I spent an enjoyable couple of days doing one-to-ones on business planning at a conference last week and the area that was most misunderstood was the need to define and understand your market.
It sounds simple, everyone of course understands their market don’t they, it’s obvious. The market is whoever will buy from us. We don’t [...]

 
Company Partners has been a blessing for those businesses who are looking for business partners, mentors and investors, but what if you need to reorganise your business to make it more profitable, or to grow?
 
I’ve been helping companies that have approached us for a while now, but eventually there is only so much of my [...]

I wonder if anyone you know has been the victim of these? Various business journals have been mentioning for some time that the Inland Revenue has decided to target small companies. On the belief that such businesses would have poor record keeping and so would be able to have more tax squeezed out of them.
It [...]

A few days ago the office of the Prime Minister sent a letter to many small businesses and SME organisations explaining that a new online tool called Contracts Finder has been launched that will show all government tender opportunities.
At the same time he said they would eliminate the prequalification questionnaire (PQQ) for low value orders [...]

There’s a common misconception of the typical entrepreneur being a charismatic individual business person, not needing or wanting a partner’s help in driving forward his all conquering venture.
Think Richard Branson, Bill Gates, or the latest film idol, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame.
Yes they were the front men and there’s no doubt that they steered the [...]

I was putting together a business plan workshop for some MBA students the other day and looked for a couple of quotes to illustrate points. There are, as you can imagine, quotes for everything, sometimes contradictory.
There is one area though that no one disagrees with and it happens to be a pet issue with me. [...]

Last night I attended the keynote event of Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), yes it’s this week, how could you miss it? Sitting in a packed conference centre of the British Library, I looked around at the alert eager faces of budding Entrepreneurs and thought this has to be the future for Britain.
Tom Bewick, the CEO [...]

Business gets ever quicker and there’s never a time now when we aren’t connected and “on-call”. It used to be that if you were on a train or car journey, there was valuable down-time where you could ruminate on life and free your mind to come up with new ideas.
It’s good to keep busy – [...]

Last week I talked about having a simple sales & marketing plan for your business. It doesn’t have to be particularly fancy, but you should have bounced ideas around with your team (find someone to do this with if a sole trader) and written it down. The act of documenting it is important, clears up [...]

Hands up those who have more sales than they can handle? It does happen, but for most small businesses it is a constant battle to get customers.
You’ve got a good product or service; in fact you are probably very proud of the quality and cost effectiveness of your offering. But sales don’t seem to be [...]