Seraph Estates’ Douglas Haig talks social

Today on the What’s Next Event blog Seraph Estates owner, Douglas Haig talks to us about his growing appreciation of the value of social networking and how it is already helping his business

Haig knows the value of relationship building in the workplace . He currently runs three successful companies in Cardiff, under the Seraph banner, one being  Seraph Estates who are proud sponsors of the Whats Next Event.

So without further ado, here is the special guest blog-post  from Mr Douglas Haig.“I run three small businesses, and yes that is probably a sign of my attention span, but they were opportunities that built on each other.  They are in incredibly competitive industries, in different ways.  Every day I learn something new from each of them and every day I wonder how I’m going to get them to the level that I really want them to be at.

“I’m a dreamer.  A very focused one, but often where I want to take things can make people look at what I say I am trying to do and take a step back and tell me to think a bit more seriously.

My grandfather told me to shoot for the stars and at least you’d hit the moon.He was right, but what about hitting the stars?  Well, we’ve built a solid base.  We have fantastic customers, good systems and most importantly, and this is how I got there, we have fantastic staff that really care about what we do and understand where we are going.  That’s what I’ve focused on in the first three years.

Expansion in 2012

“Now I’m trying to grow.  I love networking, not the yes I’ll do that and never hear from me again networking but the building relationships networking.  The taking time to understand people, get people to trust you and deliver what you say you’re going to deliver; and we do.  We’ve been successful in that, but there is a limit to it.  None of the businesses are high margin, we provide a lot of work for a narrow profits, so we have to hit a bigger market.”We can’t afford massive marketing campaigns, we don’t have marketing budgets in the hundreds of thousands, and just how effective are the big budget campaigns without already establishing a natural affinity and relationship between your customers and your brand anyway? We can’t compete with that.

“I looked around and I saw this Facebook thing that everyone is using, very much something that I simply dismissed as people being nosey. If they wanted to stay in touch they would have called me before.  But when you look at it, it’s about establishing, or re-establishing relationships.“It’s a way of showing people who you are, what you are doing and why you’re good at it.  It’s about how I believe in doing business, but it has a much bigger reach.  You add the other social media platforms and it allows people to choose how they build that relationship with you, it becomes more relevant to more people.  

You then add to that, people can choose and specify what sort of things they want to see and don’t want to see.  If it’s relevant to what they do or like they are more likely to find it.  Ideal.

“It gets better because on top of that, as I’ve already said, I have some fantastic, hardworking staff.  Now, I have a chat with them, and they are all quite keen on telling people what they do and what they know about, so not only do I show what I can do, but we can show what we all do, and even better, we are all specialised in specific fields so it helps people find exactly what they want to a level I couldn’t do on my own.

“It all adds up.  It’s happening now, it’s not expensive, it’s experimental, there is no right or wrong and how my friend Russell Davies at Lobster Digital Marketing says, it’s a leveller between the big and small companies.

“So that’s why I’m sponsoring What’s Next. I encourage us all to  ’get involved’ and ‘be part of the conversation’.  I can’t wait to see how social networking evolves. One thing is certain, it’s something that is here to stay – just like my business. Ill see you online!”