Business Articles

It is becoming more important to ensure that your business acts responsibly and you fully understand the impact it has on society, the environment and the economy.  

Whilst you may already be doing something there are opportunities to allow you to stand out from your competition and working with Charities can ensure that you make a positive difference.

All of a sudden it’s 2023 is just around the corner! Where did this year go?

Look through the articles in our blog section here and you’ll see that there is a common theme to a lot of them:

“Put a plan together, and then monitor progress against it regularly. If progress isn’t in line with the plan, you get early warning and time to solve the problem before it’s all too late.”

So, you’ve finally decided you need to recruit someone. You might be a one man band looking to hire your first employee, or you might already have staff but need to increase the size of the team because the business has outgrown its current staff resources. So, how do you go about it?

Getting your financial planning right is essential to achieve your business plans and here's how....

Smart Support was involved with the Covid19 Response Task Force with the Kent and Medway Growth Hub right from the beginning. Our role was to help businesses through those exceptional times. Here is the story of one of the businesses we supported.

All of a sudden it’s 2022! Where did last year go?

Our journey supporting businesses with the Kent and Medway Growth Hub through the Covid 19 pandemic

We are all too aware that 2020 was a very tough year for many business owners and that, although the vaccine is giving some light at the end of the tunnel, things are far from over.

There is no doubt that Covid-19 has changed our world both today and for the foreseeable future. On so many levels we are facing situations and events we have never prepared for. The lockdown of large parts of society means we now have to look at how we conduct our lives in new ways.

More than that, as we prepare for our businesses to rise like phoenix from the ashes of lockdown, there are so many things to think about; where to start?

With the current Coronavirus crisis we want to offer practical help to our fellow local businesses.  Having supported our own clients, we realise there are a great number of businesses who may feel isolated and don’t know where to get advice and support. We want to help and have produced an overview of the key steps you can take in order to put your business in the best place to cope with the current crisis which you can access here.

We are in this together and need to pool our resources for everyone’s benefit and the support and help available is changing rapidly, so we will also be looking at other support we can provide online and will post about on these when we can and welcome any suggestions or ideas.

I was talking to a business owner recently who was telling me how he had recently increased his marketing and as a result his  turnover had increased dramatically. As a result he was extremely busy. When I asked him if he had any plans to bring some new staff into the business in order that he could cope better, his response was that he couldn’t afford  do that. It turns out that although turnover was up, that didn’t translate into more cash in the bank; in fact quite the reverse. When I asked him why did he think that was, he replied, “You know, I’m not really sure….”

So many of we business owners really hate the idea of the summer, because of the holiday season.

Staff want to take holidays, which reduces the workforce across the company. Lack of staff disrupts production and puts more pressure on the remaining staff to get the work done. You as the business owner can’t go away yourself because if you do everything will stop dead while you’re away.

So it is that many business owners take the path of least resistance and stay at home, while their workforce go away and come back tanned and relaxed two weeks later.

But what if things were different?

In my time I get to talk to a lot of business owners, and it isn’t unusual for them to say that they can’t tell whether their business is doing well or not, and they don’t know what they have to do to improve it. Quite often, my first question is to ask what KPIs they have in place? What numbers do they have about how their business is performing? And quite often they don’t have any.....

“He’s a born salesman; he could sell ice to an eskimo”

 “I’ve never been able to sell; I’m not aggressive enough…..”

“This product is brilliant - if only I knew how to sell I could be a millionaire”

There is no doubt that there are natural salespeople, those who don’t have to think too hard about it, but are just very persuasive and always end up landing the deal. But for a lot of us, selling can be daunting, and we find that our sales results never quite match up to our expectations. We struggle to get in front of prospects and then, when we do, we fail to convert them into customers!

So, Selling – What’s the secret?

Let’s face it, none of us like paying tax.

It seems unfair sometimes, doesn’t it, that a Government who is put in place to govern the country and sometimes imposes upon us policies, rules and restrictions, is allowed to force us to pay for those policies which we don‘t personally agree with or like?

But to quote Benjamin Franklin, “In this world nothing is certain, except death and taxes”.

