Business news and advise

The Chevvy Volt has been voted Fleet World’s car of the year 2012 in the UK. Known as the Vauxhall Ampera in the UK, the car has only just been launched there.

Back in the US the Chevvy Volt won the North American Car of the Year 2011 award and World Green Car of the Year 2011 award.

The thing that sets the Chevvy Volt apart from the other electric vehicles on the market is that there is no range limit attached to it. The 111kW electric motor is powered by a 16 kWh lithium ion battery pack. In pure battery mode the Chevvy Volt can travel emissions free for distances between 25 and 50 miles.

Once the battery charge is depleted, the on-board gasoline powered generator kicks in. Unlike a hybrid, the gasoline engine does not power the car per se, instead it produces electricity to power the electric motor.

Worldwide, business fleets have become more eco-friendly with hybrids and EVs becoming popular choices for companies. Not only does this have tax benefits for the company, but it’s also seen as a staff morale booster. Staff enjoy the fact that they work for a company that shows its concern for the environment through this kind of decision.

In the States, the Ford Fusion hybrid has been awarded Automotive Fleet’s Fleet Car of the Year title for 2012. This is a second time win for the vehicle.

The Fusion hybrid can travel at speeds of up to 47 mph in EV mode and has a range of over 700 miles on one tank of gas. It has a fuel economy of 41 mpg in the city and 36 mpg on the highway. The PowerSplit technology system uses two motors and CVT to optimise fuel efficiency in all operating modes. The new car offers 20 per cent more battery power than the previous generation.

It’s often said that the real business at conferences is done outside the conference hall – and perhaps at the bar.

There’s a lot of truth in this – but it’s generally over-stated. Of course, a lot depends on the nature of the conference itself; how large and significant it is – and what the conference competition within the industry looks like.

But the bottom line is that conferences have to be fairly serious affairs with good content, good speakers and news which is significant to the industry segment. Otherwise they simply fail to get the kind of attendance figures which are needed to make them have true resonance.

Within your business segment, there will most probably be one or two really standout conferences that are seminal within your industry. These are the ones to really concentrate on; it’s all about quality over quantity – less is more, as they say.

So concentrate on these conferences only – and do all you can to get your organization involved in some official way or on the roster of speakers presenting papers etc.

If you can’t get directly involved, consider a complementary event. This may involve some additional local venue hire or maybe just a restaurant deal for chosen delegates etc. Either way, this will be a real boon to your organisation and help present you as a serious player.

Take a lot of time to plan your conference attendance carefully. Just like any other marketing tool, you need to take time to think what messages you need to get to which people – and in what way you’ll achieve that. At a conference, this may be in the main auditorium plenary – or it may be in the bar – or in some kind of break-out session. But do take time to plan it carefully.

People running their own business tend to be busy people. They need to be, because the buck stops with them, and if they’re not making the business work to its absolute capacity, no one else will be.

Also, those people who work for themselves are usually in their prime of life according to earning ability and if anything were to happen – if you got sick or were to die – it’s likely that life would be difficult financially for your family.

Yet, given these high risks, surprisingly few self-employed people take out life insurance cover. If you don’t have any dependants or you have a great amount of savings in a pension or other investments, then life insurance isn’t such a big issue. But if you don’t have these kinds of assets and you have a mortgage that still has years to run, then you should consider getting some life insurance sorted out.

There are so many different policies available that talking to a financial adviser is probably time well spent to make sure that you choose the right policy. You can get your own quote by going directly to an insurance website like www.suncorp.com.au or by going to a comparison website.

A term life insurance policy is cheaper than a whole life insurance policy. Term policies run for a specific period and insurers will pay out a lump sum if you die during that period. If you outlive the policy, you receive nothing – which is why some people struggle with the idea of choosing this kind of policy.

Suncorp offers critical illness cover as an additional option in its life insurance deals. Critical illness cover provides you with a lump sum pay out should you suffer a heart attack, stroke or a disease like cancer. There are other conditions covered by critical illness cover, but you should check which conditions are covered before you sign up to a particular insurance policy.

As you can see from these two examples, there are a range of possibilities when it comes to life insurance and ill health protection. It’s worth clearing an afternoon in your schedule to get your financial future sorted out.

There is a new front-runner in the race to provide the perfect solution for business conferences, annual general meetings and product launches.

Aside from staging events on home turf, city-centre bars and restaurants have dominated the field for decades.

But the cinema has now muscled in on that market share and more and more companies are turning to the old picture house for their next important event.

Why is this happening? Well, there are a few things to consider.

A good corporate event planner will predict potential problems and aim to solve them before the big day arrives.

