January 2010 Archives

The announcement the UK has now left recession after reporting 0.1 per cent growth brought some cheer to businesses hoping the longest period of gloom since the Great Depression is finally behind us.

The problem the government faced was the fact entering into a seventh consecutive quarters of negative growth would give the appearance we were headed down the road to depression.

The ONS figures also have an error range built-in, which are generally not published, but the figures range from between -0.2 per cent and +0.4 per cent.

Of course the 0.1 per cent growth figure will be adjusted to provide a more accurate account in the coming months, but for now we will have to settle for the less accurate range figure.

So, are we really out of recession just shy of 550 days of negative growth?

Always nice to see something we first reported in Business7 coming to fruition.

In October last year Colin McLean, operations director of Scotmid and Semichem, told me about the trial the company were doing of a standalone perfume business in this interview.

Having seen a good uplift in Semichem stores by introducing a more upmarket fragrance selection McLean, pictured, was sure the success could be repeated in a standalone brand.

Now it has been confirmed The Fragrance House concept is being rolled out.

The Insider business breakfast went extremely well with several members of Scotland's business community indulging in networking and debate at the Sheraton Hotel in Edinburgh.

We've done some live text coverage from the event here and sat down with a few guests for a podcast which you can listen to here.

But we also had the folks from the award winning Maverick Photo Agency providing us with video and picture coverage.

Photographer Michael Hughes took a selection of images over the morning and here are just a few.

It has to be said Roger Green from Spotless Commercial Cleaning was a great sport when getting his picture taken.

As can be seen below he got right into the spirit of things with marigolds, hoovers and cleaning fluids.

The shots were taken at Spotless' head office and warehouse in Edinburgh.

Once again thanks to Lesley Martin from the Daily Record for taking the pics.

ONE of the most frustrating aspects of working as a journalist is when people or organisations are unwilling to speak to you.

Certainly it is more common than you would expect to find extremely successful Scottish businesses which have no interest in talking about what they do.

And while some entrepreneurs naturally take to being in the limelight others prefer to operate without any glare from the media.

So when I received a phone call about some festive trading figures from retailer M&Co it came as some surprise.

Some positive news for businesses in Inverness and the surrounding area.

Highland Council has agreed to approve the construction of the ambitious Inverness Airport Business Park.

Infrastructure work for the first phase of this major development could get underway later this year with around 10 hectares being made available for office and other business use.

In the fullness of time the whole 250 hectares at the site will be developed with up to 350,000 square metres of business accommodation built including supporting facilities such as hotels, conferencing, shops, creches and other amenities.

This is just something we are going to try out in 2010 and see if people like it.

Not every photograph which gets taken for Business7 makes it into the printed product.

Also we don't really get to thank the photographers who put together the images for our centre spread profiles.

So if copyright and time allow we will try to post photo galleries from those shoots.

Therefore you can find below a few of the shots of Dougal Sharp, of beer company Innis and Gunn, which Lesley Martin (from the Daily Record) took for us but didn't quite make it into the paper.

Interesting one this as flight search engine Skyscanner has launched its first ever old-media advertising campaign.

Ok so strictly speaking a television ad campaign might not be completely old media.

Still from an internet company which has never done any traditional advertising it marks an interesting development.

It's much like the billboards for Google and its Chrome browser which have been appearing in UK city centre's for the past few weeks.

What with holidays, snow, podcasts and magazine deadlines for Insider I didn't quite manage to round up 2009.

Rather than go through the big stories and events I want to do it a bit more personally and look back at the large profile interviews I did during the year.

Each chunk below has a link to the interview if you want to read a bit more.

The first one I did in 2009 was appropriately enough, given the current weather, in a snow covered Falkirk industrial estate with Jamie Rae of Redeem. He was extremely honest and open which for an interviewer is great.

Then I was off up to the Raploch to speak with Campbell Christie about the regeneration in Stirling, football and politics.

A slightly shorter journey saw me going downstairs from my office to spend an hour with Margaret Laidlaw from Tenon to discuss accountancy, entrepreneurs and the recession.