Triangle Blog

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, or how profitable your business is; if your customers are not paying you then you are not really in business at all.

I’d take it further and say that until the money is in the bank you shouldn’t even consider a sale as a sale.

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I heard someone talking to a non-techie recently in a thriving small business. They were trying to illustrate the importance of software in the business, so they asked the question

“If I took away your software, how would your business run?”

The person was suitably shocked with the idea of running the business with all of the computers rendered useless.

It got me thinking about an obvious follow on question that was never asked;

“If I improved your software instead of taking it away, how would your business run?” (more…)

It seems that these days, you can’t open a business newspaper without reading that another company has become a “victim of the economic downturn”. But becoming a victim in the newspaper writer’s eyes might not mean that they have gone out of business; it might mean they have been acquired by a healthier outfit or merged with another firm to make one strong entity which will survive, and more to the point so will the person who owns it.

As a business owner with a smallish company that has done more than survive during the good times, you’ve probably had a good standard of living without getting rich. You’ve probably also provided a decent living for 3 or 4 other people into the bargain and kept a healthy number of clients satisfied with the personal level of service a smaller company can provide. (more…)

Many companies have evolved from one or two man start-ups. During their evolution they naturally use whatever skills and tricks they know to survive and grow. They will often have found that somebody in the company knows Access or Excel and they have used theses skills to develop ad-hoc computer systems.

At this stage, every business owner should now ask the questions; is this really the best use of valuable staff who could be focussing on our own business, and is it likely that we now have a reliable solution on which to rest our business.

Here are a few reasons why you might reconsider having the guy in accounts knock up his own Access database, or think again about using multiple spreadsheets with ever more complex calculations all feeding each other, to run your business. (more…)

It’s not a world shattering event in some contexts, but we’re excited.

Today sees the launch of the new Triangle website. We’ve tried to make information more useful and easier to access and we’ve added new interactive features like applying for a place in the Triangle team. 

The site will evolve over time and we’d be really happy to hear your feedback both on the design and the content.