One of the key issues is parking. Is there enough space for your guests’ cars? Can they park next to the venue? The cinema’s answer to both of these questions is a resounding ‘Yes!’.

City-centre venues rarely offer anything beyond roadside parking and the only alternative is to leave your car in a council car park or privately-owned multi-storey facility. These could be some distance from the facility and can be very costly for your guests if your event lasts longer than an hour.

Another big issue is whether or not the equipment you have is up to the job. The mentality of ‘it’ll be all right on the night’ has cost companies clients, as often technology can fail, leaving your keynote speaker red-faced and your company’s hard-earned reputation tarnished.

The cinema allays all of these fears as it is equipped with top of the range audio and visual equipment that is not only reliable, but also capable of making a good sales pitch great.

Something else that event planners need to consider is the seating arrangements. Are there enough seats for your guests? Will everybody be able to see?
Once again, the cinema trumps its rivals, as every auditorium contains row after row of comfortable banked seats that all face the front.

There is even enough room in front of the screen at most cinemas for you to erect a small stage or lectern.

So not only does the cinema tick many boxes that many other venues do not, it is also flexible enough to meet the demands of most corporate event planners.

The corporate entertainment world is evolving at a rapid rate, but the cinema looks set to further enhance its already stellar reputation within the business sector, and it is easy to see why.

More and more businesses are turning their back on the usual facilities that fail to answer questions posed, and it’s time you joined the revolution.

If you run a company car or a fleet of them, of course you have a few fundamental decisions to make like whether to lease or buy and when the optimum time to trade up is. If you lease, there’s nothing wrong with that and you should read no further. But if you’ve decided to buy, then read on…

Personally, my small business needs the sum total of four cars and I prefer to buy. The accountant’s advice was that this was not the best way forward, but it’s worked out just fine and I’m able to make tax efficiencies in other areas.

The reason for this decision is that I don’t trade up. Instead, I run the cars as long as they’ll go and I keep them looking pretty good – and I’ve found that this saves the business a small fortune.

All cars are Hondas and all are regularly serviced. Now Hondas have been found by the independent What Car? And Warranty Direct annual survey to be the UK’s most reliable cars for an unprecedented six years in a row – so I feel my decision has been vindicated to a large extent – and it’s borne out in practice as we’ve never had a single breakdown save for one person running out of petrol; hardly the cars fault!

When it comes to spares, we always go for Honda Spare Parts but to be honest, this is an incredibly rare event.

Also, we haven’t found the few Honda Spares we’ve had to get to be too far above the lookalike stuff and given the company’s reputation for reliability – and our own proven track record with Honda – this seems to be the wisest choice.

Running a car carefully for a small business for well over a decade makes bottom line business sense to me – regardless of what the accountants say about leasing.

In my life, I need what I call a three-in-one automobile.

I need a car to transport my family, I need a vehicle to transport tools and equipment for my business, and I also need a car to meet with clients when I put on my business suit.

The trouble is – I really only want to own one vehicle for reasons of cost, sheer hassle and because of environmental concerns.

What I’ve found is that the only way I can really tick all these three boxes at one time is via the right sort of estate car.

An estate enables me to pack up my tools, paints and other stuff for my property maintenance business but as long as I keep it clean in the trunk and pick an estate with no lip at the edge of the trunk) then I can load and unload everything I need without needing a pick-up truck or continually fixing a trailer on and off.

Perhaps more to the point, the car doesn’t look like a work vehicle when I don’t want it to. And this is quite often as I have to meet clients in more of a professional capacity for a lot of the time – and I really need to look the part.

And finally as a home-owner and family man, I need to take the family everywhere they want to go with all their sport equipment, friends, and, of course, on vacations for which an estate really is ideal.

I’ve looked into the low emission cars available, but overall, the estate which is conventionally gas-powered fits the bill better for now. I’m sure this will change in the future, but for the time being, I’m real happy with my three in one car!

You may wish t consider the same option if you have a similar needs.

We all know the temptation of buying a new car. You can choose the colour and all the extra features you want, and you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re the first person to drive it. It comes with the promise of trouble-free motoring and you’ll have the chance to impress your mates if you buy when the new registration plates come out.

Plenty of new car offers also help reel you in – including things like a period of free servicing and roadside assistance, payments to cover insurance premiums for a number of years, or straightforward cash back offers. They all make it sound good value.

However tempting the idea of buying a new car may be, you have to think hard about it and decide whether you really want to pay so much for a vehicle that will mainly be used for getting you from A to B.

Buying new cars are one of the main reasons for getting tied up in debt. Our desperation and desire to keep up with our peers and neighbours makes us blind to the real cost. It’s not helped by the low monthly payment figures that the car salesman tells you about and keeps you focused on.  It doesn’t sound much when you think about the monthly figure against your monthly salary.

