The following is a summary of a few of the short term specific projects that have been carried out for both business and personal clients. Do you have a specific task that you think you need help with? Please get in touch….
Genealogy research – The man with three names
‘Tell Ma I am just going for a haircut’ – With these words our subject deserted his family….. for the second time!
From the transfer of the herring fishing fleet from East London to Great Yarmouth in the second half of the 19th Century to the Australian Forces in World War 1 (during which time he is recorded as being in France and Belgium, yet fathering children in Australia….. ). Finally ending up in a Gentleman’s Retirement Home in Hampshire, our subject left a colourful trail which was pieced together for a personal client. The search was complicated by our subject using 3 names that we uncovered.
The icing on the cake was finding and introducing the three families that we know existed: Although too late for all but one of his children, his grandchildren have been able to find out who their grandfather was, and clubbed together to replace his headstone to reflect his colourful life.
Business – Set up a database
That’s what was requested by an East Devon recruitment company wanting to produce information for their investors on the progress of its applicants, who were mainly services leavers from a large local military base.
As a principally online business, the applicants logged their details into the company’s website, and those who applied personally were logged onto the same system….
The database already existed…. It wasn’t a job that needed duplicating so I suggested that they spoke to their website providers. A quick call to them established that it was no problem to devise an application that would provide the statistics required from the website database, and in easily transferable formats.
The shortest assignment ever…. !
Business – Franchise or Branches?
The customer was a busy photography studio combined with a retail image processing/printing outlet in South East London.
They had stumbled upon a simple formula for Photoparties – Simply a group came into the studio for a fun lifestyle shoot with lots of props and scenarios, refreshments, and above all FUN! Sales were generated from prints, plus a range of value added products that could be ordered.
Saturation point had been reached with the original studio – already expanded – at full capacity, and there was scope to expand the operation.
Working with the Owners, the implications and costs of franchising versus opening further branches were explored, and eventually it was decided to keep the operation completely in house, and open two further branches locally. The potential problems and costs were felt to be preferable to the legal expenses and difficulties attracting franchisees with sufficient capital to establish and run the franchise properly.
The Case of the Missing Cheese
This was a case of research, spreadsheets, more spreadsheets, hunting through warehouse document boxes and reconciling against invoices. Long hours checking and rechecking that each cheese was accounted for.
A local cheese processor had entered into an agreement with a cheese importer to prepare and pack a large range of UK and continental cheese for supermarket customers, so – for example – 1 large Roquefort would come into the factory, and leave as 24 portions packed for the supermarket shelves.
Over the course of the first six months a considerable discrepancy – into 6 figures – had arisen on the stock of cheese, and as a dedicated task all cheese entering and leaving the factory had to be audited. A large number of spreadsheets – one for every variety of cheese – was set up to do this.
Firstly the receipt paperwork had to be sorted into some kind of order….. and this included tracing several miscellaneous boxes of paper which had been stashed throughout the factory. From the dates and batch number evidence it was usually possible to work out how many portions had been made of this cheese and reconcile that against invoices to the supermarkets.
Over the course of three weeks, Le Roulé increasingly stood out as the major source of the discrepancy. When this was discussed with the Production Teams it became clear that cutting Le Roulé was an almost impossible task, and indeed massive quantities had been skipped, but there had been no procedure in place to record it.
So the source of the loss was identified….. The next question was the legal ownership of the cheese… but that was another story altogether with which we were not involved.
Genealogy research – Where did my Grandfather go? Do I have any cousins?
Another interesting case covering the North West and North East of England in which our client was the subject’s grand daughter. She supplied us with her grandfather’s family information in Carlisle, which included his death in the 1980s which she had traced.
However, soon after her mother had been born in 1934 her grandfather had left the family home and nothing was known of him until our client had traced his death.
With a fairly common combination of names tracing his movements between 1934 and his death 50 years later was not going to be easy, but through birth and marriage records a list of ‘suspects’ was produced. They were eliminated one by one until just one was left, who had married in 1936 and lived in a house very near Newcastle Airport where he and his (bigamous!) wife had raised a family of three children.
Travel related to another project co-incidentally took me to that part of the work and I was able to spend a couple of days in the local record offices, and information gained there enabled me to supply the Client with a list of six living cousins who she was able to contact as her nearest blood relatives.
The question that remained unanswered was why he returned to Carlisle after the death of his second wife in 1979 having lived in Newcastle for 45 years.
A Family Business succession
Through a mutual contact a Father and Son business asked us to help smooth the path for the Father to retire from the family business and allow the Son to take complete control.
Part of the problem was that the Son had been a free spirit for a number of years, and had only joined the business five years before, and whilst he felt he still needed some assistance occasionally from his father, was keen to ensure that his father’s status with respect to the business was clearly laid out and understood.
