New Lettings agent website in Gloucester Right Choice Lettings

A new lettings agent based in Gloucester aims to shake up the local market by targeting landlords with a competitive fee starting from 5% for a single fully managed property. Most monthly fees for a landlord are between 10-15%, with a discount only being offered with two properties owned being rented by the same landlord. How is Lee Ellix and his team able to achieve this competitive rate, well unlike most agents they do not have an office and its associated overheads and they have a team of proficient maintenance engineers, able to put any DIY job right at short notice. Right choice Lettings aim to increase their portfolio quickly and match them to well-referenced tenants. Right choice lettings are a lettings agent based in Gloucester and serve the local area. Contact them for a no obligation quote and proposal to take the risk out of letting your property. www.rightchoicelettings.co.uk

Cycling the Strawberry Line, North Somerset

The Strawberry Line, is an old railway line in Somerset that has been regenerated into a shared pedestrian and cycle path. The route is a few miles long and runs North to South to the east of Weston-Super-mare in North Somerset. The entire scope of the line is in varying degrees of accessibility, ranging from fully operational to route planning. I cycled part of the route from Cheddar to Yatton, with part of the cycle path taking you through the orchards of the Thatcher's Cider farm. The route leaves the orchards behind and turns left onto Nye Road for a short stretch before turning right and back onto the old railway line, heading to Congresbury.

The surface of the line is small pee-size shingle gravel ontop of a larger aggregate. Generally the path is worn to almost powder on the outsides of the path, where cyclist ride up and down. The centre has more of a build up of pee-shingle gravel. The path is about 8 feet wide and popular with walkers and cyclists alike. Cyclists are asked to slow down and sound a bell when passing pedestrians, including errant children and loose dogs. The strawberry line is passable on a road bike with little trouble, obviously the surface is flat, with little pot holes. I was able to cruise at 17mph on 23mm tires no problem. If your tires are susceptible to punctures you may wish to think twice and there is a perfectly good alternative route on Nye Road which turns into Puxton Lane. I would say the path is passable in all weathers including wet conditions, although clay mud will get flung up onto your bike, in anything but dry conditions.

For more information check out the website or just Get on Your Bike.

http://www.thestrawberryline.co.uk/

Competition - 10 photographers SmugMug Pro for Life

Make your photos happy - @photowhoa is giving 10 photographers SmugMug Pro for Life! Enter here. http://www.photowhoa.com/c/CQcYvRD #photography

Shoot and Share, Simply.

Want an easy method for Colloborating, Documenting and communicating in your large company offices- Give them all a Digital camera (with a rechargeable battery). Sounds expensive but some cameras just do not allow the average Jo to take good photos easily, they are either slow to focus, grainy as hell (not enough light) or washed out with too much flash. Why? The subject matter. This can be a simple means of recording how you did something to allow you to follow a process to make it repeatable next time you do it. or for someone else to repeat the process, without been shown. You might want to show a colleague a progress update every week and they are on the other side of the world. Photos are easier than writing down a description of what you are taking a photo of. The image provides a memory jog as well. The justification can come from a better outcome, an improved product or service, less downtime, less training and retraining. Of course if you do not have a grasp of just how much you spend on these aspects, there is not a lot to compare to. Next. send some Key staff on a course to take better photos, they need to be taught how to keep the camera steady, when to use the flash or not and basic composure. Those people should be advocates for the Camera idea and that will embrace it. Get them to retrain the other staff. Once your team can do this adequatly, write down a simple step by step process, that allows them to upload the photos to your server. This could be giving everyone a USB cable (that came with the camera) or a docking station (Kodak were big on that). Or better yet an Eye-Fi card that allows the upload of images as the camera shoots, straight to your server via wirelss network. (Avoid the 4in1 multi-card readers and USB SD card readers, these are notoriusly flaky whatever OS you have). Once people have uploaded photos onto the server, make sure they get into the habit of completing some appropriate tags, descriptions and titles to allow others to find them. Set a policy about whether they can or cannot upload images to the internet and social media websites. If you are a funky creative design house and want to build your brand and show off your relaxed workspaces or new projects then you maybe fairly open. If you are constanatly developing projects in a competive market you might be more restrictive with your policy. To be truly collaborative, make it easy for people to see what's new in your business, or what others are working on. Index your servers photos using something like Picassa. Although designed for home, it is powerful enough to support a small enterprise and has some useful features such as face-recognition. Shoot and Share.

Dummies guide to waiter/waitress service in the UK in 8 steps.

At the entrance to the dining area of a restaurant, place a sign which says “Please wait to be seated” or some restaurants such as Gastro pubs allow to sit down, the menus are already on the table, and have instructions about ordering food at the bar, noting your table number. However this post is about receiving table service, rather than informing people by non-verbal means.

1. Sit the customers down at their table, give them a choice of where to suit if you wish. Hand them the menus drinks section, explain any specials or soup of the day for example.
Having a specials board is not ideal because inevitably it cannot be seen from every seat, some people can have bad eyesight and if they have to remember the choice they will not remember the details and not be able to sell it to their fellow diners for you.

2. Come back within five minutes and take their drinks order. Offer table water to all diners. You should have a basic knowledge of sommelier skills and have tried some of the wines on a staff training night. Remove any wine glasses that are not going to be used (if they didn’t order wine) and place these on a side table within the dining area. (minimise time it takes to reset a table).

