Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Thanks to a spot of stormy weather, our trusty satellite dish has been knocked off even the few channels that we were picking up a few days ago.

Still, we figure that it’s a max of a half hour to get the thing properly aligned on the correct satellite this time around. Essentially, we just need to move it a little more to the right as we were on the leftmost satellite last time.

Shouldn’t we get one of those signal meters to do all this stuff? No need really, a compass and protractor is both cheaper and a good deal more practical when used in conjunction with the signal meter that’s built into each satellite tuner anyway.

Whilst we’re all looking for rapid growth in our businesses, if that rapid growth happens to arrive unexpectedly it can cause equally unexpected problems.

Moving from being a small scale business to a medium sized one in any market is usually a very big move. On the small scale, it’s quite possible to operate very much as a cottage industry in many fields with the owner doing a lot of the work themselves. As the scale moves up though a point arrives where automation in some form is a necessity and that’s where many businesses fall down through not having prepared for it.

I say automation but, of course, another option is to take on staff. In the “real world” it’s additional staff that is usually the way to go but online automation is often the preferred route although not necessarily the easiest one. In fact, often automation is essential online simply because growth can be very, very rapid and so much so that taking on additional staff may not be a viable option. Sure you can hire staff if you find that you now have two or three times the number of customers that you had last year, but if it’s 10 times the number of customers you had a couple of months ago then it’s a different matter.

Fortunately, the Internet provides the tools to let you scale up your offering without major hassles. Ten times the number of customers online isn’t the problem that it would be in the real world. If you’ve used standard software then chances are you may well get away with simply upgrading the hosting package for your website as the number of customers grows.

What’s dangerous is to take it for granted that you can simply upgrade in that way forever though. There are upper limits that shared hosting packages offer before you need to move onto VPS hosting or even a dedicated server and in some cases those upgrades may mean you looking to hire an IT expert to support it all for you.

Whilst moving from one European country to another is as easy, at least legally, as moving from one American state to another, it’s a whole different matter when you want to emmigrate to a completely different jurisdiction.

Aside from all the normal differences in taxes, social security and health systems that moving countries always entails, you add the complication of needing to apply for a visa, residence and work permits which adds considerably to the time that it requires to make the move as well as increasing uncertainty somewhat.

For example, take the relatively simple case of a British citizen wanting to move to Canada.

Canada is, of course, in the British Commonwealth so, in theory, that should make the move easier. However, even if you have a pretty much perfect points score for the move, it currently takes around four years from initial application through to the point where you have your Canadian visa and can actually move.

That’s a very long time and a great deal can change during it. For example, four years ago I had one son and now I have two. The second one would obviously need to be added to the visa application for a start and there’s the complication that he has even more nationalities than the first little guy.

Such a long lead time seriously complicates matters in other areas. For one thing, you’ll be working in your existing job and not know in advance how long. You may be wanting to move house too over that kind of time. It’s even possible that the visa categories which you’re eligible for could change too if, for example, you had an inheritance you might find that you could apply under one of the investment categories or perhaps you added a qualification (eg I picked up a university French diploma within the last four years which adds significant points to my Canadian application) or skills. The list is endless.

In fact, over that time period your life could change radically so you need to be really set on moving to a particular country if you’re talking of application periods running into years. Yes, of course, you should be that determined but over such a long period many things can crop up to change your mind even if you originally were really set on making that particular move.

And, remember, that’s just for a relatively simple move!

There are loads of devices around these days that can display video but few people seem to realise that almost all the devices can display the videos from almost all of the other devices and seem amazed when you can take, say, a video from youtube and play it on a PSP or for that matter record a TV programme and play it on their phone.

And yet, it’s usually fairly simple. Granted, youtube aren’t too keen on people recording the videos as such but if you can see it on your PC screen you can definitely record it. Once you have it recorded on the PC then you’ll find that there are a whole range of programs dedicated to changing video formats and thereby letting you copy it onto an iPOD or PSP or DVD.

Going from a broadcast TV programme is a little more complex in that you need a little item of hardware (cost: around £60) to let the computer record the programmes but once you have it on the PC you can move it on elsewhere.

The one thing that’s usually pointless is moving mobile phone videos to other devices with larger screens. It’s not that you can’t do it, just that the resolution isn’t high enough. In general, it’s best to move from high resolution devices to equal or lower resolution ones eg TV to/from PC and from these to smaller devices. Going in the other direction is usually a disappointment.

Once we get into the summer season, there’s really no chance of us keeping up with anything that isn’t essential to the day to day running of the place and one of those “non-essential” things is keeping the accounts up to date.

It’s not that we’ve no idea what money is coming in and going out as we go along, just that the formal accounts don’t get kept up to date over the summer period. This year is particularly bad as there was a lot of additional work needing doing with our UK side of the business and so it’s really only now that we’re getting settled down to get the finances up to date.

Naturally, that long period since the relevant transactions makes life more difficult as it’s that much easier to lose the odd document along the way of course and getting the whole lot into a sensible sequence takes a whole lot longer than it would do if we were keeping up to date as we went along.

Having said that, overall it seems to take us a lot less time to do when we do the whole lot in bulk. This morning we went through the majority of the receipts over a couple of hours for instance whereas doing it a little bit at a time would consume a lot more time when you added it all up. In fact the biggest downside is that the whole thing feels much more like a chore when you’ve a big heap of documentations to work through than when you’ve only a couple of bills to mark off.

Fingers crossed, we’ll have tidied it all up by next week and then it’s off to the accountant with it.