Raising money for your small business is a time-consuming endeavour. And you are unlikely to have time or resource to waste on activities that are at best ineffective, at worst actively putting investors off the idea of funding your business.
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Working with family means mixing business and personal life, which can be quite a difficult thing to get right. It has both its benefits and disadvantages, you just need to make sure that you are prepared for it. If you are considering hiring family or having family members as partners in your business, you need to consider how well you could work with them. Working with family can be great as well as challenging, you may bring the best out in each other or you could bring out the worst.
Failing in business at some point is not only inevitable but essential. Failure is the biggest teacher, therefore there is always a lesson to be learnt. Failing at anything can be horrible and it can definitely knock your confidence, however, it’s vital that you get back up. As the small business owner and decision maker, you are allowed to fail, however, it’s your recovery that says everything about you as a leader. You need to make sure that you are leading by example and showing your team how to recover from a failure in business.
The road to success for any start-up is undoubtedly tough. Couple this with the fact that around 50% of all small businesses fail in the first five years, with the figure rising to an astronomical 90% for tech start-ups, and the picture starts to look somewhat bleak. However this shouldn’t be a discouragement, instead, it should be a call to organise your business operations well from the beginning so that it’s addressing issues before they can cause real problems.
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A company succeeds or fails on its reputation; a good reputation will bring you more customers, more sales, and ultimately more profits. You will be able to grow and thrive exactly as you want to. A bad reputation will result in fewer sales because fewer people will want to be associated with your company name, brand, products, or services. Although this sounds fairly frightening, it’s not something that you should lose sleep over – as long as you commit to doing the right thing at all times and admit your mistakes (because every business makes them, no matter how established they are, and it’s how you deal with them that counts).
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There are almost a million drivers on the UK’s roads who are behind the wheel of a company vehicle. A company car is a privilege and a great perk of employment. It is also an essential tool for those who need to spend time at the remote work site or meeting with customers, suppliers and business partners.
President Donald Trump’s nuclear sanctions on Tehran are having significant implications for a major European business, creating a climate in which other companies looking to expand business globally are growing concerned. In particular, many are worried about how they may be impacted by international relations issues, including sanctions and embargos.
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Decorating your office can be as challenging as it is rewarding. And being limited to a budget does not make the job easier! It is much more challenging to decorate an office than it is to decorate your bedroom or living room because the office is a much more sober place. Even if you run a small business, you probably get a lot of people coming over to your office, and you need to make sure that they get a good first impression of the place. After all, they will use that impression to make their initial judgement of you
Investing in one’s own business comes with a high risk of not achieving the expected results. The level of competition in the UK’s market is high: since 2015, more than 500,000 start-ups have been launched every year. In the first six months of 2018, more than 300,000 new companies have been registered.
Diversity in the workplace can be really beneficial for both the people who work for the business and the business itself. Every major city is multi-cultural, there are people from all over the world that live and work there. For example, London is one of the best cities in the world and it’s full of people from many different backgrounds, cultures, races, genders and sexual orientations. The diversity in the city should, therefore, be reflected in the city’s workplace too. Small businesses, in particular, need to encourage more diversity when it comes to the recruitment process.
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This advice is based very much on experience. Only two years ago, I was about to close my digital agency. I had been forced to let six staff go and it was down to just me and one other.
Anthony Main is the founder of an app development company called The Distance. Anthony has had an incredible and inspiring business journey, from dealing with business failure to making his business a success. In his success story, Anthony highlights everything from the lessons learnt from merging with another company to the skills gained from dealing with business disasters.
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It’s undeniable that there are multiple benefits to training the workforce and upskilling your employees. From retaining good employees to having highly skilled individuals work for you, the benefits are vast. Whether your business has a big budget or a small budget to work with, there are methods of helping your employees add to their skill set. There are certain types of training that will be essential for your employees depending on your business and the role they will have.
The work-life balance is something that has become more important in recent years, even though it has also become more difficult to obtain in many cases. There was a time when working long hours (and at weekends), losing sleep and sacrificing family time, was seen as something admirable, but thankfully the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way, and now most people understand how important it is to have some downtime.
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The time of completing and filing a self-assessment tax return is a dreaded time for the self-employed. However, being prepared and having a good working knowledge of taxes and allowable expenses will surely make the task a little easier. Figuring out which expenses you can claim can be quite difficult when it comes completing the self-assessment tax return.
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Properly implemented workplace safety is something that both the employer and the employees benefit from. In practice, it is quite hard to motivate the workforce to follow the intricate safety procedures. They are usually fully aware of their importance, but they lack the motivation to follow through.
IR35 takes its name from an Inland Revenue press release which heralded the birth of new measures (The Intermediaries Legislation) aimed at preventing the use of intermediaries purely for the purpose of avoiding paying income tax and National Insurance.
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If you have registered for VAT, you may well have to wait a month, or more before your application has been processed, and you receive a VAT registration number. A commonly asked question by many business owners is how to account for VAT and issue invoices in the interim?
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Everyone has a unique personality. That’s part of the reason why people are so interesting. But sometimes, personalities clash. When it comes to working in a team, knowing how to manage different personality types is a vital skill. While we are all unique, it is generally accepted that we all sit on a spectrum of introversion and extroversion. It’s common in the workplace for personalities from different areas of the spectrum to collide and it can be a challenge to work with or manage introverts and extroverts.
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In the most recent Small Business Index carried out for the third quarter (Q3) of 2018, it was found that small businesses are lacking confidence. The research carried out by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) on a quarterly basis has seen the confidence of small business plummet for the third time since the Brexit vote. The confidence of the self-employed has also taken a big hit due to the government unfulfilling its promises.
