A week has just passed when some Christchurch CBD business and property owners, angry and desperate from the lack of communication from Civil Defence and fearful of the fate of their businesses,  joined together in protest at the Art Gallery to try and get answers.

It was a gathering that lacked co-ordination and direction, gaining momentum as time went by and no one from Civil Defence fronted up to hear their concerns. Those vocal enough gave vent to the media, who were mingling in and out of the gathered protesters, showing more interest in their concerns than Civil Defence.

By this account, you might rightly conclude that I was there too.

Last week I arrived home from a short break in the North Island to discover our premises in the Old Weekly Press Building, unbeknown to us, had been demolished. Abbie, our designer, had posted footage on her Facebook page that had been shot by Civil Defence and shown at the memorial service in Hagley Park the previous Friday.

The extracted photos shown were taken of our office after the quake, before and after demolition.

Weeks ago I had rung and registered on the Recover Canterbury website as businesses had been advised to do. I had been receiving email undates from the Canterbury Business Recovery Group and Colliers, our Property Management Company. But that had dried up after the 7th March (Recovery Group) and 12 March (Colliers). It was evident, from comment supplied to the Press by Colliers Managing Director, Warren Glassey, that they were aware of the demolition, and despite their responsibility to advise tenants when a building is being demolished, had said to the Press that he didn’t have a problem with the situation.

As I said during an interview with Jim Mora on Radio New Zealand, I don’t dispute the need to demolish our office, distressing as it is, but what really wound me up was that no one had thought it necessary to tell tenants about it. Tenants with leases and property in the building. In not carrying out their legal duties, they hold up tenants’ ability to move forward with insurance claims, which in our case have hung in limbo since Boxing Day. If I hadn’t seen the video I would still be none the wiser.

Whilst attending the protest I decided to join a short queue of other business owners outside two tents beside the Art Gallery. I had no idea what I was queueing for and neither did the business owner in front of me. The only evidence of anything related to business owners was a scribbled sign saying ‘business owners’ with an arrow pointing down, attached to the outside.  When my turn came, I was asked where my business is located and to fill in a form with the same details I had already supplied on the Recover Canterbury site. Pointless, I thought, but this time I received a call about 30 minutes later from a CCC rep inside the Art Gallery building, who said they were waiting to receive an engineering report from our landlord and I should contact him.

So I did, and to my surprise he replied very quickly. The engineering report had been supplied to the council. It was his engineer’s view that the buildings are too dangerous and will need to be demolished. However this report had to be ‘peer reviewed’ by the insurance company’s engineers and the City Council. So whilst video shows our section of office has been demolished in the Old Weekly Press Building, the bulk of our contents remain in limbo in the neighbouring Whitcoulls Building.

Unlike many businesses, I hope that this is a small step out of insurance ‘no mans land’, but we could well be moving from one hopeless process to another.

What we are seeing now is businesses being slowly choked to death because Civil Defence or insurance companies are simply not communicating as they should with business owners or moving fast enough. The problem is quickly becoming one of lack of cashflow. Many SMEs don’t have large chunks of money sitting around in case an earthquake cripples their business. There are those, like businesses in our neighbouring building in the Shades, whose buildings are OK, yet they are unable to enter to recover equipment and records that would enable them to continue. Their tenancy agreement or insurance often doesn’t cover this situation. Unless they have a sympathetic landlord, they are still liable to pay their rents, and they still must pay their employees and creditors.  For those businesses outside the CBD cordon, not much business is being done as the inner city resembles a ghost town. The latest government package looks like it won’t cover them for loss of trade so we are looking at a case of RIP CBD SMEs!

The Minister of Civil Defence says we must ‘exercise patience’. Some small businesses have been experiencing a slow death since the first earthquake in September 2010. For how much longer are we expected to ‘exercise patient’? We are not children to be scolded (nor celebrities commanding red zone guided tours), but mature business people who have responsibility for the livelihoods of our families and our employees.

Posted on March 29th, 2011 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
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I don’t think that anyone can come up with a word that fully encompasses the extent of the trauma that Christchurch people have been experiencing on and since 22nd February. Initially it was ‘surreal’ but now, over one week on, the magnitude of the event is starting to hit home, as people face loss of lives, homes and businesses.

Our small and close knit team at Hot PJ are all well and lucky to be alive. We can’t help but dwell on the ‘what ifs’. What if we had been in our new office in the Whitcoulls building? What if the buildings hadn’t been empty due to the Boxing Day quake? What if we had been in town that day?

