing of times.
If you’d like to talk to a truly ‘people first’ agency, we’re herewith a listening ear. So talk to us, at marketing@proctors.co.uk.
At Adapt, Covid-19 has provided us with plenty of positive insights. One key change we are focusing on is how we view our engagement with our offices and physical spaces.
As we come out of lockdown, we are fully embracing what we have learned these past 12 months across our 2,000+ global Welocalize workforce and we refuse to revert to how it was before.
We know we can do a whole lot more, and by that, we mean we will be more forward-thinking, more innovative, more flexible and more people-focused.
We will stick to our word and provide a better environment for our team. We want to focus on providing people with a sustainable work/life balance, as well as a more enjoyable future work environment.
We have one underlying principle: to encourage people to take ownership of their own time and how they choose to engage with our physical spaces when our teams are safe to return. In short, we want to ensure people are given the trust and therefore flexibility to work in a way they feel most productive.
Our working habits have changed. This pandemic has accelerated some principles for work that may have arrived in the future, but we are very lucky to be able to embrace these in 2021 – far earlier than we would have been able to over the next decade without Covid-19.
We have very clear, tangible data across our global workforce that shows we simply do not need to gather everyone that works for a business in the same four walls every day to deliver for our clients, be productive and work well together. And our results prove quite the opposite – some of these trends have improved in the last year.
Over the last 12+ months, our teams in the UK and globally at Welocalize have proven that we can deliver amazing results and work for clients regardless of location.
We have plans to grow our footprint internationally and already have major international hubs in Barcelona, Beijing, London, NYC and Portland.
On top of that, we have shared spaces all over the world for our teams to gather, meet clients and build face-to-face connections.
Embracing a more dynamic way of working, less focused on specific locations and more focused on how we best serve our teams and clients will make us a far stronger business in the future and better able to serve our clients.
We have learned to embrace this far better than we could before the pandemic. And it is now time to take those findings into the future and shape our culture.
First and foremost, we want to facilitate our teams spending time together should they choose to, and we will do this by providing inspiring collaborative spaces around the world at Welocalize for people to gather on their own terms, with colleagues and clients.
Where we have clusters of employees and clients, we will invest in collaborative spaces for people to use to their own benefit and to fuel their own productivity.
As a result, we are opening a new collaborative space in Bristol city centre.
This new space, ready to use when it is safe to do so, will give us a great opportunity to stay true to our new direction… to better support our team and clients where we have a strong presence.
We could not be more excited to have a Bristol base to socialize and build stronger rapports and support the networking and growth of our team relationships.
Do you like our new approach to working? Do you want to work for a business that trusts you and gives you this kind of flexibility and has an international outlook?
We have many current roles open across our business! Click here for Adapt and Welocalize careers.
Innovative and creative businesses are welcome to join us for a webinar about grant applications and funding on 7th June 2021, delivered by Dr Ben Masheder and Adele Reynolds of Business West’s Access to Funding and Finance Team and James Wheale, Creative Sector Lead at Innovate UK EDGE.
The webinar will discuss grants available to support innovation within the creative industries.
We will cover:
During this special focus session, time will be dedicated on how to apply to the newly announced Creative Industries Fund: fast start business growth pilot (https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/919/overview) from Innovate UK, Deadline for this £25,000, 100% funded innovation grant opportunity is Wednesday 16th June at 11am.
Free registration for BCI members (£10+VAT for non-members). Webinar link will be shared before the event.
More information about Innovate UK EDGE can be found at: https://www.innovateukedge.ukri.org/
To connect with Ben, Adele and James to see how they may be able to support you and your business, email infosw@innovateukedge.ukri.org with ‘Access to Funding – Creative’ in the subject line.
As of March 2021, P+S are now an official Amazon Web Services (AWS) Select Consulting Partner. Hurray! Exciting news for us – but why should anyone else care?
Don’t worry. This isn’t your typical self-congratulatory post.
What this means is we can help clients to grow and scale their businesses on AWS. So you could get a cost saving, industry-leading and super secure application.
