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…

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.

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

Just over a week to go not and things are getting a little complex.

It turns out that there are just three trains daily from Kiev to Kharkov and only one is express, and it leaves at 6:00am. I’ve also learnt that it gets booked up and you need to reserve in advance…only you can’t seem to do that from overseas. Mmmm.

I also gather I can get to Kharkov by bus and plane, but they leave from different locations and at different times; if I go to the train station and can’t get on it I may not then be able to get the bus, and visa versa. I could get a plane but I’m a touch jittery about that.

Yurii has offered to come and meet me at the airport in Kiev but that puts the burden on him and defeats the object of visiting people in their home towns.

My current plan is to pitch up at the airport and see what’s on offer.

On the bright side, I’ve been reading a little about the country and it’s fascinating. Here’s the Wikipedia entry and here’s a list of some notable Ukrainians.

Today I booked a trip to the Ukraine – my first appointment to devirtualize my workplace. I’m going to meet someone that I’ve never met (or even spoken to) but have been working with for years.

In a few weeks I fly to Kiev then take a 6 hour train to Kharov which is right on the Russian border and where I will meet Yurii. We’ll spend a day trying to work (I say trying as we’re not actually sure we’ll be able to communicate face to face – so far we’ve just managed email and text).

(My fall back plan, should we completely be unable to understand each other, is to find a corner, log into Skype and text like we always do!)

Then I’ll turn around and head home.

In a few days I’ll show you some of the things we’ve been working on.

I’ve been a virtual worker for over a decade and I still find it somewhat mystifying. At a personal level I’m motivated by the quality of life it gives me – closeness to my family mainly, and the chance to manage my time over the day. I expect that’s the same for many people and that’s no surprise.

What I do find surprising is how stable, robust and effective it seems to be. Orthodoxy tells you that we need face-time and daily communication to build cohesive, functional teams – without it people get off message, do the wrong thing, waste time and generally are not that effective.

I can imagine that for many types of work this is indeed true. But for a lot of what we do it doesn’t apply. We seem to have stable and effective teams without the face time, without the daily communication. In fact, it’s more surprising than that – most of our team members have never met. Ever. And in many cases, our team members don’t even talk to each other. And more surprising yet, many have never talked to each other. Isn’t that amazing?

And yet they still churn out high quality, professional output that, for example:

• Is circulated at the executive level of Fortune 100 corporations
• Is used by brand managers to guide new development investments
• Is used by consultants in client presentations
• etc.

There is no magic to this – we work hard to find the right people (detail focused, experienced, driven by quality…), ensure high standards (poor performers don’t last) and have managers that rigorously check our work. And we communicate a lot via email and instant messaging and yes, sometimes by phone.

And we benefit from very low churn rates (2-5% at last estimate), which means we don’t need to spend time and money retesting and retraining people. The people we have are motivated to work with us (probably for similar reasons to my own but hopefully also because we pay a fair rate, provide interesting work and they see we are easy and honest to deal with).

For all this, I still find it surprising that year on year and on a weekly basis I work with well over 20 people that I’ve never met or spoken to. Some people I’ve worked with just for a few months and for others it’s a decade.

So I’ve decided to change things a little and get to meet (and talk!) to some of my ‘colleagues’. In coming months (and probably years) I’m going to visit some of the people that I work with to get to know them better. I’m not sure what this will achieve.

Perhaps I’ll get to understand virtual working better and maybe improve how it works. At a minimum, I hopefully won’t screw up something that works! Anyhow, stay tuned…

In recent month’s I’ve noticed some things are changing with our business. At first I thought they might be ephemeral but I no longer think so. To state the very obvious, things are getting more global – a change we’re seeing in a number of ways.

First, we’re doing more work in foreign languages. I just totted it up and worked out that we commonly work in about 20 languages, including most of the European ones and many of the Asian ones too.

Some of this is driven by requests for overseas research as companies in our traditional markets (the US and Europe) look farther afield for opportunities, investigating markets, local companies and competitor activity generally. We find companies are also looking to emerging markets for inspiration, innovation and ideas on new trends they can exploit back in their home territories. All of this requires that we track news sources in foreign languages and bring insights back into English.

Perhaps most interestingly, for the first time we are being approached by companies overseas (in Japan and China mainly) who want research on Europe and the US. Topics vary but they cover the usual range of competitor intelligence issues – consumer trends, innovation, market size and growth rates, competitor activity and the like. Clearly, the tide is slowly starting to turn.

There is an upside for us in all this as growth in foreign language work is one of the reasons 2011 is, so far at least, going well for us. Q1 is up over 30% on last year and the 5-year CAGR is now nearly 25%.

2010 was a rough year for most people and businesses. Job loses in the US continued to pile up and the economy’s growth was tepid at best. Going into 2010 I expected budget cuts and reduced workloads for us but luckily that hasn’t happened. Our revenue will be up over 50% (final numbers aren’t yet in) and 2010 saw some notable advances – we got some new clients (including the world’s largest technology company) and most clients increased the scope and volume of work they gave us.

More significantly I think things will brighten in 2011. In the latter part of 2010 we saw a good deal more innovation and new product development related work, suggesting companies are looking forward positively to emerging opportunities. Our contract workers also increased their billing rates, another good sign suggesting that companies are busier. These are small indications but judging from the chatter and client activity I see, things are much brighter now than 12 months ago.

Behind the scenes we’ve been developing some targeted newsletter sites and one of the things I’m excited about for 2011 is seeing them roll out. They are already in use by some clients and in coming weeks I look forward to introducing them more widely. More on that later.

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