Last week I looked at the preparation needed to write your business plan, now we are laying out the structure of the plan. Not all of the following will be needed for every plan and you must decide what to include based on the use that the business plan will be put to. For instance [...]

If you’ve got past the headline then you obviously have a hankering to be your own boss. The arguments for going into business are well rehearsed – you can make your own decisions, choose who you work with, enjoy the fruits of your success and so on – but, arguably, the paths into entrepreneurialism are [...]

It’s a New Year and the entrepreneurial juices are flowing. It’s time to start the business that you’ve been talking about for years. What’s stopping you? Or maybe you’ve already got a business but it’s not growing as fast as you had thought, what has to happen to make this year the year it doubles [...]

1. Get free PR If there was an unlimited amount of money to spend, advertising would be easy, but normally there isn’t. So what can you do? Well this is where free PR comes in. PR is of course short for Public Relations and was the remit of large corporations, but has now become a [...]

After writing the title of this piece I thought what more can I say? That’s it isn’t it? Provide a better service than your competitors and you will win business. But maybe it’s worth thinking about this a bit deeper. No one actually sets out to deliberately provide a bad service and does it really [...]

Almost all businesses now days have to have a web site. Even if you don’t sell over the web, your customers will expect to be able to find you on it. If they know your name and it’s fairly unique then you are likely to be found. That’s good, you can give your customers contact [...]

Whenever I hear advice from successful entrepreneurs the most consistent mantra is “always hire the best people you can afford”. But how good is “the best”, how do you measure that? Also, if you are in a young company, with very limited resources, how much can you really afford? Let’s step back for a moment [...]

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 [...]

  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 [...]

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 [...]