The World Wide Web – it’s not just about your customers

1. The World Wide Web – it’s not just about your customers Philip Knight, Credit & Risk Director and chief internet critic at Asset Advantage discusses the importance of your World Wide Web presence. At Asset Advantage we spend a lot of time analysing non-financial information. For us a pure data driven assessment of financial statements isn’t either prudent or commercially sensible. A good proportion of that assessment includes time spent on the internet reviewing industry sectors and potential customer websites. I’m no slave to the webpage, as our own webmaster will delight in telling you, but even the most ardent of luddites now needs to wake up to importance of their electronic real estate. Whilst our agenda as a potential lender is clearly different to that of potential customer our objectives are not as dissimilar as you might think. We, like customers, want to know what you do. For customers it’s about confirming that it’s worth engaging further with you, for us as financiers it’s about assessing the strength of your business model. We both like background about the business. Both of us like the comfort that experience and a long track record bring. Thirdly we both like dealing with people –OK, yes we’re one of those crazy lenders that think business is as much about the quality of the management as it is about the financial data. But it’s not just about customers and lenders. Your website is a shop front to all sorts of parties. Invoice discounters looking to provide finance based on your invoices to your customers. Potential investors in your business will gain a first impression from your site and suppliers will use your website as a reference point when looking to put in place trade credit lines. Employees, both current and potential ones, especially the ones with less grey hair than me, may judge the business by the quality of the website. A millennial’s first source of information about anything is the internet and your business is no exception. Potential investors or even acquirers of your business can be influenced by the first impression gained from the quality of your landing page. Let’s now look at some specific areas of your website that I think you should pay the closest attention to. The most obvious of considerations is: do you actually have a website? I never cease to be surprised at the number of businesses that we deal with who don’t even have a web presence. There really isn’t any excuse for even the smallest of businesses to at least have a single page site. Moving onto the actual website let me get a particular favourite of mine out of the way –the ‘sorry this site is under construction’ page; preferably with a little yellow construction sign. What does this say to me as potential lender or customer? Simply that the business is not a very well organised or managed business. It’s the electronic equivalent of opening a shop and not having any stock to sell. It either implies poor planning, a lack of interest in promoting the business or simply a basic lack of control. Any of these might have serious implications for the way in which the rest of the business is managed. Of course the truth might simply be you haven’t bothered to finish the website because you busy doing your real job of managing the company. But rest assured, that’s not what it looks like to the rest of the world.

2. Now let us consider the actual content of the site. My main bugbear is a lack of clarity about what the business actually does. Of course your customers may well have a clear and deep knowledge of what it is that you do, but as I mentioned earlier, businesses need to consider that many important business relationships that exist outside of their closed industry sector. A simple and clear statement, without too much jargon or three letter acronyms, about what you do and who you do it for is all that is required. Unfortunately it is something that is so often overlooked. The next essential is to personalise the site. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to tell the world and his wife the CEO’s favourite holiday destination. A brief CV demonstrates shows that there are real people behind the business – and people like doing business with people – and, hopefully, the CVs demonstrate the depth and strength of the skill base of the people working for it. As a lender we know that businesses do not run themselves so the experience and track record of the management are a critical input into our decision making process. Oh and those photos of the staff? You absolutely must spend some money on a professional photographer to take the pictures. Content is king. Please note we are all bored to death by generic statements (and generic photos) waffling on about the quality of your customer service and how you only exist to serve us. What we want to know is specifically why you are so great and how that greatness actually manifests itself in your business. Describe your shop/factory/office; tell us how much you have invested in IT; mention the skills your staff have. My final thought is to emphasise the importance of keeping your site up to date. If you have a news section you absolutely must ensure that you regularly post items in it. The only interpretation of a news section in which the last news item is a year old is that nothing is happening in your business. Product data and services advertised on the website need to be current. Keeping the site up to date and relevant to the business needs to be the specific responsibility of an identified individual within the business and like all aspects of your business you need to be constantly reviewing the quality and efficiency of the site. So in summary not only is a web presence important, its unique accessibility to all sorts of visitors requires you to think way beyond your customer relationships and forces you to consider the wider way in which you interface with the world. And that’s no bad thing is it?