Business advice to help you grow your SME and small & medium sized company and help you grow your company
Every start-up entrepreneur sets out, armed with flip chart and pens, on a mission to draw up the perfect business plan. This often starts with a grand vision, and is accompanied by the financials to get there. But what continually surprises me, is just how few businesses, big or small, consider the customer drivers that will achieve those numbers.
Ever been sat in a meeting listening to those around the table firing buzzwords back and forth, only to head back to the office to Google the offending words? We certainly have: Where marketing provides an umbrella for so many traditional, digital and creative specialisms it has become one of the biggest culprits for developing its own overly complicated lexicon.
While recent figures from the Federation of Small Businesses show that just under a quarter of its members say they work from home, both employers and employees have to battle with working from home stereotypes and perceptions, not least helped by London Mayor Boris Johnson, who described it as a ‘skivers paradise’.
Star, a medium sized managed technology services company, provides the top 5 ways cloud computing can help businesses unlock growth and realise their full potential.
Peter Drucker said companies need to “innovate or die”, high stakes indeed. To successfully meet the demands of an ever changing marketplace you need to continually respond and innovate to keep pace, but it is expensive and resource intensive. Increasingly that resource means IT.
When faced with exciting marketing ideas, new technologies, and a limited budget, it is easy to become distracted to try everything, but this usually leads to stretched resource, wasted money and often disappointing results. So how do you know which ones to take and which to pass on?
It is crucial to the success of your business that you understand as much about your competitors as possible. Knowing who they are, what they do and what people like or dislike about them will help you to understand your own strengths. It will also help you to know how to position yourself so that you stand out or are more attractive to your target market.
Many companies are missing out on valuable tax refunds for research and development activity explains Richard Cullum, Managing Partner of R&T Consultants who specialise in tax claims for businesses.
Clayton Coke gives us his top tips to cash flow management
As banks continue to replenish their depleted capital stocks in a bid to fall in line with new regulatory targets, lending to small and medium sized business have found difficulty in borrowing money from traditional financial institutions.
Go on, admit it. You know you’ve been tempted. Maybe you actually have. I know I have.
Mark Kingsley-Williams, Director of Trade Mark Direct gives us his top ten tips to sorting out your trademarks.
We are all subject to what are known as “cognitive biases”. These are thought-patterns that we are unaware of, that influence the choices we make. We look at six types of bias that may be affecting the decisions that you make.
Wisdom is in the eyes and ears of the people around you, so to make the right impact with your insights, you need to be able to generate the gravitas. Dr Mark Clayton gives us his top ten tips for making an impact with your ideas.
Depending on the size and scope of your company, this article may or may not directly answer how you measure your Facebook success. However, even if you’re a relative start-up with only a few employees, or even if you’re flying solo, you can still use the information in this article to help you get a solid idea about how well you’re doing on Facebook – just in case the financial figures aren’t explanatory enough.
