So much for my optimism about 2011! Twelve months’ ago  I thought that 2011 would be a turning point for the economy. Technically it was – growth started to speed up, unemployment fell and leading indicators are brightening but it certainly doesn’t feel like a recovery. And most economists foresee tepid growth for 2012.

On the other hand, for Business360 things were pretty good. Our revenue will be up about 35% overall, which isn’t too shabby given the state of the wider economy but less than our 50% growth in 2010. Over the year we’ve added a few great clients (including some in pharma, which is something of a departure for us) and we’ve also gone through the administratively painful process of becoming a ‘global vendor’ with a few of our clients that I think should be a good thing for the future.

This year our growth was constrained mainly by one factor, our inability to get enough good managers to oversee our research and analytical work (these people don’t grow on trees!). We continue to look for and recruit people that are skilled at understanding client needs and managing researchers, analysts and writers to deliver high quality work. We’ve had some success but it remains a challenge (if you know any good candidates or would like to do this, all working remotely from home, please contact us).

Being resource constrained limited our growth as it stopped us from pursuing work; in 2011 I can’t have made more than a handful of sales calls (all the growth we had came from existing clients and from new clients that came to us via word of mouth). I guess that’s good but I find it frustrating not being able to approach new clients; as we fold in managers in 2012 I look forward to being able to do this again.

So what do I think’s coming in 2012: more of the same. My optimism is mainly deferred but also a touch dented (banks still aren’t lending enough and Europe remains a profound risk), so I think 2012 will bring a gradual, bumpy improvement until sometime late in the year we realize that growth is starting to be solid.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year – here’s hoping it’s a good one for you…

I never got to post some pictures of my trip to the Ukraine, so while it’s top of mind, here is a selection. They run from arrival in Kiev, via a train to Kharkov and back to Kiev…

Last month I was lucky enough to meet another person who I’ve been working with for approaching a decade but who I have only known over the phone and via email. This time it was Anne Jordan who has been with ClickNwork for about seven years – you can read a little about her here; more recently she provided some thoughts about her work with us and other companies in a blog entry.

Anne seems to be a poster child for remote working. She could easily bag a high-powered job in London running a global research team or similar (she’s done that sort of thing before, with experience at top companies, including Goldman Sachs, Mitchell Madison Group and Marakon Associate), but she puts more store in managing her own career and time so she can pursue things she’s passionate about.

She has a portfolio approach, juggling a range of projects from a handful of clients that include regular assignments and ad hoc tasks all managed so that she has enough time to focus on something that lights her fire – researching Lady Colin Campbell (1857-1911), who she recently wrote a book about that she is now promoting.

Working remotely means she has more time in her day (no commuting, meetings, office politics…) and since she is a researcher she is able to work as effectively from her home as an office. Anne lives in Devon, close to her family and working at-distance also means she can invest time in this rather than work colleagues.

Our meeting was unfortunately short – I was en route to Cornwall – but it was enjoyable all the same and it surfaced some things we have in common, like an interest in how people are making remote careers work for them; how research provision is changing; why existing newsletters are flawed and so on, and I expect it will lead to longer conversations down the line. These are things that don’t as easily surface in virtual relationships and giving them a chance to surface is a real benefit of actually meeting up.

Oh, and the research on the side? We met at Darts Farm, an award winning organic and local food retailer named ‘Best Local Food Retailer’ in BBC Radio Four’s Food and Farming Awards. Some of the work we do is tracking food trends and seeing great local food retailers is great field research.

We’re on the lookout for an experienced report writer who can help us with our growing work load. Our first port of call for this sort of thing is ClickNwork but that route hasn’t worked this time so we’ve been running ads in a number of places. In case you or someone you know might be interested, here it is:

“Business360 is a New York based company that for over ten years has been delivering a range of professional services to leading Fortune 100 corporations, advisory firms and many smaller companies focused on niche areas.

Our work centers on research, writing, analysis and competitive intelligence generally.

We are not a typical company – we are entirely virtual and everyone works remotely from home. We often have many people working on large projects from many different countries and it can take good management skills to pull things together and deliver a quality product.

