PRIME business club

Several interesting case studies from the US in this article by Margaret Heffernan about “why midlife women make superior entrepreneurs“. It comes from More, an American magazine aimed at women in their forties and over.  

Among the myths challenged are:

• Entrepreneur Myth #1: You Have to Be Young
• Entrepreneur Myth #2: You Need Heaps of Cash
• Entrepreneur Myth #3: You Have to Be an Expert
• Entrepreneur Myth #4: Women’s Businesses Are Small

A new small-business award has been launched for those who live on Merseyside, backed by the Liverpool Daily Post and Dominique Faversham Group. The prize is 12 months’ mentoring and support, and a loan of up to £100,000. There are three age categories, including one for people aged 50+. The closing date is noon on the 1st of October 2007.
More details at

www.thesearchmerseyside.com

Here are three good articles on business networking.

The first recommends a systematic approach to business networking, complete with an action plan template you can download and print out.

The article and action plan are both aimed at freelance journalists, but you can apply the principles to many other industries. Journalism is very obviously dependent on networking, but so less obviously is much business-to-business selling.

Many business-to-consumer services that depend on personal reputation can also benefit if you make sure you become known in the right circles.

If you prefer a less structured approach here’s a good list of networking tips from the two founders of Everywoman, who have certainly used it to great effect.

“Networking is a great tool to expand your business – we used it out of necessity when Everywoman was being born, because we didn’t have a budget for any form of marketing.”

Finally here are 20 practical tips from networking guru Will Kintish, who makes a living training people on the subject.

Date: Wednesday 05th September 2007, 9:30am to 3:30pm

Venue: Business Link Humber; 45a Newdown Road; South Park Industrial estate; Scunthorpe; DN17 2TX

Status: PRIME event

This 6 hour beginner’s workshop will help you come up with and develop your ideas.
You will then begin to make a decision on whether you would like to work for yourself. 

The workshop will include understanding your strengths, likes and dislikes.
Staff from local organisations will be invited along to talk and will also be available on a one to one basis.

A free lunch will be provided on the day.

To book your place on this workshop please contact Faye Banerjee on:0800 783 1904
Email: faye.banerjee@ace.org.uk

Printable details

Location map

Enterprise Nation, whose podcasts you can see listed lower down the page, has launched a new award for home-based businesses. The closing date is the  17th of September 2007, and the winner will be announced on the 1st of  October.

The free competition is easy to enter, requiring just 200 words under each of three headings on the entry form. You need to have been going for at least six months and be located in the UK.

The prizes are modest, consisting mainly of publicity. But Enterprise Nation has attracted some good judges including designer Wayne Hemingway, Rachel Bridge of the Sunday Times and Ann Carter-Gray of the renamed DTI - now called the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform. This should help secure some good coverage.

Some common business dangers

1. Failure to sell

New businesses should concentrate on winning their critical early customers before anything else. If you are uncomfortable with selling, try another approach. Selling doesn’t have to be the traditional hard sell, but it does need to be done. Even if you are busy now, set time aside for thinking about where your next customers are going to come from.

• Feel bad about selling?
• Basics of selling explained
• Free club course on marketing (audio podcast and workbook)
  
• Understanding customer needs

2. Not watching the cash position

Know what you have got from week-to-week, as this is a very common cause of often completely unnecessary failure. A sudden cash shortfall can happen even if things are going well. Indeed the cash can run out just when you get very busy, as you may be spending a lot on stock or materials and not have time to watch out for pitfall no 3.

• Managing your cash flow

3. Failure to chase for payment

Chase up money promptly or they’ll think you don’t need to be paid. Don’t be embarrassed - if you have done the work you deserve to be paid. But don’t take it personally - be businesslike at all times. Regular reminders and clear terms of payment can forestall many problems, but if you have to go to law the small claims court (the county court) is quicker and simpler than many people expect.

• Dealing with late payment excuses
• How to get paid on time
• Checklist on controlling credit

4. Underpricing

Pricing is one of the most difficult things for a new business to get right, because you don’t yet know all your costs or have much evidence of how your customers respond to price. A common mistake is to overlook some major costs and thus price too low. It’s hard to increase prices later to the same customer. If on the other hand your prices are too high then achieving sales will be difficult and your marketing costs will be high. If you suspect this is the case experiment with lower prices through time-limited sales or trial offers to particular customers.

