Venture Finance – the kings of self promotion

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Venture are one of those companies that delight in taking the slightest opportunity for a bit of self promotion and the latest bit of PR to arrive across my desk is to tell me that their Birmingham office has moved address.

For most companies it would suffice to give the new address and the date of the move but I guess that Venture employ a PR man who needs to earn his corn so I received the following:-

“Venture has strengthened its presence in Birmingham by relocating to a new office in the city centre.

The new address is:
Venture Finance
Victoria House
116 Colmore Row
Birmingham
B3 3BD

The new office has a great location in the centre of Birmingham, just a few hundred yards from New Street rail station. This will enable our Midlands team to provide an even better and more tangible service to our introducers.

With a fourth Business Improvement District recently approved for Southside, these are exciting times to be located right at the heart of the city and we look forward to continuing our efforts in supporting local businesses meet the recovery with strength.”

According to Multimap, Venture have moved just two and a half miles from Edgbaston to the much more expensive Colmore Row and I am intrigued to know how this move will enable their team to offer a better and more tangible service to introducers.

The new address is certainly nearer to the bars and restaurants in the city centre and I wonder if this is anything to do with the “exciting times” referred to. After all, it is December

Independent Bank Reviews

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The word on the grapevine is that the banks are becoming increasingly nervous about many of their invoice discounting facilities in these recessionary times and their nerves are showing in the amount of Independent Bank Reviews that are being performed where an outside firm of accountants / insolvency practitioners are asked to perform reviews of the company in order to calm the nerves of the invoice discounting financier.

These reviews do not come cheap and naturally it is the client who is forced to bear the cost. It wouldn’t be so bad if the discounter acted upon the review but we have recently come across a case where the bank factor appointed a well known form of insolvency practitioners to conduct a review to support an application for an increased funding line. The review was very positive and supportive of the client but the bank decided not to increase the funding line in any event but still charged the £15,000 cost of the review to the poor client.

Bibby is not being taken over by Ultimate Finance

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Shares in Ultimate Finance were suspended this morning subsequent to an announcement that talks were well down the road leading to a reverse take-over of another factoring company.

Needless to say the wires have been hot with speculation today and so far it has been confirmed that 15 different factoring companies were the target according to 15 different people with Bibby being the only one so far that hasn’t been mentioned.

I will admit now that I honestly haven’t a clue who the target is and although I can rule out many of those being speculated about on the basis of size, culture or geography I can’t come up with a sure fire alternative.

Save money and use a factoring broker

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I like to think that the major advantages of using the services of a specialist factoring broker like myself is that many of the factoring companies don’t perform as well as they claim and I know the market sufficiently well to steer companies away from the poorer performers.

Whilst some companies might approach me with this view in mind I’m sure that many would rather approach the factors directly believing that it would save them money on the basis that if I receive an introductory commission from the factoring company they would get a cheaper rate by going direct as the factor wouldn’t then have to pay me.

I received an email last night from a prospective client asking me to quote an approximate rate for his business. I spoke to my contact at the factoring company that I thought to be most appropriate who quoted me a rate which I subsequently emailed to the prospect.

I received a telephone call this morning from him saying that he wished to go ahead at the quoted rates but he was quite surprised when I told him which factoring company it was as he had already approached them directly and they had quoted a significantly higher rate.

Another factoring broker who thinks it’s acceptable to steal intellectual property

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One of the problems that being top of the search engine rankings causes me is that there are always unscrupulous people out there who rather than develop their own websites just copy mine.

Since I started this blog I have commented twice on unscrupulous rogues that have copied my website and now another one has crawled out of the woodwork.

factoringandfinance.co.uk and ajmartinco.com are word for word copies of www.factoringsolutions.co.uk with only the chap’s name and phone number changed. I telephoned him to ask him why he had stolen my intellectual property and he denied it saying that it hadn’t been copied.

One would have to be pretty stupid to try and make a case out that his website is original, especially when the source code still includes a link to my stats package complete with site name.

I repeat what I have said before – would you trust someone who has such a cavalier approach to other people’s property?

I certainly wouldn’t.