Small Business Matters

Four ways to improve learning in your small business

There are plenty of ways that everyone in your organisation – even you - can keep learning something new to benefit the business, and you don’t necessarily have to spend lots of money. Here are some ideas.

Learn from your employees

An employer-employee relationship in a small business is not just a one-way street. Every employee can contrib­ute to the intelligence-gathering process in your company.

Why you need a marketing plan (and three key questions to help you write one)

This guest post is by Pippa Highfield of Brainwork Marketing. She outlines why she thinks all small businesses should have a marketing plan and provides her tips for writing one.

If you have ever purchased advertising space just because the offer was too good to miss, or have set up a Facebook page because everyone else is doing it, you are not alone. With a baffling array of marketing options available it isn’t any wonder that many small business owners see marketing as a key challenge.

So how can writing a marketing plan actually help your business? Simply put, your marketing plan will help you focus your limited resources (time and money) on your best prospects (your most profitable customers) to ensure your business prospers.

You will find lots of templates, theories and entire books written about marketing planning. The following three questions will, I hope, act as a starting point to help you on your way to writing a good plan:

Mid-year reforecast – now is the time to do it

This guest post is by Michael Austin – a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and the founder and managing director of Blue Dot Consulting, a firm of Chartered Accountants based in South West London.  

If your business has a December year-end, you are not too far from half-way through your financial year. How is it going?

You might be beating your budget or falling behind, but it is highly unlikely that you are exactly on budget and also unlikely that your budget for 2012 is now an accurate gauge of business performance.

There is little to be gained from comparing actual performance against an out-of-date benchmark. Perhaps it is time for a reforecast?

Government launches £200 million Growth Accelerator programme

A £200 million programme to help up to 26,000 of England’s brightest businesses achieve their ambition and potential has been launched by Business Secretary Vince Cable.

Funded by the Department for Business Innovations and Skills (BIS), GrowthAccelerator is to be delivered by private sector experts from a consortium led by Grant Thornton and comprising Winning Pitch, Oxford Innovation, Pera and seven other local delivery partners.

GrowthAccelerator is available for companies with “genuine potential for rapid and sustainable growth”. The new partnership between the private sector and Government will see proven business experts working with companies to identify their barriers to growth and ways to overcome them. This will be on issues such as securing finance, commercialising innovation or developing leadership and management capability.

As well as coaching, GrowthAccelerator provides comprehensive support by fast-tracking clients to trusted providers of business advice such as UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) and professional advisers, as well as relevant networks such as Angel Investors.

Are you eligible?

My First Employee: Dan Crow, Songkick

In the latest video in the My First Employee series, we hear from the chief technology officer of Songkick, Dan Crow.

He talks about his experience at a previous company when he hired his first employee, and tells us how he was able to do so much more when he had an extra pair of hands and the additional skills that came with them.

The My First Employee series was launched to coincide with the One Giant Leap report, which addresses the barriers that small businesses face in taking on employees.