It is almost 10 years since Sherforce – our version of High Court Enforcement – came out of the box and went live as a process. At that time we wanted an online system to allow judgment creditors to look at their reports and to deliver paperwork to our enforcement officers in any part of England and Wales. We delivered the award winning SHERPA system to do just that – deliver work to our national team of High Court Enforcement Officers, and keep our clients informed with reports published in a secure environment.

In the decade that has followed Shergroup has continued its planned diversification and investment in new products and services which sees us move away from being “enforcement centric” to being a provider of business solutions in 3 different territories and with a planned expansion into the Middle East in 2014.

So I was pleased to read an article in the Telegraph today in which SMEs are being encouraged to innovate because that’s what we are continuing to do – here in our own Research and Development lab.

The headline in the article caught my eye as it was headed “Soapbox” so immediately I had a synergy with the journo who had but the piece together.

It went on to quote Simon Devonshire who is a director at O2 Telefonica’s “incubator programme for entrepeneurs” in which he talked about SME’s having to be more innovative in the way they do business or risk being left behind. Well I guess we all knew that but then he goes on to talk about how innovation has become a really important way of communicating with customers. Now that really got my attention.

All over Shergroup we are developing our communications process so that we have more and more opportunities to talk to our customers about their business and how as a result we can help them solve their dilemmas and business challenges.

As a company we want to encourage dialogue and feedback with our customer’s ideas on how they can utilise our “tool box” to make our solution work for them. I say this because we have some great tools in our tool box which can be adapted – ten years ago we only had a handful.

This year we have delivered our range of websites with 64 potential service areas and even now we are developing sub-brands to fill in the gaps in our revenue management, outsourcing, enforcement and security divisions which are not limited to UK geography – how exciting is that!

We are now launching our Shergroup Signature™ range where customers can design the way they want their service or process delivered. In the UK for example this may mean telling us how you want security or enforcement services to operate and getting a bespoke service from us that meets your industry need.

According to Simon’s expert view, customers like to be thought of as “early adopters” of new services and we certainly see that in the range of services that we deliver month on month.

Innovating our proposition once every 6 weeks isn’t easy – but it can be done if you consolidate ideas and intellectual capital so that you can rehash and deliver a slightly different version to meet the needs of a new set of customers.

So if you want to discuss your ideas and put your “signature” on our service for security, enforcement or anything else that we do, drop me a mail to set up a conference call to discuss how you want our service to work.

We don’t have all the answers of course – but we are agile enough to flex what we do when many companies in our key areas of operation won’t budge.

We look forward to receiving your call and having a real conversation with you about your ideas.