As you all will know, the CBD, because of its high number of historic brick buildings and high rise offices, has been hit hard. But there are also businesses spread throughout the city that have suffered badly, not to mention the thousands of homes.

On that fateful day, I was working from home, having just completed a WordPress training session with a client, my cat snoozing on my desk in the filing tray. Like everyone else in Christchurch who has become used to aftershocks, when another comes along you don’t move until you are sure it will be worth the effort. When this one continued for more than the initial second or two, and I could hear the sound of falling and smashing items, I grabbed the cat and headed underneath my heavy desk.

At the same time Abbie was enjoying her Tuesday off, at the start of a busy week preparing for her stall at the weekend’s Lyttelton Festival market. She was browsing through racks of children’s clothes in a large store when the quake struck, and was pinned between the racks. We are so thankful she was not injured. However her house in Linwood sustained a lot of internal damage, including her work computers, and her street had some new ‘installations’ in the form of partially submerged cars.

Across town, in Halswell, my home came through with much less damage than the first quake; a small and bad smelling beach reappeared in our drive, and all our foundation and paving cracks got that much wider. Because we have brick tiles on our roof, every aftershock sounded like rocks in a tumble drier.

We all spent several frightening hours trying to locate family and friends. Whilst we were receiving calls from overseas and in other parts of NZ, it was proving difficult to get in touch with others in Christchurch. All our immediate families were scattered around Canterbury, from Kaiapoi to Le Bons Bay, and it wasn’t until Wednesday that we had them all back again.

The rest has been well covered in the media, and continuing to dwell on it, at this stage, does nothing for the recovery of our mental health.

What remains unknown is the fate of our city office/s. We were in the last stages of moving equipment from the Old Weekly Press Building to the Whitcoulls Building when both were ‘red stickered’ after the Boxing Day Quake. We have now about three quarters of our equipment spread between both offices (including my extensive orange glassware collection, which survived the September quake and was carefully packed away for the move). But is it only equipment, it can be replaced if necessary, not like lives.

Our hearts go out to our clients who have lost valued and loved members of their teams or customers and clients.  No business would have a ‘plan’ for dealing with such an event as that. Words can not express the horror and pain they must be feeling.

Whilst we all wait an uncertain future, we will continue to support our business clients as best we can. We have new phone numbers and addresses. Also our PO Box is located within the CBD cordon so our mail will be trapped there for some time. Please see our website for our latest contact details.

Kia Kaha Ōtautahi!

Posted on March 2nd, 2011 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
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Looking for new marketing ideas to get 2011 off to a successful start?

HubSpot have produced a free booklet featuring 11 short case studies on how individuals, businesses and organisations, all operating in different industry sectors, have successfully used various online marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and sales.

The eBook features case studies on how:

• Chicago Museum used a competition to increase their exposure through social media by getting a web-savvy person to live in the museum for 30 days and report on their experience using social media.
• an online e-commerce site selling luggage used existing resources (results from a survey) to create new content for their blog that attracts visitors to download the report, and get picked up by Readers Digest.
• a US agricultural company supplying pumping equipment, used keyword research to identify the phrases potential customers were using in search engines to find their products, enabling them to attract more qualified visitors to their site – those that were interested and ready to buy.
• one company in a highly specialised field, used blogging specifically to increase their presence in search engines.
• a logistics company targeting the truck driving industry discovered that their assumption that truck drivers were not technical or web savvy was untrue, and was able to use this information to better communicate with them.
• a medical billing solutions company used their IT dept to star in an hilarious parody video of the Lady Gaga video ‘Pokerface’, to increase their visibility within the health information technology industry.

As you read through each short casestudy, you realise the link that binds them together is creative thinking.

At the end of the e-Book there is an 11 tip ‘action list’ drawn from each short case study, to make it easy for others to apply the lessons learnt.

>> Download “11 Examples of Online Marketing Success” eBook here.

Posted on January 17th, 2011 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
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When the team at Hot PJ downed tools for the 2010 Christmas holiday period we had pretty much forgotten what an aftershock felt like.

But Mother Nature had other ideas. Not content with 4000+ previous attempts to shake our foundations to the core, she struck again on Boxing Day, centring her violence on the inner city.

As a result, our inner city offices, new and old, located in the Old Weekly Press Building (built in 1881) and the neigbouring Whitcoulls Building (c1906), both listed protected buildings, have sustained significant damage and both buildings remain closed.

The long term future of these buildings remains up in the air, and it looks like tenants won’t be any the wiser until at least the end of January.