3. When you return with the drinks, be prepared to take their food order. Write down the order with the starters first. Up sell any side orders such as potatoes, vegetables or salads. If the portions are too big, than food will go to waste with no up selling. It should be a question of quality over quantity, agreed with the Chef and restaurant owner.
Take the order on an electronic device similar to a PDQ machine, this will save you having to go back to the kitchen to drop an order check off, with your messy handwriting. This also means your bill is made up correctly on the computer ahead of time.
After taking the food order, take the menus with you, so that your colleagues do not ask to take the food order again. If you take a note of which dish was ordered for which table place on a seating plan, this will allow you to deliver the food faster, hotter and more professionally, with no dithering of who ordered what!

Fancy restaurants or corporate functions with silver service have a team of waiters that deliver an entire tables food in one go. They stand behind the diners, look at each other, 3-2-1 then place the food on the table at exactly the same time.

4. When the food is ready at the hot plate, deliver it efficiently as possible, keeping tally of dishes still left to be served, because you will be asked. Have a colleague help you serve up as described above, this way no single diners are left with an empty place setting. Offer to take any more drinks order at this stage, wish your diners a enjoyable meal “Enjoy”.

5. Within a few minutes, ask the diners if everything is OK with their meal. This is instant feedback and gives you a chance to fix something that is not right for the customer, before they complain or not pay you a tip. Top up their wine if this is the sort of restaurant that warrants it, you maybe able to sell them another bottle where normally they would have had just one.
Keep an eye on the diners, make it easy for them to ask for something because it will invariably add to the bill and therefore your tip. When you move from the kitchen to table you hands will be taking food out, likewise when returning to the kitchen clean away glasses or empty plates – look busy and efficient. Its the small details that add value to a dining-out experience and make you look even better at your job.

6. Return when all the diners look like they have finished, ask if they are finished and start to remove plates and clear the table. Ask them again if everything was OK with their meal. Return with the desserts menu/hot drinks or leave it with them before clearing.

7. Come back to take any dessert or hot drinks orders. If they don't want anything, ask if they would like the bill as your table is not going to earn anymore money tonight, and could be filled with new paying customers.

8. Return with the bill and deliver to the top of the table, or the one who looks like they are most likely to pay (to give this person the satisfaction of the buying/ treating of other diners experience). Come back quickly with the PDQ machine to take credit card payments.
The tip...
An increasing trend is for Restaurants, typically chains to add a service charge by default. This can be around 10%+ and more often applies to table of six or more. Not being America, it is not always customary for English diners to tip their servers, and hence it is discretionary. If a company adds a service charge as standard, the staff see it as part of their wages (even though this is legally not the case, and the restaurant does not benefit). The problem with this is complacency by the staff, who continually provide poor service. This is unfortunate for the catering industry in this country, which employs a majority of students, without any aspirations to make the work into a career where you can master the art of service, such as in France. The flip side where no discretionary service charge is added to the bill and, and the diners do not add a percentage themselves, can cause some good staff can lose out. The bottom line is through your dining experience and skills as a cook/host in your own home you will decide yourself what is good and what is not so good, and tip accordingly.

Different credit card machines vary, some allow the server to add the bill, hand the machine over to the paying customer, who has the option of a gratuity. Other machines just allow the input of one figure and it is deemed impolite to ask for a tip. One method of getting round this maybe to ask “how much the diner would like to pay for on the card”, in the hope they would round the bill up by 10% and excusable in that the server may believe the bill is being split or paid in part by cash.

3 tips to Survive in a modern business world?

1) Find new ways to generate new sales 2) Reduce time to market 3) Increase Profitability

How do they provide fresh, cool and pressurised air in passenger Aircraft?

I pondered about this issue because it seems like a difficult thing to do at 35,000feet. The 3 elements which are all critical to the comfort of passengers ability to live and breath at altitude inside the cabin of a passenger jet are:

Fresh air: Yes lots of germs circulate inside the cabin, but if the air is not changed to fresh air (m3 per person) then condensation may occur on the heavily glazed windows and more importantly the carbon dioxide rich, second hand air that humans expel must be replaced with oxygen rich air at a rate faster that it is consumed, otherwise we will full unconscious.

The Temperature of the air outside at 35,000 feet is a lot cooler then at sea level, so this needs to be warmed* for comfortable inhalation.

The Pressure of air at altitude is a lot thinner than at sea level, and this also needs to be increased in pressure to allow our lungs to work at normal capacity.

The answer to all of these 3 factors was solved many years ago and understandably involves lots of engineering to provide what is abundant at sea level and unavailable in the correct form at altitude. The following is an explanation from a passenger jet Captain.

"The air is tapped from the engine compressors and then ducted to the air conditioning units for cooling if required. As the air from the engines is very *hot it and so needs to be cooled via heat exchangers that use ambient air for cooling or air cycle machines that operate like turbo compressors. The tapped air drives the turbine, the compressor pumps the air into the cabin. At altitude where the outside air temp. can be 56 deg. C below, the hot air is not cooled as much. The pressurisation is achieved by controlling outflow valves to regulate the outgoing air. On the 747 they maintain 8.6 PSI differential which gives a 5000ft' cabin at 35,000ft. If just one cabin window blew out of a 747, cabin pressure would be lost." and a rapid descent would follow. This is a continuous process and a system with inputs (fresh air) and outputs (old air) and a process (humans breathing).

I found more information available at Boeing www.boeing.com/commercial/cabinair/ or at Lufthansa
www.lufthansa-technik.com/aircraft cabin air