So how can we turn something which we can do very little about into a tool to help us in our business?

We are all leaders whether we like it or not.

But here’s a question: Are leaders born or made?  Is leadership a function of nature, or nurture? Can leadership be learned?

“I need to make more money from my business! I need more customers! If I double my marketing spend everything will be great.”

But will it? With grand financial gestures comes greater financial risk; If we spend a great deal on marketing there is no guarantee it will bring in more business and if it doesn’t work we may have sunk a great deal of money into it for no gain; if it does work we create a need for more working capital to service the sales!

So what has this got to do with small change?

It’s that time of year again, the one we always look forward to; the summer holidays.

Kids have finished school, the bags are packed, tickets, passports, sun cream………plus for a lot of business owners, mobile phone, laptop or tablet. “Just so that I can keep an eye on the business while we’re away”.

So, you have the appointment to see a prospect. All you have to do now is to close the deal, yes? So why is it that you walk away empty-handed? Do you find selling really, really difficult? If you are, you’re not alone. It isn’t unusual to find that business owners find it hard to sell their product or service even when there is a perfect fit for the needs of the prospect. Why is this?

Listening to coverage of the pre-election budget has got me thinking about tax.

As you know, there has been a great deal of publicity in the media about individuals and organisations using loopholes to avoid paying tax. I didn’t want to jump on the moral bandwagon, there are enough people doing that, but in one discussion I heard recently on the radio, a participant tried to justify why a certain major coffee beverage provider was not paying corporation tax in this country by saying that they were creating  jobs which pay tax and NI, buying and selling products which pay tax and supporting the UK economy through this diverse chain and that the corporation tax was only a tiny element and that they had contributed significantly to the UK economy.

“I need to do some marketing. So I’ll get that bloke I know to run a social media campaign for me, because social media is free marketing isn’t it? I’ll get some flyers printed up and post them through the doors on the local industrial estate and wait for them to call. I’ll get my website revamped; I’ve had an offer from that bloke I met at the networking meeting who said he could do it for £5,000. I’ll put an quarter page ad in the local freebie magazine which goes into 7,500 homes locally.”

“That should do it. I can sit back now and wait for the phone to ring……..”

Except it doesn’t.

What is the Christmas Curse, and what has it got to do with you as a business owner?

What was your dream when you started your business? How close are you to achieving it? What are you doing to make sure you achieve it? What is stopping you?

Most of us struggle to achieve business success, often prevented from succeeding due to mental blocks we have placed on ourselves. I would like to provide you with a few thoughts that should help you stop prevaricating and start changing your business and achieving your goals:

So, after last month’s article about the need to have a financial plan, and how important it is to know your numbers, a business owner said to me “OK, so it’s all very well saying that I need a financial plan but how is that going to stop me going out of business?”

Just before and just after Christmas we surveyed our database of more than 10,000 business owners to try and understand what they saw as their major challenges and opportunities in the coming year.

What are the key challenges facing smaller businesses and how do we approach them?

Business advisors from the network attended the B2B Kent & Medway Exhibition on stand 9 at the Ashford International Hotel on Tuesday 3rd July. The

Last time, we wrote about Vision and the natural follow up for has to be goal setting.A clever man said “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time”Large businesses,...

This Smart Fox Thinks Ahead Welcome to the first of a series of articles where I hope to encourage you to think about what you want from your business, and begin to introduce to you...

Marketing, an essential investment? First of all, let's ask a question: What is marketing?The best definition we have come across is that it is ‘the action or process of promoting and...

The overdraft. The old financing friend of the small business. Provided by the banks to meet short term monthly or seasonal swings in cashflow or in some cases inappropriately used to purchase...

Cash is the lifeblood of every business and no business can survive for long without it. As Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens' novel, David Copperfield, so succinctly put it:"Annual income twenty...

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Running a business is much like being the captain of a ship, but too often we don’t have the basic navigation tools so that when we are blown of course we can find our way back.In the case of a...

HOW FIT IS YOUR BUSINESS?If you woke up one morning with a headache and the headache was still there by early evening it’s a fair bet you’d go to the doctor...

If your car started making...