We are looking for someone to help manage some of our projects, which will include coordinating work inputs by our researchers/writers/analysts as well as helping to prepare reports for clients. In time we’d expect there to be some client contact and management but no selling (our issue is doing the work we have, not getting more).

We don’t have set requirements for your background but given the research and written skills required in much of our work we’d look positively on people that have a lot of experience in preparing client-ready reports and presentations. Over the years we have had good results working with people that came from consulting companies, from banks as analysts, or from a range of corporate positions as market/consumer insight researchers.

This is not a full-time position but contract work that will start on an ad hoc basis, although if things go well it should grow and could be full-time if you wanted. Also, we do not have a fixed pay rate. Instead it will depend on the project and will range between $40-120/hour, being determined by a number of factors such as complexity, urgency, duration etc. Generally, there will be more work at the lower rates and in time we would hope it rises as you take on more complex and demanding roles.

The range of work varies greatly with the style and format required changing for each client, but typical projects include:

• Reviewing and preparing competitive intelligence reports on companies and about their earnings performance
• Managing and editing a range of competitor profiles on leading companies that bring together financial data as well as market and category insights
• Assembling compelling consumer insight documents about consumer trends from a disparate range of multi-language sources

We’d prefer someone in the US and ideally close to New York but in principle we are open to promising candidates wherever they are.

If you’re interested in this opportunity, please reply to this ad, attaching a recent resume, notes on what experience you have preparing competitive intelligence/analytical/consumer insight material as well as some samples of your work (sanitized if need be). It’s also important for us to understand why you want to work from home and whether you have any other work-from-home income streams.”

(If you read this and want to reply, please reach us via our contact page – thanks)

For all the reports of doom and disaster Hurricane Irene proved pretty manageable. It was certainly noisy in the night and we had a few leaks to contend with but it wasn’t the destruction forecast.

It highlighted for me an advantage of working from home and having a network approach to business – we had no issues with transport or closed offices and with the hurricane so well signposted it was easy for us to shift work from those on the East Coast to others not affected so our clients wouldn’t have seen any disruption.

And on a lighter note, I can’t help but think of that Dexy’s Midnight Runners classic that was going to be the theme to our Come On Irene Hurricane Party…

Yurii duly arrived and we had a great time. We could communicate after all (although not without some difficulties now and then!) and we worked together at his home before walking around Kharkov and going to a restaurant.

I have a photo and when I get to download load it I’ll post it.

Looking back at my trip to the Ukraine to meet and work with Yurii I think I learnt two things:

• Yes, the world might be flat, as Thomas Friedman would have us believe, but in a funny kind of way mine has become more diverse because of it. Had I stayed in the corporate world there is no way Yurii and I would work together:  the corporate environment filters people out and makes for a very homogenous work place. People might have varied ethnic backgrounds and all but the selection process means that everyone who gets a job has the right sort of degree, the right sort of language and communication skills, and the right sort of attitude and so on.But with Yurii, none of that has happened; he was selected for one thing alone –his ability to develop a software system.   Virtual working means we have in Yurii someone who would fail at all the standard corporate filters but in the one thing that matters, he excels.Our virtual team is way more diverse than anything imaginable in the corporate world and I think this is a good thing.

• My other thought is that because we worked together for so long without meeting or talking, finally meeting up was more meaningful.It took a fair amount of effort for both of us – I traveled to Kiev then took a 6 hour train to Kharkov and he had to talk to me in English, something he wasn’t comfortable to do. It could easily have gone wrong – we might have been unable to understand each other, or not got on etc, so there was some risk to it. This doesn’t happen in a regular workplace where work relationships evolve gradually.We met only for a day but the bond established is stronger than many of the bonds I established in the corporate world where I daily met and interacted with people. I had a good working relationship with most of my corporate friends but I learnt little about their private lives and our relationships didn’t extend much beyond the workplace.But in the short time I was with Yurii I met his family, worked at his home with him, walked his dog and generally got a good insight into his life and how our work fits into it.  I rarely attained this level of understanding in the corporate environment and feel it has to enhance the working relationship that Yurii and I have.