• The dangers of competing on price alone
• Regrets charging too little for too long
• Experts answer 10 pricing questions
• Lloyds TSB on pricing your product or service
• Three firms find out how low they can go (article and audio podcast)

5. Failure to do a reality check on your basic business idea

Any entrepreneur needs enthusiasm to overcome all the inevitable obstacles, but don’t let it blind you to fundamental flaws in your business idea. Think of all the dreadful singers that enter The X Factor. Though their mum likes them, and their friends say they like them, a look in their audience’s eyes should alert them to the fact that they are not good singers. Look at your business from the point of view of your audience, the paying customers. Are there enough of them, and will they really pay enough to give you a good income when all your costs are taken into account?

• How to thoroughly research your market
• On the other hand you could be right
• Reality check from Dragon Peter Jones

6. Ignoring seasonality

It is amazing how many types of business show a strong seasonal pattern of demand that is not obvious to the outsider. It’s not just toys, ice cream and fireworks but journalism, dog kennels and car parts. When you enter a market do all you can to quiz people in the know about its distinctive seasonal pattern. Methods used to counter big seasonal swings include adjusting pricing (as in the holiday industry), diversifying into a market with an opposite pattern and exporting to somewhere with different seasons.

• Copying with seasonality

7. Forgetting about the competition

It’s a rare business that has no competition, so you need to think up good ways of dealing with it. Avoid entering a crowded market unless you have a very good plan for winning customers. Aromatherapists abound in some localities - which makes it difficult for any of them to make a profit. Try to make your product or service unique in some way that matters to the customer, so you are not competing head on. Take a lesson from the animal world and search out your own niche.

• Finding space in a crowded market - operating in a niche
• Changing marketing tack to beat competition

8. Ignoring legalities

Only take risks in the area you are most confident in - which for most people isn’t the law. Minimise risks everywhere else so you have less to worry about. Always check the small print in contracts before you sign. You don’t need to be obsessed with regulations, but watch that you have the necessary licences if for example you are street trading, that you obey hygiene laws if handling food and that you know the basics of employment law if you take someone on to help. Legal wrangles can waste a lot of your time or even close you down if you get it wrong.

• Health and safety basics that no business can ignore
• Check for government regulations that might apply to your type of business
• Top data protection pitfalls for small enterprises
• The legal aspects of taking on new premises

9. Getting involved with scams and con artists

The world of business has its seamier side. Be cautious of the off-the-shelf business opportunities market - some venerable scams are still active particularly in self-employed selling businesses, and new ones are always being invented. Franchises should be BFA members. If not why not?

• Is that trading scheme legal?
• PRIME’s guide to buying a franchise
• British Franchise Association site

10. Getting trapped in long-term arrangements

New and small businesses are usually best off keeping things flexible, so they can move to where the money is. You don’t want to get locked into anything you can’t get out of easily. This applies to premises, hiring staff and contracts with suppliers. The big strength of small businesses is that they can learn by doing and quickly change to take advantage of the opportunities they discover. You don’t want to throw this advantage away.

• Getting the right deal - negotiating skills

Comments please. We are preparing this list for a guide which we’ll make available (with links to helpful resources) both online and in printed form. We may also use it in future live workshops.

But have we got the right top 10?

Date: Tuesday 23rd October 2007 9:30am to 2.00pm

Venue: St Swithun’s Community Centre, Arncliffe Road, Eastmore, Wakefield WF1 4RW

Status: PRIME event

Ever dreamed of being your own boss?

This free PRIME workshop will focus on

• using your skills and talents
• developing your business idea
• the basics of being self-employed

For more information and to book your place call 0800 7831904

Location map

Date: Thursday 13 September 2007

Venue: Fairfield Hall, Croydon CR9 1DG

Status: PRIME attended

The Open Day programme is the biggest government business support road show, designed to provide free information and support to businesses, through a series of exhibitions across the country.

It is organised by HM Revenue and Customs, who invite local organisations and representatives of national bodies such as PRIME that can provide support and advice to local businesses. The organisations chosen all operate on an “other than for profit” i.e. non-commercial basis.

