Frances Wright
Frances Wright, who co-owns marketing and communications company Trinitas Consulting, believes one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make in running a business is to understate the importance of the supply chain in its entirety.
“A supplier must know that if they mess up on your business it’s a whole wad of business going,” says Wright, who works with writers and photographers, as well as design and multi-media companies. She maintains that the service her business offers a client is only as good as its weakest link, as she stands to lose out if a supplier she has commissioned misses their deadline on a project.
Wright’s eleven years working in the industry have helped her to identify key suppliers, but she admits that to find a good supplier and one that you can trust is still difficult. What does help however is that she has fixed-term contracts in place with her writers and gets her suppliers to sign a quality standard document as part of their service-level agreement.
The marketing companies she worked at before starting Trinitas never had any documentation in place, which, Wright says, often had a negative impact on delivery. Once she has found a good supplier she says she works on the relationship with them by making regular payments, briefing clients properly before approaching a supplier and by ensuring that suppliers know exactly where they fit into each new project.