To achieve our AWS Select Tier status, we had to demonstrate a whole lot of team knowledge and prove the strength of our experience too. So, over the past 4 months, we’ve delivered High Availability architecture for clients like Osborne Clarke and the UK Hydrographic Office.
So, we’ve written this blog to tell you just why you should take note about what AWS has to offer, and answer a few of the questions you might have.
Because they’re the industry’s leading cloud provider.
AWS offers a huge list of services and a robust global infrastructure that we knew could serve our clients around the world. If it’s good enough for 90% of the world’s Fortune 100 companies and the majority of Fortune 500 companies, it’s good enough for us.
And now our partnership status is testament to our experience and knowledge when it comes to designing and implementing cloud architecture.
As an application implementation, development and infrastructure partner, we can achieve a very close link between your applications’ functionality and its environment, ensuring you always get the very best performance.
We can save you time and money.
It’s likely you already know on-premise infrastructure can be hugely expensive. Or you might be using cloud computing, but finding it’s still costing you a fortune. With the right cloud architecture in place, not only can you gain a huge price advantage, you could also save countless hours of time, too.
Commissioning just one new server can take several days and thousands of pounds of hardware investment. But in the cloud, the same process takes just a few seconds. Plus, you can spin servers up and remove them again easily, and without having to worry about hardware.
Our use cases are normally centred around creating web architecture, where this flexibility is useful for creating cost effective solutions. A traditional web architecture might consist of several web servers behind a load balancer, where traffic is distributed across the instances according to some rules.
The problem with this traditional set up is that during lulls in user activity, e.g., overnight or over the weekend, you end up with more servers than you need – you’re just haemorrhaging money.
Conversely, during traffic spikes, you might not have enough capacity to meet demand, putting your application’s performance at risk.
Auto-scaling prevents this by automatically adding more servers to the group if demand requires it. When the demand drops, these servers are removed.
Because in the words of Werner Vogels, “Everything fails, all the time”.
All technological solutions – no matter how perfect we might like them to be – will have points of failure and downtime. In fact, even cloud solutions within AWS are subject to the same risks.
By creating an infrastructure that anticipates this failure, we can overcome the risks and mitigate the impact before a failure ever happens.
For example, the AWS network consists of several geographical regions based around the world. These regions are further divided into Availability Zones. An Availability Zone is made up of separate physical data centres that are connected within a region.
You can then split your services across Availability Zones, so should one develop a problem, you’ll hardly notice – your application will still be up and running.
At P+S we follow the AWS principals for High Availability across all of our clients’ architecture to ensure there are no single points of failure, and recovery is automatic wherever possible.
Yes. In fact, at AWS, they have a saying: Security is Priority Zero.
This is for good reason, given the critical nature of data security and harsh penalties for businesses who breach regulations.
There are multiple features in AWS’ tools and services ensuring every design meets stringent compliance requirements, with our own architecture including many of these features as standard.
For example, we deploy AWS CloudFront as a CDN as standard in front of all our sites, together with AWS Web Application Firewall and AWS Shield to protect your site against web vulnerabilities and attack vectors, including the OWASP Top 10 – globally recognised by developers as the top 10 risks to application security – and Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS), which you may have seen recently taking a number of the Belgium government’s websites offline. It also ensures you’re compliant with Data Protection standards such as ISO 27001.
AWS also provides the ability to create entire virtual networks and subnets within the cloud, with complete control over data and user access and flow. This gives you the ability to lock down access to subnets, instances, and services to only authorised sources. For example, you can block physical access to web application servers, ensuring access can only be gained from the load balancer or approved IPs.
No. One of our favourite methodologies in cloud infrastructure is ‘server-less architecture’.
Server-less architecture means the servers or machine resources used to run a particular task are handled by the cloud provider. So you don’t have to worry about provisioning a server or maintaining it. This saves a lot of time and money; we can simply spin up a database or run code.
This methodology is extremely useful when working on prototypes, for example, allowing us to quicker develop and verify our ideas. It’s also useful for running Continuous Integration workloads to speed up deployments (useful for Autoscaling groups) and helping you manage repetitive tasks or queues.