My work with Yurii over the last few years has focused on developing a newsletter service that rests on a simple idea – we’ll send you (the client, the individual user) an email containing articles, links to articles and summaries of news that you want to follow. It sounds so simple but getting to this point has been surprisingly arduous and more than once we’ve had to rethink and restart.

With myriad free news trackers and newsletters available, many of which are really good, the obvious question is what can we offer that’s worthwhile, and the answer is…focus. Our thinking (hope) is that business professionals need more than just broad industry or market material. These days, with the proliferation of information there is usually good and useful literature on very specific topics that can help business managers but it’s simply too cumbersome for them to pull it together and read it all.

So while a general a newsfeed or newsletter on the food business can be good, it’s not sufficient for someone in NPD that is focused on, say, functional foods, who is probably interested in specific ingredients, the application of specific technologies, patents, specific competitor activity and so on. A brand manager is probably interested in marketing and promotions activity of specific competitors in specific retailers in specific countries, and so on. I think companies would value information delivery with this level of focus and that is what we’re trying to do.

We have developed three solutions to this problem. The first is to send clients articles that cover topics they are interested in, the second is to create and email ‘hand-made’, focused newsletters to subscribers; the third (that I’ll cover in another post) is to automatically generate newsletters according to individual user preferences.

It’s not easy to do any of this and, so far as I know, it’s not yet possible to reliably deliver it using just technology, so our solutions rely heavily on human input. To get a good understanding of the sorts of information clients want tracked we discuss requirements with them and identify the best sources (academic publications, trade journals, scientific studies, blogs etc) and build a search strategy with this in mind. We then daily and weekly visit target sites and run search strings to capture the information they need which is tabulated in our database according to subject.

Each day our system then sends out hundreds of emails with relevant articles to clients. Ongoing communication with clients allows us to tweak coverage as client information needs evolve.

We also have some writers who summarize a selection of these articles and the summaries are made available online and assembled into newsletters. These are in beta at the moment and we are working in just six areas, food business, health & wellness, sustainable business, diet news, innovation and personal care. For each area there are a number of newsletters people can choose to receive and you can see the topics we cover (most are for subscribers only but each site has at least one free newsletter that you can sign up for):

• Food Business (http://www.foodbusiness360.com/) which has these newsletters and past issues of free newsletters
• Sustainable Business (http://www.sustainablebusiness360.com/); newsletters past issues of free newsletters
• Health & Wellness (http://www.healthandwellness360.com/); newsletters, past issues of free newsletters
• Innovation (http://www.innov360.com/), newsletters, past issues of free newsletters
• Diet News (http://www.dietnews360.com/), newsletters, archive to free newsletters
• Personal Care (http://www.personalcarebusiness360.com/), newsletters, past issues of free newsletters

Six hours on the train and I arrived around noon in Kharkov, Ukraine’s second city and where Yurii lives.

We exchanged texts and he’s coming to my hotel in 30 min or so.

I completed the first step of my journey to Kharkov, leaving Heathrow this mornnig and arriving in Kiev today. I spent much of it walking around the city and using the subway – very clean and efficient. I’m not sure what expectations I had, but I’m surprised how beautiful Kiev is; lots of old world charm and modern sophistication.

Tomorrow I’m up at the crack of dawn to get a train to Kharkov…

It looks like there’s another coworker that is ready to meet me – must be my lucky day!

This time it’s Anne, one of our researchers who has been working with us since about 2004 and is truly a great information professional. You can read a little about her here on our sister site, ClickNwork, and also at our ClickNwork blog where she wrote an interesting entry about her new book.

Anne lives not too far from where I’ll be spending some of my holiday and the hope is that we can coordinate schedules to meet up.

In many ways Anne epitomizes what’s good about remote working – she has valuable skills that can be applied at-distance and uses the flexibility of virtual work to make time for something she’s passionate about.  I look forward to meeting her.