Essentials

Business Records Checks: what the Small Business Owner needs to know

by Kev on 1 April, 2011

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My accountant is trying to drum up business for their “Tax Investigation Insurance Scheme” which is fine. What isn’t fine is that they’re mixing it up with the proposed Business Records Checks which are another thing entirely. It’s nothing short of scaremongering to link the two together but that’s a matter between me and my accountant. For now, let’s look at BRCs and what they might mean for us.

I’m not, at this point, going to get deeply into the government justification for BRCs (indeed, they claim it’ll help us make more money, a-ha-ha-ha) because it can be summed up as this: money. They claim that they’re missing out on billions of pounds of tax revenue because poor record keeping amongst small businesses almost always results in lower tax bills. Or at least, so they say. It seems to me that if the problem is simply poor record keeping, it would be just as likely that this would result in paying too much as too little but reading between the lines they believe small businesses are deliberately keeping poor records to reduce their tax bills. [click to continue…]

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PagePlus X5: the perfect desktop publishing tool for small business

by KevPartner on 22 December, 2010

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First impressions count. Boring, clichéd but true.  An amateurish or incomplete website, for example, destroys the credibility of any small business. The same applies to your paper-based communications. We may live in a digital world, but paper’s been around for 4,000 years and it’s likely to remain important for the foreseeable future.

For most small businesses, the day to day production of paperwork is handled in-house and this presents two problems. Firstly, you need to have some understanding of design to come up with a professional look and for this I strongly recommend the Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams.

The second problem is translating your design into reality. Most small businesses use Microsoft Word but Word is not up to the job of creating sophisticated layouts. Word’s purpose is to make the job of generating documents quick and efficient. This is fine for reports and letters but if design is a key component of the document then a more sophisticated tool is needed and this is where desktop publishing comes in. [click to continue…]

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5 facts about Franking Machines you probably didn't know (but should)

by KevPartner on 2 November, 2010

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I’d been meaning to do it for months but finally we’ve got a franking machine for our candle kit business MakingYourOwnCandles. Wax, in particular, is expensive to ship and it seemed, on the face of it, that we’d save a lot of money – particularly in the run up to Christmas.

However, I was nervous of getting a franking machine – partly because I didn’t fully understand how it worked and partly because it represented a contractual commitment, unlike SmartStamp. [click to continue…]

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My Top 6 Small Business Books

by KevPartner on 4 September, 2010

You wouldn’t expect to be able to sit in a car and drive it without learning first, would you? It’s the same with your small business. You need to go into business with a certain level of education covering how to plan, run and market it otherwise you might make expensive mistakes right from the beginning.
These 6 books are my bang up to date best small business books for all:
1) Purple Cow by Seth Godin: essential to help you find a product or service to market. This book will help you understand why blending in with the crowd is the fast path to obscurity and failure
2) Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson: published in 2010, this is the book on running a business in the 21st Century. It chimes with much of what I say in Microbusinessentrepreneur.co.uk. It is the anti-Business Link. Again, it will challenge you and you won’t agree with everything but it will radically alter your received perception of how business should be run
3) Free by Chris Anderson: if you’re developing a product, especially if it’s electronic, this is required reading. If you don’t understand the new economy, where Free is the default price, then you won’t know how to make money from it. This is the paradox that the book describes – it also gives you practical ideas of how to profit from a “free” economy.
4) Crush It! By Gary Vaynerchuk: brash loud and occasionally obnoxious, Vaynerchuk is a hugely successful internet entrepreneur. I like the messages in this book and, although I probably wouldn’t go to the extremes he promotes, there’s a lot to learn from his techniques.
5) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Hold onto your trousers if you’re British as this is very American in a sugar coated, God fearing way (especially the audio version) but it is good. This was the first personal development product I ever bought and has probably been the most effective. Do you get miserable on a cloudy day? This book is for you.
6) The Power of LESS by Leo Babauta. Chimes a bit with Rework but this book is about how to be more effective in both your personal and professional life by doing LESS. If you feel busy all the time and going nowhere fast, read this.

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3 Steps to Starting A Small Business: a bullet point guide

by KevPartner on 26 May, 2010

Step 1: Planning

  • Come up with product ideas
  • Evaluate them
  • Plan a business around the best
  • Set up your company
  • Prototype and test your product/service

Step 2: Build the business

  • Build your product/service
  • Build the website that supports it
  • Get payment processing and support systems into place

Step 3: Market the business

  • Optimise your site
  • Build a list
  • Create an autoresponder
  • Begin an Adwords campaign
  • Use Facebook and Twitter to promote your business

Find out more by downloading our FREE guide to starting a business on a shoestring

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Finding Direction

by KevPartner on 31 March, 2010

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Click here to listen

Who’d be a school/college/university leaver today? Well, I would for one as the range of possibilities open to people these days is exponentially greater than when I left school. At that time (in the 1980s), on leaving college you had two choices: get a job or go onto University (at which point you had two choices: stay at Uni or get a job). Although there were, of course, self-employed businesspeople, most people didn’t know one personally and it seemed that there were many barriers in the way. For example, being self employed meant, at that time, selling a physical product or service and that meant either buying expensive equipment or renting a shop and that meant borrowing money from a reluctant bank (or family member).