We had relocated vital equipment to our home offices prior to closing for Christmas, so for Hot PJ it remains business as usual but from different locations.

If you were planning or needing to visit us, please phone first (03) 374 9929 and we’ll arrange a new rendezvous.

• www.stuff.co.nz: City Mall shops face uncertainty
• Whitcoulls Building 2005 Grant fo Seismic Upgrading
• List of Protected Buildings

Posted on January 13th, 2011 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: Environmental | No Comments »

There is no doubt that it has been a tumultuous year for many up and down the country. For the Hot PJ team, the year ends with change and some exciting news.

Abbie Pickrill, who started her career as a graphic designer with Hot PJ in 1999, leaving us for 7 years to experience life on the other side of the world, returned to NZ and Hot PJ in 2009. She and husband Nathan are now looking forward to the birth of their first child in late June 2011. Congratulations Abbie and Nathan – you have six months to pack in as much sleep as you can!

Andrew Biddle, who has been more than a part-time member of the Hot PJ team for many years, running our accounts system and providing IT support (in between caring for two lively preteens), left us in September to take up full time employment again. However, because he has the disadvantage of being married to the boss, he’s also ‘married’ to the business so still keeps a firm hand on the accounts after hours.

An ideal time to move

We’ve been rattling around (more so since September!) in a large space overlooking City Mall for some time, enjoyed the views and suffering through many talentless buskers. Its now the ideal time to move, especially since our building is about to undergo post earthquake repairs. For the foreseeable future we’ll be relocating to our respective home offices in Linwood and Halswell, with a new city office/meeting space in the Whitcoulls Building, just next door to our previous space.

New contact details

Our contact phone number, emails and PO Box address will remain the same, with additional direct numbers for Abbie: 0226 208 668 and Wendy: (03) 322 1080.

As we’ll mostly be working from our home offices, if you need to meet, just call and we’ll arrange to visit you at your office until our new office meeting space is set up in the new year.

In addition to this, we’ve been working on some exciting new services which we’ll also be revealing in the new year.

Posted on December 23rd, 2010 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
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I’ve been scouring the internet, looking for new information on what financial help is being offered to small businesses in Canterbury who have been worst effected post quake.

If you’ve been game enough to venture into the worst effected business areas, you’ll have noticed that scaffolding and road works are still very much in evidence over three months after the event.

It is heartening to see that many businesses were able to relocate or get back to business very quickly, but there is still an immense cost to bear in doing so. There are others whose businesses have paid the ultimate price; Cross Brothers Butchery, a cornerstone Sydenham business since as long as I can remember, recently closed, a victim of a sharp downturn in trade post earthquake. Even having business interruption insurance wasn’t enough to save them and their employees.

This leads me to ask: Is the government doing enough for Canterbury businesses?

Like many things online, I’ve wasted a lot of time looking for answers. Phoning a government agency and the local Chamber of Commerce didn’t turn up anything new either. Perhaps this is because the earthquake is now considered ‘old news’.

To start with, it looked like things were heading in the right direction with the Work & Income ‘Earthquake Support Subsidy. But that’s now come and gone.

In its place is the “Unemployment Benefit – Canterbury Earthquake” or UBCE. This does not support businesses directly, but does provide support to employers personally if they can not work in their business as a result of the quake. Like the unemployment benefit, it is means tested, so there are still ‘hoops’ a business owner has to go through to be considered eligible. But it does not support the business.

Grants from the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal, administered by the Red Cross, are not available to businesses who have been displaced as a result of the earthquake.

There are free training workshops and business mentors – but these don’t pay the rent, outgoings or wages when a business is faced with a sudden significant downturn, on top of a cashflow sapping recession.

What has been funded?

• Earthquake Subsidy Scheme (ESS) to help businesses pay wages (funded by Work and Income up to $12.5 million);
• Recovery workshops to train business people in methods to help them recover from the effects of the earthquake (funded by NZTE up to $100,000);
• Business Mentors to work on a face-to-face basis with individual business owners (registration fee funded by NZTE);
• A report on the economic impact on key industries and sectors and potential growth scenarios (funded by NZTE up to $30,000);
• New measures:
  • Over half a million dollars for business support, including:
    • Two full-time and one part-time business recovery coordinators for Christchurch and Kaiapoi;
    • $100,000 shared funding for promotional and marketing campaigns for Christchurch and Kaiapoi;
    • Further support for business mentors.

