Ross Williams Founder and CEO of Global Personals LImited and Online Dating Expert

There’s a few people I can think of for this

Apologies for the lack of updates recently – have had my head down since returning from holiday. Service will resume as normal in a few weeks and I’ll be sharing more then.

Sooooo – I’m told it’s a bit chilly in Blighty at the moment, a few snowdrops have fallen and the whole country has had to dig out the Horlicks to keep themselves warm.

Or in fact – the UK is having it’s coldest winter for almost 30 years and most of Berkshire is under a foot of snow. Which is quite problematic for WhiteLabelDating.com as most of our staff live within a ten mile radius of Windsor and it’s not the easiest place to get to when you live at the bottom of an icy hill in the countryside.

The phone lines to the office went down this morning and we had to send most people to work from home due to the atrocious commuting conditions.

It’d be great if we could offer more home working for staff – I think a lot of staff think that the reason more companies don’t offer home working is because they don’t trust their staff. That’s really isn’t the case (or at least it isn’t with our business and nor would it be for most successful, strong cultures businesses).

The real problem are things like:

• Workplace health and safety
• Communication systems
• Security of system
• Customer communication

For example, before the introduction of the public smoking ban in the UK, many bars stopped customers from smoking at the bar itself because of the risk to the health of the bar staff, their employees, from passive smoking.

This is because an employer has a responsibility to provide a safe work environment from the staff.

How many people working at home have the appropriate desk, chair and lighting necessary? It amazes me how strict the laws are regarding what particular lighting is legal and what isn’t.

What about computer equipment? If they use their own, should they expense that to the company? If they use a company laptop, is it on a secure internet connection such as a virtual private network? Or do they simply log in to their webmail from a non-secure environment which could be intercepted?

How do you manage calls from customers? What about internal calls from other members of staff? What if you want to have a face to face meeting?

What about training staff who are inexperienced at home working to teach them time management skills and the best way to work from home so they can enjoy work without impinging on their home life?

These are just some of the questions we need to answer – and they’re by no means exhaustive. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not perhaps the most knowledge on the subjective of Health and Safety and HR correctness – that’s why I work with a great team of people who sort out all that stuff!!

But while there are no doubt individual answers to all these questions, to offer home working correctly requires a formal business process that will enable the employee to work as seamlessly from home as he or she would from the office. It requires investment in IT systems and process as well as support from HR for training and management.

So I’m very pleased that work is already under way at WhiteLabelDating.com on new platforms that will allow us to offer effective remote working – whether people are at home, on the move or even thousands of miles away on a beach (ahem).

We’ve got a new moderation system in the pipeline for our Customer Support team (due to go live next month) which has been written completely from scratch to enable us to moderate profiles, photos, videos and messages from anywhere in the world. It’s designed so we can offer localised support for our international sites in the future, but also has the benefit of easier home working for our customer support team which will be critical as we grow to provide true 24/7 customer service.

Support managers can assign moderation tasks to their team (such as to moderate X profiles, Y photos etc) and an audit trail provides an activity feed so managers can see everything their team are doing from anywhere in the world. Our development team have done some fantastic work on the user-interface of the new moderation system to help our staff visualise activity – I’m really looking forward to being able to share this with you when it goes live.

We’ve also upgraded our telecoms system as we move to our new offices in February 2010 to a hybrid Voice Over IP (VoIP) system whereby any incoming or internal calls can be routed through our network to anywhere in the world. This is ideal if we need to redirect out of hours customer service calls to USA in the evenings – but it also allows us to redirect calls to a dedicated handset at home.

Customer care is becoming central to our operations in 2010 – we’re recruiting heavily both internally and externally to build the best customer care team in the industry for both consumers and partners alike.

So if we get hit by an equally freezing winter this time next year, we’ll be much better prepared to support those home workers

So I managed a good 4 days on holiday, here at Sandals in Antigua before whipping out the Macbook Air and finding a free wifi connection. That’s a record for me being without a web connection (apart from the time I spent husky sledging in the Arctic – until they breed huskies with wifi connections getting online up there is challenging…)

I’ve caught up on emails, kept myself up to date on blogs and sent some ideas back to the team at WhiteLabelDating.com about a few projects we’re launching in the next two months.

A few people have said that I should close the laptop and relax – but if you love what you do, then work really doesn’t feel like work. I can be up in the morning as the sun rises, do a couple of hours on emails, checking our revenue stats, new member signups, etc and then be down for breakfast at 9am, ready to start the day.

I’m reading Gary Vaynerchuk‘s latest book Crush It! on my Amazon Kindle (thanks Santa!) at the moment, it’s a great read – and if you don’t get up excited about your work, then read it. Gary takes you through his journey where he turned his passion into his work – and how anyone can do it.

