Matthew Kimberley

I’m just getting to the last few chapters of The Eddie Stobart Story by Hunter Davies.

Eddie Stobart is a family firm of truckers in the UK who are now one of the country’s leading haulage firms.

The brothers suffered with dyslexia and speech impediments, with no formal business training, and yet they’ve gone on to become the single most recognised and respected brand in UK logistics.

Ed Stobart Jr, founder of the company, seems to put his success down to two main elements: never saying no to a job, and keeping his staff in uniforms and his trucks spotlessly clean.

The Sunday Times recently ran a “Profit Track 100” supplement, listing the companies with the fastest profit growth in the country. With the exception of two of these companies, they’re all companies in markedly non-sexy industries: construction, timber, oilfield services, engineering … probably all keeping their engines clean and their clients happy.

The moral of this story? Wash behind your ears and do what you’re doing just a little bit better.

Most of us are unlikely to found the next killer tech start-up, but if we can deliver on time in a shiny vehicle, we’re already doing a bit better than a lot of the rest.

Who makes the coffee in your office?

You probably make your own, I’m guessing. If you’ve got visitors to the office, you’ll either do it for them or have a receptionist who takes care of it.

I just got thinking about this because Vinny, one of our new hires at Target Recruitment, got spammed by Adecco twice on Friday.

Two text messages in one day, both inviting him to apply for a job as an “office junior” (no further clues) at two different companies, tasks including “photocopying, answering the phone and making coffee for your colleagues.”

I’m hoping that this is the result of an under-imaginative consultant at Adecco drafting a sloppy job spec. Even the hardest-pressed receptionist or stressed secretary is surely relieved the task of making coffee for their colleagues? Or at least on a non-reciprocal basis? And to have it as a formal part of your job description?

But what’s more worrying is the indiscriminate spam. Vinny’s asked to not receive any more job alerts. Twice.

And “making coffee” doesn’t figure in his CV.

Seth Godin has written an eye-opening piece about Firefox users on his excellent blog.

… 25% of the visitors we track at Squidoo use Firefox, which is not surprising. But 50% of the people who actually build pages on the site are Firefox users. Twice as many.

Firefox is an alternative web-browser to Internet Explorer. It was the first browser to introduce tabbed browsing. You can add bits to it to make it more useful. For e-sourcing, I’ve found there are various add-ons that make life much easier.

I use three dead simple ones that help me out no end: Google Notebook for recording leads or people I want to speak to, the LinkedIn companion which lets me look people up on the fly, (I also use Who Is This Person?) and the Twitterbar extension for updating my tweets from right inside the browser.