Today it’s different. It’s possible to get a business up and running for, say, £250. It’s easy to choose a business that you can run part time to supplement earned income. And then, at some point, to add another business or build that one until you have enough regular income to stop inhabiting the corporate rat maze.

And the sheer amount of choice, along with the questionable reputation of the internet and the multitudes of “gurus” all eager to sell you on the dream of easy money is what is leading to confusion and procrastination amongst the next generation of entrepreneurs. With so much choice, what do you do?

Well, you may have come across a book called Crush It!: Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk. If you haven’t then I strongly recommend it: I had read it within 24 hours and am now systematically applying its lessons to my businesses. Vaynerchuk’s style might be a little OTT for your taste (or mine) but there’s no denying his enthusiasm or his success.

He talks about three rules, in this order:

  1. Love your family. As soon as I read this, I knew I was going to like the book.
  2. Find your passion
  3. Work your arse off

…and there’s a fourth, which is “patience”.

So, to find direction you need to think about this. If you didn’t need to earn money, what constructive activity would you devote your life to? What would get you out of bed early in the morning energised and carry you through the day enthused and excited? Whatever the answer to that question is, that’s your direction.

I get excited about the idea of building new businesses, either myself or helping others to do so. It’s like a puzzle to me, a very creative puzzle. I also love writing and programming. So I spend the majority of my day doing these things. I’m advising one young man to build a blog around his passion for horse racing, another to build a very specific t-shirt business and a young woman to build a business around her passion for history. Can you imagine spending all your time working on something that turns you on? Then do it! Vaynerchuk’s book is a good starting point but you’ll find this advice given by all of the industry’s most respected figures.

The key is not to be in it just for money: be in it because you love it. You might not make more, working for yourself, than you did as an employee. But you’ll have a great time doing it.

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Inbox Zero – myth or reality?

by KevPartner on 19 March, 2010

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If, like me you get hundreds of emails a day (in my case from 5 main accounts) then you need a way to effectively handle them. Having spent years struggling with keeping most messages in my inbox (which ended up with thousands of entries) I tried “managing” my inbox down to zero in Thunderbird by either responding to emails instantly, deleting them or moving them into another folder.

It lasted a few days. However, on moving our email onto Google Apps Professional (essentially the Gmail client) it has become not only possible but actually easy. I am not an organised person by nature so the fact that I can achieve it means ANYONE can. [click to continue…]

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Don't sell your soul: why you should never sell equity in your company!

by KevPartner on 16 March, 2010

Be gentle with me guys: this is my first video blog entry: I will get better and there is some good stuff in this!

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How can you protect yourself from being shafted by a shifty client?

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by KevPartner on 15 March, 2010

…I wish I knew the answer to that. At the end of the day, the client is the one with the money and they therefore hold the ultimate whip hand. The bigger your reliance on an individual client or a small group, the greater their control over you and a few clients find themselves unable to resist exerting that control. It is only a few I hasten to add, but when it happens it can be devastating.

1: Many small clients > a few big clients

The first step is the business model you operate under. Given the choice I would always choose a business model that involves having lots of small clients over a few big clients. Let’s think about a modest microbusiness with a turnover of £50,000 per year. If that business has two major clients each of whom is therefore worth £25,000 to the bottom line: that’s a LOT of power. If the business has 1,000 clients each of whom brings in £50, then each client has much, much less power. That doesn’t mean that they should be treated with less respect but it does mean that if, for whatever reason, you decide to go your separate ways (or even refund them) it’s not going to bankrupt the company.

What if you’re in a business like the first example? If it were me, I’d move towards the second one bit by bit. [click to continue…]

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How to come up with Small Business Ideas

by KevPartner on 11 March, 2010

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One of the most often asked questions is “How do I come up with an idea for my small business?”. Bear in mind, from the start, that coming up with an idea is just the first step in a long process – once you have an idea, you need to research it before deciding to base your business on it. Far too many businesses are started up without this level of research and this is one of the main reasons for early business failure.

Here are some of my techniques for idea-generation:

What do you like doing?

A good business is based around your skills and knowledge. If you like doing something, you’ll naturally be better at it and more informed simply because your interest level is that much higher. This is why boys who are completely turned off by school can explain, in great depth, the off-side rule or list their favourite team’s players faultlessly.
Whilst it is possible to force yourself to learn about a subject you’re not naturally interested in, you’re pushing against the grain when you do that. Make a list of the things you like to talk about and do and see if there are any business ideas there. [click to continue…]

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