Keith Shirley

Congratulations to Martin Delaney and Ann Egan on receiving their certificates for courses they did with the Laois County Enterprise Board. There were, of course, a lot more people at the event but those were two of the people who took part in the Internet Marketing course I presented. I would have had a picture with me in it but I’m afraid it was out of focus. You’ll have to wait a little longer to see how I’ve changed since my profile picture was taken.

Martin is a business and executive coach at Empowerment Coaching and Ann runs the Roll n Bowl Entertainment centre in Portlaoise. It was great to be able to catch up with both of them.

I know I’m biased because I run them but I currently recommend Internet Marketing courses to any business owner that is serious about their website. Even if you are only in the planning stages it can help you avoid the mistakes that end up meaning your website is not reaching full potential. It’s hard work getting a good website in place and it needs to provide a return on investment.

Internet Marketing / Search Engine Optimisation is one of those areas that can seem really daunting at first. If you start doing your own research on the Internet you are likely to find hundreds of sites with info – many of them confusing. There are a number of things that you can do as a business owner to make sure your site is not getting lost in the crowd. People spend a fortune on developing their website but then don’t test it or promote it. When I see websites that lock out the serach engines through bad design I tell people it’s like have a beautiful shop full of products and leaving the door locked.

If your local Enterprise Board or Skillnet program does not currently run a marketing course – then tell them you are interested. They need your feedback. If you can’t wait for a course and can afford professional assistance then there are numerous companies specialising in this area. One Carlow company, T2, is currently pushing their search engine optimisation services and have been offering coupons to the members of the Carlow Chamber of Commerce for an initial consulation. Tell them I sent you and you might be lucky and get the first one for free.

In short the course will help you to critically review your business processes and analyse the impact potential disasters would have on them. It will help them to figure out which parts of their business are the most critical and to document in advance what needs to be done if the disaster materialises. At the end of the day the intention is to make sure that a little advance planning will help ensure that the business survives.

A breakdown of the content is below. For more information contact me directly  or the Carlow Kilkenny Training Network. The course will take place at the new Carlow Chamber of Commerce Gateway Centre on the Athy Road, Carlow.

Course Breakdown

Lesson 1 – What is Disaster Recovery
This introductory lesson covers the differences between disaster recovery planning and business continuity planning.

Lesson 2 – Reviewing your current status
This lesson starts with a review of your current state of preparedness. It then reviews the reasons for such planning and the consequences of not being properly prepared.

- Worksheet – Business Impact Analysis
- What is a Business Impact Analysis?
- How Prepared are some Organizations?
- Top 5 Consequences of Disasters
- The Extended Impact of Disaster

Lesson 3 – Planning and Preparation
This lesson covers the steps and methods needed to do an analysis of the business processes and the risks those processes face. The risks are divided into categories to aid in the analysis and determination of the final impact a failure can have on the business. The lesson reviews the pressures faced when setting priorities and demonstrates a system for quantifying risk vs. impact.

- What steps do you need to take to ensure you are prepared?
- Methods for Completing a Business Impact Analysis
- Categories of Risk
- Additional pressures when setting priorities

Lesson 4 – Business Systems and Technology
This lesson reviews some of the tools needed for a disaster. It also covers some tips to help reduce the impact of a disaster event.

 Do you have the tools you need in case of a problem?
- Inexpensive options to reduce the impact of disaster

Lesson 5 – Incident Response Planning
This lesson reviews the first steps to take in the event of a disaster and discusses how to prepare a timeline of actions suitable for your organization.

 What to do what the crisis strikes
- Timeline preparation

Lesson 6 – The Next Steps
This closing lesson reviews how a contingency plan might actually look and discusses the long term activities that are needed to make the plan is a success.

- Sample Contingency Plan Format
- Publishing the Disaster Recovery Plans
- Testing the disaster recovery solution and ongoing assessment of the plan

For those of you that were wondering where I had disappeared to the last 8 days – I was taking part in an NLP training course in Carlow. I’d like to be able to say that taking part in a training is less work than providing one but this course certainly made me work and think a lot. The trainer – Soonduk Park Mooney  – really made sure we had lots to keep us busy and provided a very entertaining and instructive course. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the whole time.

Those of you that know me personally might be surprised that I’m taking part in a course that would “traditionally” have been seen as a  psychotherapy issue. While my initial background is in technology and management – I am always interested in learning something new. On the other hand I’m very very sceptical when it comes to anything where there is the slighest possibility of having to believe before things will work. I’m glad to say however that this was not the case here. Each step of the way we did some solid foundation work and then worked through some practical issues. I was given every opportunity to play the sceptic but had all my issues dealt with. 

I was initially encouraged to do the course by my wife (AHA!! – I hear you say) but it was not until I met the trainer personally a few months ago that I decided to do it. A week is eternity in my job and I have very high (possibly unfair) expectations from a course that expects me to be gone for so long. As the trainer is from Korea there was naturally an additional worry that communication would be an issue  – not a good thing when the course has a lot of issues with linguistics. I needn’t have worried – while there is an accent – the trainer had no issues and in fact her choice of vocabularly impressed me. 

The course is giving me a lot of insight into how I and other people think. Time will tell how useful it is for my work but I have no doubt that there are numerous issues I will be revisiting again and again.

There are some clips available on You Tube which were done by one of the participants.

Part 1:

Part 2: