Whatever happened to the Small Firms Association

I am a member of the Small Firms Association in Ireland. There web site is www.sfa.ie, but the email address of their director is patricia.callan@ibec.ie. Who is ibec.ie. IBEC is the Irish Business Employers Confederation of which the SFA is an offshoot. They share the same building.

The SFA is for businesses with up to 50 staff, IBEC would deal with the bigger businesses. Both organisations are great business organisations and I cannot fault their professionalism and the assistance they give to their members. It's just I now feel that the smaller business has become left behind and that the bigger businesses are more important than us.

Small business and big businesses have very different agendas. ISME the Irish Small and Medium sized Enterprises organisation does not have that compromise, but then but then it does not have the larger resources that IBEC can give to the SFA, but then does it need them?

So back to my original question, whatever happened to the S.F.A. Is it the same organisation I joined many years ago.

Phone numbers hidden by the caller, what do they not want you to know

Today a got a call from a person claiming to represent a well known insurance broker and claiming that they were operating a discount scheme in association when an organisation I was a member of.

Seems straight forward but, they had blocked their outgoing phone number from being displayed on my phone, so caller id was useless in this case. How would I know if they were genuinely from this insurance company? My policy is if they hide there number from me, then they have something to hide. They may not want you to have the option to ring them back because they want you always to go through a switchboard e.g. software support departments, or they are selling you something from a dodgy company.

I sometimes advise people to block phone numbers when they are making final debt collection calls to make sure that your customer who owes you money is not avoiding you by using caller id to identify you. But when selling, why do you want to hide who you are?

You may no realise that your phone lines block their outgoing numbers to your customers. Try ringing out on each line you have to confirm if they are blocked and what numbers do appear on caller id. Consider whether or not blocking your phone number is a good or a bad thing. If your customers like you, then they wont mind a call from you. But if a unknown number appears on their phone then what goes through their mind, maybe "is this person hiding something, that their product is not up to scratch or the company they work for is dodgy"

I know that I wont be dealing with this well known insurance brokerage business.