Services

Running a business is hard enough without having to go searching for the best vendors and suppliers. BSH is your ‘one-stop shop’ for all the supplies you use at the moment but are getting elsewhere. The more hassle-free we can make your business helps both of us.

The Business Support Hub gives you exclusive access to all the preferred suppliers, top-notch freelancers, and teams of specialists we use within our own businesses and those of valuable clients.

They’ve all been tried and tested and are constantly under review. If we find a better, faster, or cheaper supplier to provide the services we need, we add them to the list. We then give the existing vendor they’re scheduled to replace an opportunity to match them in performance, quality or price.

Whether you need a new website or tweaks and adjustments to your existing site, a developer that understands your business and your terminology will always be better, quicker and easier to deal with than one you have to brief from scratch.

Finding a designer for your next new brochure can be a nightmare. For example, if the designer doesn’t know that designs for print must usually be produced in multiples of 4 pages (with ‘bleed’) or doesn’t use copywriters that understand the critical marketing differences between ‘features’ and ‘benefits’ (and how they apply differently to B2B and B2C customers), he or she will cost you a fortune in opportunity cost alone.

We all take a chance when hiring new suppliers; the hot new copywriter at the local car dealership is not necessarily the best fit to market a beauty salon, a fitness centre or a distance learning provider, for instance. It’s a lottery, for which we often pay dearly.

However, we understand your business requirements because we either have relevant knowledge and experience within our management and leadership team, or we are already servicing a similar business through BSH.

You already have people in place to service those requirements. But do you have the time, inclination or expertise to consistently get the best products and services at the best price? We’re not all born negotiators, and the British hate to haggle…

We’ve got your back; we’re on the same page. You need high quality services, just as we do. You need timely delivery, and we know you demand value for money. Because we do, too.

Everyone wants value for money, but many of us often fall foul of the “you get what you pay for” bargain basement approach, and it costs us dearly. “Buy cheap, pay twice!” as the saying goes. Been there, done it, got the T-shirt…

BSH is The Solution We All Need! Here are just some of the services we can help with…

usiness Support Hub is blessed with a dedicated and experienced team of experts and entrepreneurs who have a combined 120 years of hard-won expertise across multiple commercial sectors.

Education and training, health and social care, sports and fitness, human resources, senior management, business turnaround, management accounting, consultancy, recruitment, marine and aviation sectors, manufacturing… and more. We’ve been around the block a few times and have started and run our own businesses as well as working for large corporate enterprises.

In a nutshell, there are not many aspects associated with leading, managing and controlling staff, operations and diverse business environments in which we don’t have at least some hands-on expertise.

We don’t say this to brag or “big ourselves up”; it’s to illustrate that we know what we’re doing and don’t have many gaps in our operational and commercial knowledge. In short, we’ve seen most things before, and have fixed, analysed and made good many of the business situations you’re likely to meet.

We’re offering our knowledge and experience (core to BSH) to help you resolve any commercial issues you may be stuck with, ranging across all of the areas highlighted above, and many more besides. We also have a good working knowledge of employment law and health and safety, so can give sound, practical advice on any of them.

If you’re struggling to get issues resolved or would like to explore your options prior to engaging lawyers or other “specialists” (a.k.a. very serious ‘fee earners’), give us a call. If we can’t help, we know someone who can.

If you’ve ever tried to find a suitably qualified External Quality Assurer (EQA), Internal Quality Assurer (IQA), or Assessor, you know how difficult it can be to find reliable, professional people in your field. Particularly when most are freelancers.

BSH gives you 12 months’ FREE access to our specialist Quality Assurance Hub (QAHub), which provides:

• • Professional QA Practitioner Register, publicly accessible and searchable online
  • Verification of Registered Members’ qualifications and currency
  • Ability to browse the Register and message relevant Members with your requirements
  • Portal to post QA tasks for interested Professionals to bid for your work
  • Helps you attract more specialists in your field
  • Helps QA Professionals find you and understand what you need

In today’s marketplace, even Review sites give out inconsistent and fake information. The QAHub gives you peace of mind and confidence in the knowledge that your QA Professional is properly qualified and in current practice.

You also get:

• • Right to display the QAHub logo on stationery, website, and promotional materials, reassuring your clients and customers that you only employ qualified professionals
  • Access to QA Professionals with whom you can build a trusted and reliable relationship, secure in the knowledge that they will operate within your guidelines
  • Access to the Register and Job Boards when you need a permanent QA Hire

The QAHub also provides the QA Professionals the facility to appear on the Register and bid for your tasks. Their qualifications and experience are validated by us before they can offer their services.

Although most companies these days put all their promotional resources online or send out Portable Document Format (PDF) brochures (case studies, sales sheets, special offers, annual reports and so on) by email, they still need to be designed.

