Reflecting on the first month at Bamford Media

The start of May feels like the end of the first proper month at Bamford Media.

Technically we incorporated the business on 30th May last year, so our legal first birthday is coming up at the end of this month. But April 2018 was the month we moved into our new offices and launched Bamford Media as a ‘proper’ business.

It’s been a busy month.

The office move meant a lot of late nights and weekends, decorating walls and assembling Ikea furniture. We’ve still got a few bits to finish off – including finding a sofa and coffee table for our podcasting studio – but the offices are fully up and running.

Alongside the office move, we spent some time getting our various systems established. One goal for Bamford Media from day one is to make it a business which is able to grow, which means our software packages need to be able to grow as we do. This meant choosing email, CRM and project management software which could work equally as well with 2 of us as it does with 100+ working in the team.

Next on the never-ending list of things to do is to get our business stationery printed.

As well as moving into our new offices, during April we managed to launch two new websites.

The first is a website for our first event; Bamfest, which is a one-day conference in June 2019 (there’s nothing like a bit of forward planning!) exploring the art and science of marketing for financial planners. We’ve secured some excellent speakers and booked the venue, The Electric Theatre in Guildford, for what promises to be a very special event.

The second website we launched in April is an e-commerce site called FinCart. The idea behind this website is very simple; lots of IFAs and financial planners have websites, but few keep them updated on a regular basis with new blog posts and articles. FinCart offers articles for sale which IFAs can purchase and then publish on their own website, under their own name. We think it’s a valuable concept and it was especially pleasing to see articles being purchased on the site within hours of it going live!

And of course we have been keeping busy with plenty of client work. Our founding client, Informed Choice, kept us busy in April with their sponsorship of the Spring into Cranleigh event, but also the creation of a 32-page financial planning services brochure, which is now with the printers.

We completed a second season of CII Radio for the Chartered Insurance Institute and started work on the production of a new podcast series for a regional firm of accountants. We have also been writing blogs for a number of financial planner clients.

Bamford Media is exploring a number of joint venture projects too, including website and podcast production for niche markets within the financial services sector.

A nice surprise in April was discovering we are finalist for Start Up of the Year at the Surrey & Hampshire Biz Awards 2018 from Eagle Radio. We get to find out later this month whether we have won the top prize, during an awards ceremony at the HG Wells Centre in Woking.

So that’s month one at Bamford Media. We can’t wait for month two and some of the exciting things we have planned.