About

Hello! Welcome to MicroBusinessEntrepreneur.co.uk, a website created by Kevin Partner aimed at people running 1 or 2 person businesses and their unique interests, needs and points of view.

On this site, you will find:

• useful articles for MicroBusiness Entrepreneurs: whether you’re starting out or running an existing business. Everything from choosing your business type, through finding ideas, planning your business, running and marketing it to choosing technology and how to solve common problems
• a series of resources that will help you start and run a business
• fresh content, updated regularly including interviews with experts in their areas, how-to articles and news affecting people like you and me.

Perhaps the biggest difference between this and other small business blogs is that it’s written by someone who actually runs small businesses day to day. Some blogs are written by business organisations, others by people whose business is the blog whereas MicroBusinessEntrepreneur contains advice from the coal-face: real experiences of a real businessman faced with real problems in real language. I’ve hired staff, fired staff, used offices, worked from home, sold physical products, sold services, sold software, sold information. I have promoted both bricks and mortar businesses and web businesses online and learned a lot about the techniques needed for successful marketing.

This blog is dedicated to the owner/operator of very small, or micro,  businesses. There are plenty of resources around for SMEs but much of that material is really only applicable to larger small businesses (if you see what I mean). Very small businesses are those with less than 10 employees: in fact the vast majority have only 1 or 2.

This brings unique challenges as you are forced to wear many, many hats at once: innovator, technologist, accountant, administrator, salesperson, marketer, manager etc etc.

This blog aims to offer genuinely useful advice, observations and news for the very small business owner along with reviews of useful products. I do recommend some specific products and books: please be reassured that in every case, these products are used in my business on a day to day basis.

Who is Kevin Partner?

So who am I to be giving this advice? I currently run four separate companies with a number of brands within them. Ten years ago I set up NlightN Multimedia Ltd, a developer of elearning for corporate clients. This company has varied in success and size over the years, employing up to a dozen people down to a couple. I also own and run PassYourTheory Ltd, the UK’s leading Driving Theory test website and Scribbleit a journalism, writing and technology company. MakingYourOwnCandles is my latest venture and is a business selling candle making kits run by my wife with all technology and marketing issues handled by me.

I’ve been a Contributing Editor at PCPro magazine (the UK’s leading technology magazine) since 1996, writing about multimedia and web applications. I also run a number of other smaller brands within the above companies.

What all this means is that I’ve been working as a micro business owner for over a decade now, struggling to follow my interests (programming and writing) whilst developing the skills needed to make my businesses successful (the most important being marketing). This blog contains much of what I’ve learned, often the hard way, so that you don’t make the same mistakes that I do.

One final thing. This is NOT a blog about how to become a millionaire. There are plenty of blogs like that on the internet if you look for them and they’re of variable quality. This blog is about how to run a company in the real world for real people to help give you the best chance of making a success of your company and deriving a reliable income from it.

This is the place to be if you’re interested in real-life stories and advice from the coal-face. If that’s you, please take the time to register using the form on the right and you’ll get some exclusive advice direct by email along with a range of freebies only available to registered members.

Contact Kevin

You can get in touch using the Contact page, I’d love to hear from you!

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