I’m lucky enough to be already working in an area I’m passionate about – the web is an incredible business medium and online dating gives us the opportunity to try new and exciting ideas in an industry which is fortunate enough to make good money.

One of the things that attract our partners to running dating sites with us is that they can give up the 9 to 5 and work how they want, where they want – well, anywhere with an internet connection anyway!!

Dozens of our partners have given up their 9 to 5 jobs and now make their living from running dating sites on the WLD platform. If you’re not doing so already, you can create a site for free and have a play around at http://www.whitelabeldating.com – or check out the case studies page to see how other people have done it.

I’ve talked often about seasonality with regards to online dating – there’s a clear peak demand for online dating from 27th December onwards.

Throughout most of the year, online dating needs to be actively “sold” as a concept, then a particular brand needs to be sold to the consumer. However, if people have a higher disposition to search for a partner then it’s much easier to sell a particular brand to them.

A good indicator of propensity to buy is to look at what people are searching for and when. For example, using Google Insights you can search for when people are looking for “dating” sites:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#content=1&cat=299&geo=GB&q=dating&date=1%2F2007+25m&cmpt=q

This clearly shows a peak in January 2008 and January 2009 compared to the rest of the year.

In January 2008 you can see an increase in searches of around 50% compared to early December and a similar pattern is repeated in January 2009.

It’s unusual for us to advise partners to focus their marketing spend on the short-term (generally we recommend a slow but steady increase in marketing spend through the course of the year) but with consumers far more motivated to pay for a dating service as part of a New Years resolution it makes sense to increase your marketing spend in January by 50%-100% above your normal spend.

We’ll be putting our money where our mouth is – increasing spend for our own-brand sites such as:

http://www.singles365.com/
http://www.datingagency.com/
http://www.justsingles.com/

Looking forward to a fantastic January 2010!!

It’s good to see our partners increasing their marketing budgets for the end of December and all of January – this is the peak season for online dating and a time when people have the highest propensity to pay for the service (so catch them while they’re hot!!)

I can’t be the only one who noticed a load of relationship change notifications pinging up on my Facebook newsfeed – people breaking up, getting engaged – and there’s a good reason for this.

The holiday season brings people together like no other time of year – relationships that are currently under strain inevitably show cracks during this period of high pressure, high intensity family situations. In addition, those people who are single have a great opportunity to meet others during the party season.

And you can be sure that, on New Years Eve, those people who don’t have someone to kiss at midnight will be getting online on New Years Day to start doing the dating thing. I know – I did in 2006 and it worked for me!!

We’ve introduced some new features at WhiteLabelDating.com (such as email verification) to improve the service we offer our members and we’ve got two major projects launching in February 2010 which will radically improve the quality of our offering even more.

I’m now back from my first trip to LeWeb, held again this year in Paris.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect of the event, but it was a genuinely useful trip for me personally. There were presentations by some of the web’s elite, such as Jack Dorsey, Gary Vee , Timothy Ferriss and rather randomly Queen Rania of Jordan who has actively engaged with the community via social media to further the cause of child education around the world.

Le Web was also a great opportunity for networking – I got to meet up with a couple of other online dating professionals for some very productive discussions as well as meeting some new friends in the web community.

However, the greatest learning I had from LeWeb was thanks to Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com who presented on the “Science of Happiness” which focussed on the importance of culture for a business.

In the case of Zappos.com, their culture is their business – team first, customer service second and the rest follows. By hiring the right people and giving them the culture to flourish, the customer receives the best service. Which means high consumer satisfaction, low churn and high propensity to generate word of mouth marketing – exactly the kind of thing the dating industry needs.

Tony declared that Zappos aren’t online retailers, they’re not logistics experts – they’re in the business of generating Happiness. And that’s exactly the same as online dating – we’ve helped thousands of people find love and happiness in their lives, we’ve also had fun and earned good money doing it.

However, there’s no getting around the fact that Online Dating is perceived to be relatively uncool amongst the web community – yes it makes good revenues and profits, but it doesn’t have the exciting momentum of services like Twitter, Facebook or businesses like Moo.com.

This is a problem for us as it makes it more difficult than it should be to attract the best talent to our business. When people visit our offices for interview they feel the fantastic energy in the business, learn about the exciting projects we’re undertaking and generally want to be a part of the team – but getting them to interview isn’t as easy as it should be.

There’s no getting around it – from the outside, I recognise that the online dating industry isn’t the most attractive industry for web professionals.

We’re going to fix that.

We’ve been working on a project for the last twelve months which will come to fruition in 2010 and which I believe will radically transform the perception of online dating for both consumers and the web industry alike.

My trip to LeWeb has only validated my belief in what we’re doing – it’s not going to be easy to change an industry but I passionately believe we can do it.

We’ll become a Great Business by combining Passion, Purpose and Profit in 2010 – and I’m really looking forward to it.

