The Microbusiness Entrepreneur — A blog for people with big ideas running very small businesses

Finding Direction

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 [...]

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How to mend a broken image

Toyota has had a rough time of it lately – entirely its own fault. The business world is replete with examples of companies founded on exceptional quality losing sight of this over the years and compromising the quality in the name of cost cutting. Anyone who’s read or listened to Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits [...]

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9 out of 10 small firms unhappy about the Budget

A press release from the Forum for Private Business says: More than nine out of ten smaller businesses were left disappointed by this week’s Budget, a snap poll has revealed. In a survey of its members, the Forum of Private Business found that just 5% believe Alistair Darling’s proposals will create an environment for their [...]

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Why the Budget doesn’t matter

Today is Budget day in the UK. This means that our Chancellor, Alistair Darling, will be walking the incredibly difficult path between the economic realism needed in the face of this country’s huge overdraft and the need for his party to be re-elected in a few weeks time. (Incidentally, what a backward country we are [...]

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How to have your ads appear in GMail

If you’re a Gmail user you’ll be familiar with the “Sponsored Listings” on the right hand side of the page when you view an email. These are ads supplied by the Google Adwords system and displayed via the “Content Network”. To have your ads appear here, you need to have a Google Adwords campaign running. [...]

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Inbox Zero – myth or reality?

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 [...]

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Getting organised: the online Filofax

As a business owner, keeping organised is critical especially if, like me, you’re naturally disorganised! I’ve been using Backpack by 37Signals for a number of years and all of my businesses have a separate Backpack account. It’s a very easy to use, fairly free-form organisational tool and I use it largely for keeping track of [...]

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

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?

…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 [...]

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Coming up with a “nonsense” business name

My general recommendation is to include your main keywords in your business name (and certainly in your URL) but there are occasions when you might want to break this rule. In that case, you might want an English-sounding name that has no specific meaning. The website Wordoid will generate such names for you and indicate [...]

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