Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-06-25 18:36:38 - Graham Ellis
Markets change, and we must adopt with the times. If I was still doing exactly the same thing that I set Well House Consultant up to do in 1995, I would be stuggling - or to be accurate, we would probably be out of business by now. But we've taken ideas, adopted and adapted, experimented, not been frightened to try and gently drop some ideas, and have had "plan B" in place most of the time ... had to use it at least once too.
In Edinburgh, where I was last week, the bottom seems to have dropped out of the Sporran market ... and indeed companies who haven't moved on now look rather down at heel.
Competiton, in the form of a free sporran given away with every sale over 30 pounds at a neighbouring shop may be something to do with it ... or perhaps the Sporranmaking business has now separated manufacturing and sales, and sales are mostly online
The Open Source programming language niche that we inhabit - with courses in Lua and Tcl, Ruby and Python, Perl and PHP - is a good one. I taught when I set up Well House in 1995, but I taught none of those subjects; and other things have been added too. The accommodation to go with the course was a natural extra. Then - give that, the natural extra of letting rooms to others. And, we thought, perhaps letting rooms for events. But in that latter, we've only proven it to work for certain clients, and we're on our "Plan B" of not marketing the capability; we simply can't do it and cover our costs at the low volume we're able to handle, and we don't have all the specialised facilities to turn out conference after conference, which could be lucrative.
Perhaps there's a more general story here ... including the changing times in many markets. Of course, I don't know much about the sporran makers who appear to be shut down ... how hard they had to fight for their market, but there does get to be a point that a business takes a look at something and says "we need to do something radical and move on". I heard about one Melksham operation about 10 days ago that had lost 80% of its trade in 2 years, and how such a radical decision had been taken for and on their behalf. And arriving back here now from Edinburgh, I also hear of the potential redeployment of their significant aspects into something forward looking.
In Edinburgh, where I was last week, the bottom seems to have dropped out of the Sporran market ... and indeed companies who haven't moved on now look rather down at heel.
Competiton, in the form of a free sporran given away with every sale over 30 pounds at a neighbouring shop may be something to do with it ... or perhaps the Sporranmaking business has now separated manufacturing and sales, and sales are mostly online