The key factor in maintaining long-term viability for any business is having a competitive advantage. Probably the best book written on the subject is ‘Competitive Advantage – Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance’ by Michael Porter in 1985. Essentially it boils down to 2 factors – in summary you win by…
Raising funding for startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) or even large projects is still a difficult and painful process out there. I had a long discussion with an experienced consultant recently who works with tech startups and his prognosis for the smaller end of fund-raising circa £250,000 was…
One of the first things entrepreneurs get advised is to make their business tax efficient. It is a minefield for businesses and hiring a good tax adviser or accountant is paramount but here are some tips that help in ensuring that your business is tax efficient. 1. Difference between tax avoidance…
We all make mistakes. It’s a fact of life. The key to success is how we deal with failure and overcome the negatives. Whether it’s a business startup or your business hitting a recession, failure can be painful. In business, failure can be even more difficult to deal with. Or…
How many times have you celebrated achieving goals in your business with your team? Once a year, once in two years? Or is it more? If you celebrate success more than once a year, you’re probably on the right track. We all get sucked into the daily grind and pay…
Networking – it’s what most of us fear before we gain experience. Even those with experience aren’t experts. We can keep on learning. Networking is essential for a startup founder and also for established businesses to grow their business. I started my own consulting and part-time FD business 10 years…
Startup failure rates are enough to put any budding entrepreneur off – in the UK it is estimated that 2 in 3 businesses fail in the first 3 years and from the Department of Trade and Industry figures, stats show that 70% of businesses fail in the first 10 years!…
Advice on how to start up a business has been written about almost every day and the advice follows the usual steps. 1. Come up with the business idea 2. Research the market for the product or service 3. Write your business plan along with your forecasts for the numbers…
At some stage of its life a business must hire an experienced and effective Finance Director (FD). Finance and figures are not easiest skills to learn for all entrepreneurs or non financial managers. Whether you’re the business owner or the CEO, you need a reliable person to run the finances…
It’s an apt term for sustaining your business without outside funding. The term bootstrapping originates from a fantastic story I read as a child about ‘The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” where the Baron pulls himself out of a swamp by his bootstraps. However, wikipedia asserts the term ‘to have originated…