There still remains no direct financial support for businesses who are still struggling to pay their outgoings post quake and to keep their staff employed.

Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee claims “This interim support will allow business to ride out the worst and be ready for the upside.”

As an inner city small business owner, I disagree. 3news Jeff Hampton’s  description of inner city businesses “suffering a long slow death” could be closer to the truth.

Small businesses are the life blood of the New Zealand economy, and yet not even an earthquake is enough to motivate Government to do more for small business than provide a bandaid over a gapping wound.

Posted on December 20th, 2010 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: General | 1 Comment »

Trade Me and The Christchurch Press have got together to help Christchurch businesses which can’t trade as normal because of the earthquake, to go online to sell their goods through Trade Me.

“A team from Trade Me will fly to Christchurch, set up shop at The Press in Cathedral Square, and from 9am to 4pm on Tuesday, December 7, will help local business people set up a Trade Me account, list their stock online, and provide some free Trade Me credit as well to start selling goods around the country.”

To book a slot email: quakerelief@trademe.co.nz

Posted on November 29th, 2010 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
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I’ve just started reading Brian Clark’s booklet written in May this year, “How to Create Compelling Content that Ranks Well in Search Engines“, which has some great advice for anyone who manages the content of a website.

He nails it on the head from the outset with his statement:

“Put simply: if your content isn’t good enough to attract good, natural links, it doesn’t matter how “optimized” that content is.”

What he is referring to is attracting quality links to a site in order to help your search rankings. This can be hard to achieve, and you won’t help anyone if your site is full of advertising hype.

One sure strategy is to write good quality content that people want to read, and will in turn naturally attract links without you having to ask for them. So ditch all the overused meaningless adjectives about being ‘the best’, ‘cutting edge’, ‘truly unique’, and having ‘the best price’, ‘free quotes’, ‘top quality’ … and engage with people in the same way you like to be engaged.

Check out the 100 overused marketing words and phrases and the annual list of banished words put out by Lake Superior University, with one notable omission, my 11 year old daughter’s favourite: “that is so random!”

You can download your copy of the report from the Scribe website.

Posted on November 15th, 2010 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: Marketing, Websites | 1 Comment »

If you have ever considered using the services of Business Mentors NZ but are not sure if you an stretch to the $100 registration fee, then the recent big Earthquake may be a small blessing in disguise.

Business Mentors NZ is waiving the $100 registration fee for Canterbury SMEs as part of a government initiative to help us get back on our feet after the events on and after 4th September.

A fresh set of eyes on your business is a great way for small business owners to gain a new perspective. And don’t forget the adage ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’.

To find out more, visit the Business Mentors NZ website and give them a call on 0800 209 209 to get your payment code and register on line. They’ll assign you a mentor with experience that matches your needs, and then the mentor will contact you within ten working days to get things underway.

Posted on November 9th, 2010 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: General | 1 Comment »

We all consume it, now the NZ Advertising Standards Authority has issued stronger codes for advertising it.

These codes reflect Government initiatives to reduce the consumption of unhealthy foods.

Recently I saw a bag of marshmallows advertised as ‘fat free’. Of course marshmallows are mostly made of sugar, water and gelatin – there is no fat in them anyway!

Advertising them as ‘fat-free’ seemed like stretching the truth. A bit like marketing a pack of butter as ‘sugar free’.

It seems the Advertising Standards Authority agree.

Principle 2 of a ASA Code: Advertisements should not by implication, omission, ambiguity or exaggerated claim mislead or deceive or be likely to mislead or deceive consumers.

• Advertisements should not mislead the nutritive value of any food.
• Ads for foods high in sugar should not claim to be “low fat” or “fat free” which could mislead the consumer into believing the food is low in energy or beneficial to health.
• The same code, but in reverse, applies for foods high in fat.

If you are planning on running a competition to promote your food product you need to be careful you are not encouraging excessive repeat purchasing of foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar.

This code may well knock on the head some of the promotions popular with confectionery brands. It certainly helped recently to increase my consumption of Bounty Bars in the hope of winning free ones!

“All food advertisements should be prepared with a due sense of social responsibility..”

• Advertisements for nutritious foods important for a healthy diet are encouraged to help increase the consumption of such foods. However, no advertisement should encourage over-consumption of any food.
• The quantity of the food depicted in the advertisement should not exceed serving sizes that would be appropriate for consumption by a person or persons of the age depicted.

There are also strict codes for food ads directed at children, check them out here on the ASA website.

Posted on November 2nd, 2010 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: General, Marketing | No Comments »