Home Business Profile: Abelard Management Services

Your name:
William Buist

Location:
Chepstow, Monmouthshire

Company name:
Abelard Management Services Limited

What does your company do?
Social Media Consultancy – speicalising in building collaborative teams

When did you start it?
2004

What were you doing before you started your home business?
A career in insurance and director of a consultancy company.

What made to make the switch?
The opportunity to continue to develop and learn for myself in the challenging environment of building a business that makes a significant difference to many individuals/ teams or running their own businesses themselves and seeking to build a trusted team of supporters.

I believe that the world is moving to one which needs, inside or outside large organisations, people to develop colaborative relationships with others for mutual benefit. That’s something which requires a mind shift from command and control to influential leadership supported by technology and helping develop those skills is our passion

What made you think of this idea?
I’ve always been in the vanguard of early adopters of technology and recongise and integrate it into our natural ways of working. That enables trends to be seen early and it was through seeing the possibility that social networking and social media had as it caught hold of the general imagination that we could see the opportunity.

How many people work in the business?
3

What’s its annual income?
£250,000

How do you market the business?
Through Social Media and by word of mouth

What is your customer base?
Social networking and networking organsiations, insurance brokers, trade associations and small businesses in a number of sectors.

What’s next? What plans do you have for the coming year?
We’ll be introducing new training and learning resources to help a wider group of clients and we wil be pushing our partnerships and collaborative ventures to more coutries and territories to enable us ot leverage the global market.

What is you most useful item?
Without doubt the combination of Apple products which keep laptop, iphone and website synchronised for all of the teams I work with and enable the wider teams involved in the projects and work the business supports to be mutually supportive all the time

Best home worker tip?
Niche your products and services so that you become THE expert in your chosen markets and not just an expert in them. If you are not considered to be the expert by your network consider making your niche more specific and be explicit about how you help them.