You can see Tony’s presentation from LeWeb online at http://www.slideshare.net/zappos/delivering-happiness-le-web-121009

There’s a great article on Sitepoint for anyone who runs a web design agency – or, for that matter, pretty much any kind of service-based agency:

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/watch-your-margins-and-stay-trim

I used to run a web agency and quite a few of WhiteLabelDating.com‘s partners also come from a web agency background, but (for some of the reasons I listed in my post The Death of the Web Agency in 2010) it is incredibly difficult to make good money, keep clients happy and create fantastic work that you can be truly proud of.

Sandy’s post at http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/watch-your-margins-and-stay-trim is definitely worth a read.

For the last six months, the WLD development ninjas have been working hard on some exciting new features – for a variety of reasons, they’ve now all come at once and we’ll be rolling out these improvements this week (this is all with the caveat that sometimes, for many reasons, we have to delay a rollout or extend testing for sensible reasons, but rest assured we wanna get this live asap!!):

1. New Faster Servers - we’ve started upgrading our Adobe Coldfusion web servers to 64-bit to enable a much faster end-user experience. This is happening over the rest of the week and should mean our servers are up to twice as fast as before.

2. New Email Servers – about six months ago we started looking for a dedicated email provider to improve deliverability and tracking of our emails. We’ve gone through an extremely thorough selection process (one which I’ll discuss at a later date – one email provider in particular simply lied through their teeth and did anything to try to get the sale). The result of these new email servers will be significantly enhanced deliverability of emails by working with trusted third-parties. This is perhaps the single biggest are of revenue improvement for our partners – we’ll be monitoring this closely as we expect to see significant double-digit increase in new revenue with this solution.

3. Paypal Payments – we’ll be testing payments by Paypal this week on Singles365.com and rolling this out to our partners within a week or two.

4. Weekly Payment Option - we’ll be introducing a weekly payment option so members can pay for just a single week. This will come at a slight premium over the monthly payment option for the equivalent period.

5. Customisable Package Mix - although we believe the 6-month package will give the highest lifetime value per member, we recognise that some partners would prefer to concentrate on short-term packages. Partners will be able to choose the order of the package mix they give their members.

We’ll see the effect of these improvements over the next few weeks and I’ll post the results here.

Just been sent a link to a very good post, definite worth a read for anyone who wants to help shift the cultural balance of their business:

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/06/the-best-way-to-change-a-corpo.html

In the post, Peter Bregman describes how to change corporate culture – an issue I’m facing at present. Although we’ve had tremendous success in our growth, we’re now a very different business from the one I co-founded.

Two years ago we had 10 staff and were doing annualised revenues of a few million pounds – now we’re 80 staff and are doing annualised revenues closer to £25m, which is a whole different operation.

We’re really investing in future growth – we spend millions of pounds per year directly on our WhiteLabelDating.com platform architecture and we’re recruiting heavily in our development and marketing teams to find the best people.

The challenge we face is one of experience and work ethic – as many of our staff are young, they don’t necessarily have experience of many work cultures or how to work.

In his post, Peter describes how:

In the late 1970s, University of Illinois researcher Leann Lipps Birch conducted a series of experiments on children to see what would get them to eat vegetables they disliked. This is a high bar. We’re not talking about simply eating more vegetables. We’re talking about eating specific vegetables, the ones they didn’t like.

You could tell the children you expect them to eat their vegetables. And reward them with ice cream if they did. You could explain all the reasons why eating their vegetables is good for them. And you could eat your own vegetables as a good role model. Those things might help.

But Birch found one thing that worked predictably. She put a child who didn’t like peas at a table with several other children who did. Within a meal or two, the pea-hater was eating peas like the pea-lovers.

Quite simply, the best way to adjust culture is to put the right role models into the business in the right place – the rest of the team will adjust their behaviour to gain acceptance of the role model and acquiesce to peer pressure.

We recently took the decision to move to some new, larger offices in February 2010 when our current lease expires – although on paper we could certainly stay at our current offices for the next three years, I know that moving the team from the current three floor layout into one large open-plan layout will allow us to improve communication and work culture within the business.

We’ve got some major initiatives which we need to deliver for our partners over the next few years and we need all our team working at their very best to deliver them – the right environment is crucial to that.

Another great post from our wonderfully talented marketing team:

http://www.whitelabeldating.com/blog/2009/11/the-sunday-spike/

We’re now about to start the busy period for online dating – in the run up to Christmas, we usually see a big increase in usage as people get into the party season and look for dates. Then it’s New year and people set resolutions to find their soulmate. Finally we get to Valentines – so it’s a busy few months ahead!!

We’re doing a lot of research at present to understand what consumers really want from a site – whether it’s friendship, relationship, dating or just fun – and I’m looking forward to seeing some of our new initiatives rolling out in the months ahead.