It’s also a well-known fact that in a crowded marketplace, anything that enables you to stand out from your competition can give you the “edge”.

While traditional direct mail has allegedly been somewhat in decline for the last 10 to 20 years, there are signs that these ‘very 20th-century’ methods of getting your information in front of potential customers and clients are making a resurgence.

More and more companies are having their promotional literature printed again. Many of us still do this for specific events, like tradeshows and public displays, but you only need to watch any of the commercial television channels to know that “interruption marketing” is already everywhere.

How many times have you watched a TV ad featuring cute animals or people doing things that make no sense, only to work out in the last 10 seconds that they have nothing to do with the product being advertised. Their antics only exist (at huge cost, incidentally) to get you to pay attention so that the advertiser can get a brand, product (usually unrelated) or concept into your overworked, advertising resistant brain.

Unless you’re Procter & Gamble, Ford or Cillit Bang (wherever did they get that name from?) you probably can’t afford (and almost certainly don’t want) to spend this level of revenue on advertising.

Despite postage costs being off the chart compared to 10 years ago, print costs, while still not exactly cheap, are relatively palatable. Just getting your PDFs rendered and printed into a physical document to hand out or post to customers and clients can instantly separate you from your competition.

But if that promotional document is professionally designed, and printed on good board and paper stock, it can also subtly imply “quality”. As very few vendors, suppliers and other commercial organisations send out printed materials these days, such a document can achieve a similar objective as interruption marketing. It’s a rarity, so you pay attention to it.

Do you know a reliable and approachable printer? Do you have access to creative designers who understand your commercial imperatives (high quality at sensible prices)?

Business Support Hub does. We’ve been very busy in the last few years trialling designers and printers to create high value results for our own clients. We’ve built up a reliable team that can meet the most exacting demands and produce even complex printed materials.

If you’d like to discuss design and production of high-quality printed materials, get in touch. We are much more competitive than individual printers and have access to a dedicated team of fantastic designers. We draw on our experience and buying power to get the best results and most competitive prices for you.

Contact us today, with absolutely no obligation. An informal discussion costs nothing.

Can you remember how great it was when you first got your website “out there” in front of your customers, suppliers and clients?

Getting it to that point was probably quite stressful and worrisome; a bit like performing or reciting poetry naked in public, taking your child to school for the first time, or turning up for that new job. It can be a crippler…

But you’re proud as Punch and send all your friends and family to visit your new piece of Internet ‘real estate’, send out flyers to customers and suppliers, and blog about it at every opportunity.

A few months downstream, however, you’re starting to see the irritating little bits that don’t work, or that spelling mistake missed by a proof-reader you don’t have the tech skills to fix. Or you want to set up a new “special offer” but can’t integrate it with your payment provider.

Does this sound depressingly familiar? Websites are fantastic. They get your products and services in front of the right eyeballs and help your business develop credibility and presence.

Until you need to change something…

Business Support Hub has a team of web developers and SEO experts available to tweak, adjust, or even design new elements for you on all the major e-commerce platforms, including WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Magento, most browser technologies and shopping cart integrations. We can provide server space and hosting, domain names, and bespoke coding for special projects.

As with all the other BSH products and services, we can provide these at highly competitive prices, for single projects, complex integrations, multiple developments, or even fully managed services.

Get in touch today if any of these appeal to you. We know from costly experience how difficult it is to get good support in the UK at sensible prices. We’ve worked long and hard to recruit, train and manage competent professionals to deliver the services for ourselves, and are now in a position to offer and provide them to you.

Don’t suffer in silence. Don’t risk damaging your business by ignoring little niggles and what appear to be temporary problems. The cost of recovering or rebuilding a website can be massive. Eyewatering and business destroying.

Contact us to discuss and head off such a catastrophe, with no obligation.

This section of the Business Support Hub is a secure repository for downloadable education and training materials to support qualification courses, and additional resources to help training providers and educational centres deliver good quality instruction to their clients, learners and customers.

Many of the resources are linked to particular qualifications, but some are useful training aids, supplementary information packs, and best practice advice booklets. They help you deliver a better and higher quality service to your patrons.

While the list is not exhaustive, the repository is being added to on a daily basis, so check back frequently if you are waiting for a particular piece of information or support.

You can also contact us directly if there is an urgent need, and we’ll do our utmost to schedule that resource with our copywriters and developers to get it produced as quickly as possible.

We’ll give you an approximate time and date for completion and availability once you pass us the details.

Do you despair at how difficult it is to make a simple tweak to your CRM software, order processing modules, document controls, accounting package or time and attendance system?