Over the course of several meetings with both of them individually and together they were able to express their views in a constructive and guided atmosphere, and with input from their accountant a Retirement Agreement incorporating a favourable capital loan from Father to Son was agreed, and the terms of the Father’s consultancy role were clearly laid out.
After five years the work put in at this time has borne excellent fruit: The business has survived well under the Son’s management, with occasional but reducing input from the Father. Relations between the Son and Father remain strong – so often not the case in family business partnerships when major change occurs.
Complaint against a doctor
A 9am Monday morning appointment at a pain relief clinic became absolute agony for our client when the doctor she had arranged to see had clearly got out of bed on the wrong side that morning.
Our client, a 4 ft 8 in lady, was left terrified by this 6ft 2 18stone doctor’s threatening and boorish behaviour.
Having made no progress on her own, I was engaged to approach the Health Authority to make a complaint on her behalf, and a meeting with the Health Authority was arranged to review the case.
Research suggested that this doctor had done this before and my client, her husband and myself met with seven healthcare professionals including the doctor in question.
Whilst unable to make progress on this specific unchaperoned incident, the incident was recorded, and when a few months later an incident was witnessed, the doctor was immediately retired from public clinics.
I’d like to be…. Under the sea….
A website designer from coastal Scotland enlisted my assistance as the Joomla booking system he had designed for a local boat trip operator was giving unexpected results.
With a busy web design practice to maintain, he could not find the time to test the system to discover an error that could be replicated and thus debugged.
With a guest log in I set about testing and trialling a wide range of possibilities for party make ups, dates, changes of dates, changes of party, changes of trip…. all to no avail…. until…. I used the browser back button to return to a previous page, and the error that the Operator had been experiencing appeared.
I was able to replicate this on desktop and mobile devices, and after recording a short ScreenCastify video for the designer he was also able to replicate the bug and eradicate it from the site.
Where there’s a will… there’s a family… and where there’s not a will as well…
Families… families… families.
Especially second families.
Our client was the recent widower of a previously married lady who bought two children into the marriage in addition to the two children that the widower bought into the marriage.
As the wife’s children had grown up the relationship between her children and the widower had become strained, and also relations between the wife and her birth family had also been very fractious.
Relations between husband and wife had also been under some pressure before the wife’s untimely death in hospital, and allegations were made that the wife was about to institute divorce proceedings. However, no evidence of this was produced, and neither was there any evidence of a will, other than a scribbled scrap of paper with no signatures and no witnesses on it
Without legal basis, and without legal assistance, the wife’s children mounted a hostile campaign against the widower claiming the whole of the wife’s estate as theirs. However, our advice to the widower was that in the absence of a legally provable will he was the sole beneficiary and heir of the estate, and was obliged to do nothing.
The widower did however feel morally obliged to make a token payment from the estate to the children and we were directed to negotiate with the other parties to find a mutually acceptable figure.
However, the other parties maintained their claim to the whole estate, and resorted to a campaign of slander and threats of blackmail in support of their campaign rather than considering a settlement in which all parties would have been recognised. Again, acting under our advice, the widower sought formal legal advice and the advice received was consistent with our original advice. He therefore withdrew any offers or suggestions of settlement, and retained the whole estate.
Nail Bar costings – Where’s my money going??
I was contacted by the Owner of a Nail Bar in Westminster, London to run an appraisal of his income and expenditure to establish where expenditure could be more easily controlled.
Presented with Spreadsheet exports from the management system I began crunching numbers
It soon became evident that there were several members of staff on retainers who were performing very few therapies and treatments, and the Purchase Ledger revealed an extremely large amount of regular purchases via Amazon of small amounts of salon supplies which with some review of purchasing procedures substantial savings would be possible.
The amount of savings I was able to indicate to the Owner would in turn save him from the costs of his current policy of taking out loans every six months to pay his business rates.
The AI revolution has called here too….
The Artificial Intelligence revolution has called at Socio Business Services – or rather Socio Business Services has called them.
Voice recording assignments, some as long as 10 hours, have been undertaken for a number of AI companies developing databases of human voices.
Days on the road….
The summer and autumn of 2024 saw us branch out into a completely new field as Tour Guide and Tour Manager for groups of 37 and 34 respectively.
The first tour was around the UK and Ireland, and then we managed a small group onward excursion to Iceland.
The second tour was as sole Manager/Guide with a group of 32 and a non English speaking driver including Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, and back to Germany, Switzerland and Italy again. A large number of frontiers, languages and currency changes to negotiate!
Highlights included being interviewed by armed guards at the German frontier, and logging a route plan at the Hungarian frontier with a driver who spoke no English and a Hungarian admin who also spoke no English!