Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Not all businesses are the same, so why should all business support be?

The process of developing a business from the embers of an idea is a mammoth task and the majority of entrepreneurs will take as much help as is available. They call up business link, attend a few HMRC workshops, go to networking events and attend skills development programmes where available.

As newbie to being an entrepreneur you are not sure how long this take and therefore spending money and time on anything has to be seen in the light of moving the business forward.

In the previous years we have seen the simplification of business support and now a major reduction in the support is not making each industry sector look how they can support their own.

There has been a major amount of research done into business clustering and the benefits.

The tech clusters around Universities such as Cambridge, manufacturing in the North West and material engineering in Sheffield. Therefore both the regions and the industry itself needs these clusters to develop, grow and become the defacto region for this type of business. These self-regulating clusters should be the catalyst for regional growth based on local business developing a self help group.

Industry has a long industry of developing such organisations such as the traditional guilds (which still live on in Germany) and Chamber of Commerce, CBI and IOD. However their failure in the past to manage government funded projects is based on individual self-interest and not that of the group, seeing the one profit from helping others in the community.

This is because not all industry is the same! Having network of general business advisors creates a failure point as everyone has to be a generalist and not a specialist. If you are a specialist then providing your services as a consultant is not always done for money. However, if it’s a £50 million project, then who doesn’t want part of this pie.

The important aspect of this support is that those providing the support want to keep these young businesses as members, they know they have to provide the very best to benefit. One mistake and the relationship fails and that business move on without your support, never to be seen again.

So we should be developing our business networks to support start-ups and pay them on the success they have in clustering these businesses, growing them and then ensuring they are exporting. All things that many of our industry sector networks do so well.

Blog

I’m putting you all on the naughty list!

As we come closers to clocking off for this year, I always start to review what has happened and more importantly try and understand how I can do things better next year.

The major concern I see is that the majority of people have not tried to be more enterprising this year. They have tried to do their business as usual, using the same business models, trying to hang on to the same funding models, dead end public sector jobs and even running the same university degrees which lead to zero employment prospects (unistats.direct.gov.uk).

We all have to make changes everyday to continue to develop and it through this development we can ensure we stay with the flow. This should be every person’s manta.  I am always amazed at why we think that doing the same thing for hundreds of years will provide prosperity in this country, whereas there are billions of other people in the world who are constantly looking at how they can develop faster, higher quality, cheaper, more effective methods to do what we have done for hundreds of years. These people are taking advantage of the global economy.

Its only through using innovation, our technology advance, our amazing communication advantage and selling in real time to the global customer we can move the economy forward. Its not through spending money we don’t have on goods we don’t make.

Our resistance to change is shown in the way the UK deals with Europe, the way we run our national infrastructure and how we educate our people. I am a great believer in if its not broken don’t fix it, however sometimes you have to take some hard decisions based on the rest of the planet and not just on the few who can’t be bothered to change (especially when their pension means the young will be paying for it in taxes for the next thirty years).

So lets make 2012, the year that we embrace change and especially entrepreneurial change, making sure that we develop new forms of income, new business models and creating a network of like-minded people who are developing a prosperous future.

So here are some New years resolutions for you for 2012:

  • Make 2012 you most enterprising year!
  • Become a self made Entrepreneur in 2012
  • Employ someone else in your business in 2012
  • Start a new business in 2012
  • Develop multi streams of income in 2012