For example, we successfully offloaded some database queue processing from the application into AWS Lambda. This meant we could configure a smaller database instance than would otherwise have been necessary.
Our summary
At P+S, we believe every business should be able to offer an excellent digital service to their customers. That means creating flexible digital architecture that grows as you – and your customers – need it to. It’s faster, more adaptable, and because it’s flexible, you won’t waste money on servers you don’t need.
Your application shouldn’t go offline unexpectedly. And we don’t believe you should have to pay more for a secure website, so we’ll ensure both your data and your customers’ info is protected at all times.
And our newly earned AWS Select Consulting Partner badge proves that commitment.
Want to find out more? Talk to marketing@proctors.co.uk for a no-obligation chat.
We’re all different, aren’t we? Some of us need a tight deadline to focus the mind. Some of us just need a clear ‘to do’ list to work our way through and feel good about as we start to tick things off. Whatever it is that gives you the boost you need to get stuff done, be aware of it so you can try to harness it on the days the motivation isn’t coming quite so naturally.
I’m writing this blog on the back of a productive session – one more tick on the list before I finish for the day. I know I’m affected to a degree by the weather. It’s not warm but the sun is shining today and that in itself helps my productivity. Admittedly that’s a tough one to control but there are other things I know I can control that helps me to do what I need to do.
Make a list
I’ve always found lists helpful. I have a list for everything and if I don’t have my list handy when something pops into my head, I write it down or even e-mail it to myself, so I find it when I next log in. We can all hold a certain amount of information in our heads but when it starts to get overloaded it’s only natural that things start to slip.
Delegate
Sometimes we have to admit that we can’t do it all ourselves, so we have to delegate. This can be hard for some people but there are lots of tools that can help you hand over control gradually and in a way that you are comfortable with. Whether you are delegating to in-house members of your team or outsourced freelancers you can maintain full visibility of delegated tasks via regular communication, or via tools that are dedicated to precisely such visibility. Trello (www.trello.com) or Asana (www.asana.com) are just two examples of the kind of software that is available to help you manage your projects in the most efficient way.
Track your time
If you’re not yet sure which areas you need to delegate, it might be useful to track your time for a week or a two. We all think we know where we spend our time, but often our perceptions are wildly out of kilter with reality. It’s also very easy to focus on the jobs we enjoy and leave the tasks we don’t by convincing ourselves that what we are doing is important. By tracking your time, you might find that you are spending too much time in areas that are no longer adding value. And perhaps there are more important areas of the business that are being neglected.
Increase productivity
To increase productivity, it may simply be a case of being more mindful of what motivates us, how we spend our time and which behaviours we can adjust to become more productive without burning ourselves out. Or it might be time to delegate. If you are spending too much time on an aspect of the business that could be handed over to someone else, or if you don’t have time to do the things you know you need to do to drive the business forward, it is probably time to delegate.
Once you have identified the areas you need to delegate, you can set about delegating them. This could be to various in-house fractions, or perhaps to an outside resource. A company’s marketing is one area that often gets left when things get busy and top of the list of things to get forgotten, is your business blog. Smart businesses know they need to blog but getting around to doing it regularly is another matter. By delegating this and any other aspects of the business that you know you are simply not giving the attention they deserve, will free up more time to boost your productivity in other areas of the business.
Whether you’ve thrived or suffered in the last year, the uncertainties and market changes have put a new emphasis on the concept of value, requiring agency owners, team members and investors to all think differently.
Creating, protecting and realising value demands more rigour, better planning and greater attention to detail. And if you’re not adapting to these new standards, your personal, team and business prosperity could well be at risk.
But please don’t think these challenges only apply if you have an imminent desire to sell your business. Whatever your eventual destination might turn out to be, you’ll want to nurture and safeguard your value in the meantime, keeping your options open for the longer term.
So, to be sure that you’re on the right value track, ask yourself if you have:
We explain these new standards and how to achieve them in our Future Positive Value guide. Find out more about what it will take to optimise value in the next era, with no half measures and nothing much left to chance.
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