Newspaper Club

There’s a lovely post here about someone who’s used Newspaper Club to produce a ‘prop’ paper – a fictional newspaper for an interesting looking film. It’s a good looking paper too. We do quite a lot of these – papers for film and theatrical productions – it’s not the world’s biggest market opportunity but it’s always good to find another niche.

But what’s especially pleasing is to read positive things about our service because, well, that’s almost entirely Anne and I’m sure we don’t say enough nice things about her.

So let’s fix that now.

It’s Anne that keeps us going. Tom lashes the code back together periodically, Ben and I occasionally do talks for people and organisations, Gareth strategically strategises at a very high level, but it’s Anne that makes the whole business actually work. We’re an atoms business, we ship physical stuff to real people and inevitably there are questions and occasionally problems with the supply and shipping of those things. In our early days Ben and I would respond to those emails but it soon became clear that grumpy sarcasm wasn’t an effective customer service model – Anne has replaced it with energetic, helpful niceness.

That’s probably why we now get emails that say things like:

“just a quick email to say a huge THANK YOU. We are really happy with the finished product, and the service you have provided us with has been fantastic. Thanks also for your prompt responses to all of the emails I sent you.”

and

“May I congratulate you and your team on a most professional service. You “do exactly as it says on the tin”!!!—not to be taken for granted indeed. I am very happy with the product.”

That’s good isn’t it? We don’t say thank you to Anne enough. So – Anne – Thank You.

We’re half way through a two day Newspaper Club Away Day session.

We have all come together to discuss how we improve Newspaper Club. Things that have arisen from the Beta, working out what features we should add and just generally discussing what we do next. It’s nice to pause and take stock.

When I say ‘we’ there are five of us now as we’re pleased to introduce two additions to the Newspaper Club team. Anne Ward and Gareth Williams. Anne might be familiar from I Like, she’ll be handling Customer Relations. Gareth has a background in finance and running a large successful business and he’ll be handling Business Development.

Often as a business grows the founders find out very quickly where their skills lie and where the gaps are. A mistake people often make is thinking they can do everything themselves. That’s a trap we’re determined not to fall into. Anne and Gary have already made a significant difference to our small team and we’re excited about working with them on the stuff we’ve been talking about today.