It’s frustratingly time-consuming to find an independent developer or consultant that doesn’t cost the earth, is currently available, and with whom you can have a sensible conversation to get the problem fixed quickly.

And what if you need to have a bespoke system built? This is even more difficult, and freelance developers always want to charge you telephone-number-sums just to provide an initial specification.

Business Support Hub was specifically developed to put such resources, along with other common business practice items, “under one roof”. Essentially, it’s a “one-stop shop” that provides access to many technical services from its dedicated team of business experts and developers.

The next time you need technical support of this nature, or any other type of business support you can’t get elsewhere (or at all!), please contact us. We’re determined to make it easy for other businesses that have experienced these frustrations to get real-time help quickly and affordably.

Even if you only want to discuss a particular project or integration on a speculative basis, contact us. We’ll give you a no-nonsense quote – with no obligation – and help solve your problem. If we can’t, we’ll say so and put you in touch with someone who can!

“Good Marketing Eliminates the Need to Sell!” – MaryEllen Tribby, Best-Selling Business Author, Copywriter, Marketer, Entrepreneur 

Strong, relevant copy = profitable marketing. “Simples!” as Aleksandr the Meerkat would say. Actually, it’s never been any other way.

Whether you sell personal or professional services, diamonds, jet aircraft or hand-made shoes, you need good marketing copy. Get it right and it’s an investment. Get it wrong and it’s a massive cost. It doesn’t matter if you have the best product or service in the world, at the best possible price. If people don’t know about it, understand the benefits of using or owning it, or how to get their hands on it, you won’t sell any of it.

FBH can fix it.  If this is what you need, you’re in the right place. We have an excellent copywriter on staff – he’s produced all our marketing materials, brochures, flyers, email sequences, and even our correspondence templates. He can be made available to you for projects at very competitive prices.

Career development has never been as difficult as it is today, and job search can be traumatic.

However, there are some simple but very effective things you can do to make the process quicker and easier.

The first is to get your CV into good order. Even with the various online application processes (some of which replace the CV entirely), the creation of a good CV makes the completion of such processes very much simpler.

We often hear it’s not the best candidate that’s invited to interview, it’s the candidate with the best CV.

CV writing is both art and science, and it needs to be done very well if you are to stand out from the other 200 or 300 contenders in the CV pile. It’s all very well thinking that there are dozens of free templates about, easily downloaded from the Internet, or even borrowed or stolen from friends and colleagues.

However, these all encourage the candidate to follow a particular format or formula, which means most CVs look and feel the same, and are filled with the same boring task-centric, job description-type information.

How does a screener or employer decide which to invite to interview? This decision (one the candidate is not ‘in the room’ for, so can’t influence) is far too crucial to leave to chance. Instead, you need to make sure your CV is sufficiently different and sufficiently interesting to grab the reader’s attention strongly enough to ignore the rest.

Not an easy task, but with the right knowledge and tools it’s not too difficult to narrow the employer’s focus and get your CV into the hands of a decision-maker.

We have the good fortune to have one of the UK’s foremost CV writers on staff with us. He’s written literally thousands of CVs for candidates in every sector and at every level, from the shop floor and workshop to the boardroom and management suite. He also writes interview winning CVs for veterans and those leaving the UK Armed Forces. His CVs get interviews. Every time.

If you’d like us to review your CV for you, and advise you on a career development plan, you’re in the right place.

Email a copy of your CV to stephen@businessqualifications.com and he’ll come back to you directly.

You can also use the resources within this section of the Business Support Hub to improve your knowledge of job searching and career development. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need further help.

Businesses can’t operate without insurance. Some are legal requirements, such as Public and/or Product Indemnity and Employer Liability, while others are advisable, such as Property Insurance and Directors’ Liability.

Insurance can be a minefield, and advisers of sometimes questionable capability. It can also be eye wateringly expensive. We can help. It’s another area of our businesses that can easily become difficult and stressful and needs expert impartial advice from knowledgeable specialists if we’re to take just what’s needed rather than multiple policies that would be ‘nice to have’.

Every company is different, and every business owner has different priorities. We can help…

Like insurance, legal services and properly constructed contracts are a ‘necessary evil’ to most of us. But if we’re to be properly protected and want to sleep at night, good legal advice is itself an insurance policy. HR issues are often enough on their own to keep us awake.

Something we can help with? Let us know…

If obtaining quality services on time, to specification, and within your budget is something that interests you, simply contact us. Get in touch.

There is no subscription charge or application fee to register with Business Support Hub (BSH). You just pay for what you use.

We look forward to welcoming you soon. You could start saving money, and getting those annoying ‘little’ admin type jobs you’ve been meaning to complete for ages DONE, as early as tomorrow…