£200 a month sounds fine, but you’re not thinking rationally when you sign on the dotted line and you forget that the £200 a month will go on for years before you get close to ever buying the car. It’s the business model, of course, and most people never buy their new car outright, they end up trading up and increasing the monthly payment on a better model a few years later.

You have to weigh up whether you’d rather the new car than be able to afford other luxuries in life – like meals out and holidays.  It depends on where you get your enjoyment from.

But many people who want a new car actually decide it’s not worth the expense in the end, and buy a perfectly decent second-hand car that they’ll keep for years instead. Even hybrids and electric vehicles are now coming onto the second hand market, so you can still make an eco-friendly transport choice even if you’re not buying new.

If you love cars and driving, then your choice of automobile and everything that goes with it will be such a matter of individual, personal taste, that it’s really difficult for anyone else to advise you properly.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in getting round in safety and comfort as cost effectively as possible and don’t have any interest in motoring beyond a desire not to be too embarrassed or embarrassing while you go about it, then there are some easy ways to decide what to do.

I count myself in this group of people who have lost all interest in cars beyond these basic needs.

My hopes, these days are that my car will arrive at where I want to be without me having to do too much – and certainly not by spending too much. And if you look around the web, you’ll read loads of stuff about cars with incredible mpg figures, or eco cars that are ‘must-buys’. But really what you need to do is to buy a really good used car at a really cheap price.

Such a decision blows all other motoring cost considerations out of the water in terms of cash. In other words, most motorists in the developed world are really paying for their own vanity-driven weaknesses in their motoring choices – whilst pretending (maybe even to themselves…) that it’s something else.

The point is often well illustrated when you go on holiday to far distant lands and can’t tell one car from another, no matter what the age or prestige of the vehicles. The fact is that these days, cars tend to last a lot longer. And if you buy a car with a proven tack record for reliability like a Honda, as detailed in the post above, and get it at a cheap second-hand price – you are very likely to enjoy years of trouble-free and cost-effective motoring. So for your pocket’s sake, drop the vanity!

If you’re looking for a change of vehicle, the natural thing to do is to start poring over the statistical data to gauge performance figures, mileage per gallon, level of eco-friendliness and whatever other stats you’re particularly interested in.

But in my (practically based…) experience, this is a fundamental mistake. By far the wiser thing to do is to look at the history of each major motor manufacturer and to analyse their various track records – and to use this as your starting point

OK, you may quite logically think that “history is bunk” when it comes to performance on the current crop of cars available. And rapidly changing technology in the types of eco cars punters are chasing in ever-greater quantities for example may, to some extent, change the fundamental mechanics on which you’re making your decisions. But without history, what else have we to go on?

Of course, this is particularly true when it comes to new car offers. At least with used cars, you can read the individual road test reports etc. But there’s such a surfeit of those out there that it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Each model has its quirks and foibles which may or may not bother you. It’s all down to personal tastes and needs.

Thankfully, though it’s far and away easier to make the basic decision of which manufacturer to go for – based on objective analysis of all of the major car maker’s history and performance data. And on that basis alone, the wisest choice simply has to be a Honda.

That’s because Honda has been found to be the UK’s most reliable car manufacturer for an unprecedented six years in a row by the What Car? and Warranty Direct annual survey. And you can’t ask for much more than that. The ability to get from A to B successfully has to be the single main decision starting point for me.

The all-new honda civic 2012 is now available to order for the New Year if you fancy treating yourself. And by all accounts, it could well be worth it.

The first of the new range (the ninth incarnation of the vehicle to which Honda owes its reputation in the car world more than any other since it first arrived back in 1972) will be available for delivery early in 2012.

The Civic 2012 will be going up mainly against the UK’s second best-selling car, the Ford Focus (its little sibling the Fiesta is the best seller), the Toyota Auris and the BMW 1 Series.

Style-wise, there’s little competition for me. Thankfully new Civic didn’t move too far away from its predecessor, which has to be the most attractive car in its class.

Put this together with Honda’s excellent and proven reputation for overall reliability and engine excellence, and the new Civic looks like being a good choice. Also, many parts, including the engines and gearboxes, are essentially the same as the tried and tested predecessors, so if reliability is the main criterion for selection, there’ll be little to rival the new car in its class.

Perhaps the best refinement on the new model is the suspension. The eighth generation Civic was criticised for the hardness of its ride but the ninth generation Civic’s fluid-filled rear suspension bushes make it a far more comfortable ride, while the new electric power steering system is smooth and accurate.

Initially, the new Civic is available with two petrol engines (1.8i or 2.2i) and a 2.2i diesel.