James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Mike Hughes is the Head of Business for the Evening Gazette. He will be blogging on all matters of importance to Teesside businesses - and some that are just worth knowing »
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Karen McLauchlan is the Evening Gazette's deputy business and features editor - with special interest in all things industry, property and arts related » 
Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » In a couple of weeks time our business will be attending a trade fair in London called Design Edge. It's a fair 'for British designer makers' of which we are one and it's on over three days in mid September.
We attended our first trade fair in March and it was a really good location for us to showcase our products as we finally seemed to be hitting our target audience. Buyers come from all different kinds of outlets, they can be from museums, galleries, independent retailers and even garden centres.
So we're in full prep mode trying to get everything organised for our trip, we're organising accomodation, getting sample products together and trying to decide whether or not we can afford to put the prices up on a few of our products.
Now price is a very tricky business as anyone in business will tell you. Too high and you price yourself out of the market, too low and you can't meet your production costs. What one needs to do in these situations is look at the figures from every angle so that you can weigh up the pros and cons of making a product more expensive, or making the minimum order amount for free delivery higher.
This is all well and good except me and my partner are absolutely atrocious at maths. It's not all maths we're bad at but anything that involves decimal places gets us in such a flap that we start generating meaningless numbers that can't possibly fit into the calculation we're trying to work out.
And this is with a calculator.
When you don't know if it's 10 pence or 1 pence that you're looking at you know you're in some serious trouble. What follows is a frenzied hiccoughing of multiplications and divisions, 80's into 90 and 1.13 times 74, that eventually requires our accountant (my A-level maths taking brother) to decipher the method from the madness and inform us that yes, putting the prices up would generate more profits.
Thank you Einstein, now we just need to know if we can afford to put up our profits and we'll be sorted! That's a much bigger calculation though.
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