Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Many people move to France to live their dream and why not? If your dream is to live in some idyllic spot in France, who’s to say that you can’t?

Unfortunately, for every one that succeeds in living out their dream of a life in France, there’s another who falls by the wayside and ends up returning to the UK.

For some, it’s the case that the dream was never backed up by practical activities. Most common amongst those is the lack of preparation in terms of knuckling down and learning to speak French. I don’t blame those who arrive here not speaking any French or at best just a little because you can do something about it when you get here and besides sometimes the opportunity to move comes when you’re least prepared for it and you just have to jump or lose your dream.

Some come unstuck in not getting down to the practical business of living in France. Many fall in this camp I suspect. If you’re not at retirement age then you’re likely to need a job and, no, running a gite business usually doesn’t count as the income just isn’t enough on it’s own. B&B can be made to work but generally even that needs a supplementary income.

Finally, there are those who do nearly everything right and it just doesn’t work or doesn’t work well enough. For them it is truly sad I think. They genuinely want to live in France, have what seems a viable form of work and integrate with the local society yet it just doesn’t work out and they end up having to leave as the dream slips out of their fingers. At least for the others they can point to something specific that they didn’t do and could potentially fix it and live out their dream.

If you do fall into one of those first couple of categories, why not try to fix the problem and live out your dream?

Many people these days work their way through a short list of the top directories when they’re promoting a new website. For some it’s a very short list: addurl to google and they’re done, for others they either slog away for months or just use one of the manual submission services to do it for them.

However, many people ignore all the new directories that are launched every day. After all, they’re weighing in with PR0 so why bother about them at all?

Well, for one thing google had PR0 when it started out (OK, so they probably fiddled the books to give it PR10 from day 1, but it should have had PR0). It’s the same with all the little directories that are launched. Certainly few of them will get beyond PR5 but links from all those little PR1-4 directories add up even if the bulk of them are sitting around PR1-PR2.

Also, they are usually free at the start but charge for listings after anything from 6 months to a year, essentially when the owner gets swamped with all the free submissions (which, in my case amounted to over 100 a day this time last year on Whole Earth Directory which I assume is fairly typical). So, if you go for a free entry now, it’ll save you money later and indeed it will save you from having to add a reciprocal link to the directory (generally the first step in trying to stem the flood of free entries).

Sounds good then? The problem is that these directories are launched just about every day of the week right through the year so it’s a major hassle in trying to keep up with them all (yes, I tried for a while). Fortunately, those nice folks in India have come to our aid again though and some services are on offer to do it for you for around $20/month which should net you something like 50 new directories each month and, even better, is the kind of growth in inbound links which the search engines love.

You’d think that that these days banking practices around Europe would be fairly standard. After all, the banks handle international business every day so they’re in constant contact with their counterparts in other countries.

Of course, it’s one of many areas where European business practices are far from standard.

Take the UK and France for example. Two countries with a very long history of interaction so you’d think that many things would be similar except that they aren’t.

In the UK, credit cards are commonplace and it’s normal, expected even, for people to have several of them. In France, credit cards are a relatively new phenonmen and remain very rare.

In the UK, almost everyone has an overdraft and the banks prefer you to be permanently overdrawn as they collect more fees that way. In France, they’ll close your account if you’re overdrawn more than a couple of months.

In the UK, debit cards don’t have any purchase limit on them. In France, you can’t buy more than 3000‚€ a month usually, which is why you often see people resorting to cheques towards the end of the month.

In the UK, nobody will accept a cheque without a cheque card (a card issued by their bank and guaranteeing the cheque will be paid). In France, almost everyone until recently accepted cheques because if you bounced a cheque you could be banned from having a cheque account at all. That actually worked well until very recently when the economic situation seems to have caused something of a run on dud cheques so the effect is that more and more businesses don’t accept cheques which is sure to cause trouble soon so long as that debit card spending limit remains.

Any one of those differences can easily fell you if you don’t know about it in advance.

Although it might sound obvious, you need to ask people to do what you’d like them to do when you send out a marketing e-mail.

It might be obvious but many marketing e-mails are sent out without a clear “buy this” message and even more go out without giving the reader a clear means of actually buying the product. Many newsletters are sent out without containing links to specific products sold by the company sending it out yet it’s one of the easiest ways to pick up easy sales as you’re sending it out to people who’ve asked to be on your mailing list so they’re already interested in your products.

Don’t forget to vary your message too. For example, if you’re sending out a travel related newsletter, pick out upcoming vacations such as Easter and special interest periods like Valentine’s Day. Hallmark spend a LOT of money to produce cards that address every possible situation that you could imagine and you should approach your newsletter with the same originality (or just copy Hallmark!).

However, the most important thing is to ensure that there’s a very clear “buy this” message and a very easy way of a reader doing exactly that.

When you buy a new business you’re keen to make your mark on your purchase and tell everyone you know about it, aren’t you?

Sure, you’re going to tell everyone that you know, but should you tell everyone else too? Should you really tell the customers who may have been loyally buying from the previous owner for many years?

If they have been buying from him/her for many years then the question you have to ask is: what is it about the business that they’ve been “buying”? Is it the charisma of the previous owner, or something that’s part of them that they’ve been buying? If it is, you’d better find out pretty darn quick because you’re going to lose those customers if you can’t replicate the reason for them to come to your business and you best not hang out that “under new management” sign either.

However, if you’ve bought a business which is in need of turning round then that’s quite a different matter. Did the customer base drop away because of something that the previous owner was doing wrong? Was it that the previous owner just put off the customers? In these cases, then, yes, you would want to advertise that the place is under new management as you will want to disassociate yourself from the previous owners as soon as you can.

Think carefully about it though. Once you’ve hung out that “under new management” sign, then it’s too late to go back and try to regain any previous base of loyal customers that the previous owner may have had.