At this free all-day event you will have access to a full team of experts who provide advice and technical support on a range of subjects, covering every stage of your business from start-up, through growth and expansion to pension arrangements when you retire. Free seminars cover topics such as funding, marketing and enhancing your business through new technology.

Click on the link below to find out more and to book your place.

Website Link: www.businessadviceday.gov.uk

Click for directions

Date: Tuesday 16th October 2007, 6pm to 9pm

Venue: Crowne Plaza Hotel Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB3 6BW

Status: PRIME event

Finding New Futures is a free workshop especially for older people considering setting up their own business.

PRIME together with its partners in the East of England are putting on these evening workshops to give you the opportunity to find out about different routes in to business, including franchising.

Please book early to ensure your place.

Freephone: 0800 783 1904
or email faye.banerjee@ace.org.uk

Printable version

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Date: Wednesday 12th September 2007, 6pm to 9pm

Venue: Premier Travel Inn Chelmsford (Boreham)

Status: PRIME event

Finding New Futures is a free workshop especially for older people considering setting up their own business.

PRIME together with its partners in the East of England are putting on these evening workshops to give you the opportunity to find out about different routes in to business, including franchising.

Please book early to ensure your place.

Freephone: 0800 783 1904
or email faye.banerjee@ace.org.uk

Click for map

Printable Flyer

Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of Easyjet and Easygroup, has teamed up with charity Leonard Cheshire and the British Chamber of Commerce to introduce a new £50,000 award. It is aimed specifically at people who have achieved business success despite having a disability.

The deadline for entries is the 14th of September 2007. To be eligible you need to have been trading for under three years, have a turnover of over £10,000 per year and personally own at least 40 per cent of the business. You must also identify as a disabled person and show how the prize money would benefit the business.

The prize - a single cheque for £50K, will be handed over by Stelios personally as part of the British Chamber of Commerce’s Awards ceremony at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum on the 29th November. More details and an entry form can be found at www.disabledentrepreneur.org

“Self employment is the only viable option for many disabled people as it offers flexibility and helps bypass much of the prejudice that sadly still exists in the workplace”, said Sir Stelios . “With 50 per cent of disabled adults out of work, helping to remove the barriers disabled people face to being in business is essential.”

If you are a new small business in Nottingham then you could win £3,000 in the fourth annual Spirit of Enterprise Awards, run by PRIME-partner Nottinghamshire Business Venture. There are also several smaller prizes for businesses in particular categories.

Refreshingly you can enter “Young Business of the Year” whatever your age - because it’s the age of the business that counts.  It must have been established after the 1st of April 2005 to qualify, so aged under two-and-a- quarter.

Other categories include ones for woman-owned, creative/fashion and rapid growth businesses - this last is open for enterprises that were established any time after 1st of April 2003 .

All the category winners go on to compete for the £2,500 grand prize and title of Nottingham Enterprise of the Year.

The deadline for entries is 12 noon on Friday 31 August 2007. To be eligible to enter you must be located in Nottingham, employ no more than 10 people and be legal. It’s OK to be a self-employed sole trader - you don’t have to be incorporated as a company or partnership. And you can enter in more than one category.

Read the stories of past winners 

Download the entry form

There are several free on-line directories that are useful both for finding services you require and for researching the local competition.

Near.co.uk is a good example, and one of the simplest and quickest to use. It provides a straightforward list of businesses by type and town. For example:

Wedding services near Widnes
Chain saws near Chepstow
Car auctions near Carshalton

The data for Near’s listings comes from Thomson local directories, so it’s generally up to date. What’s good about Near is that it presents the information in a simple and clear way.

Yell is the Yellow Pages equivalent. The interface is a bit more cluttered but you can plot results on a map. On some of the examples we tried it seemed to have fewer entries than Thomson-based Near. But it is a more a intelligent system than Near, and will suggest a range of different sorts of supplier that might, for example, offer chain saws for example, rather than giving up after finding only one result.

But probably the best of the simple listing sites is - rather surprisingly, BT’s online phone book. This now has an excellent business look-up function. It’s fast, returns numerous results, and will suggest other relevant categories. Here’s the chain-saws in Chepstow query for example.

This service is free for “personal use”, and you can increase the number of results per page up to 50 in the preferences menu. So you could obtain the details of lots of businesses.

Thomson Local, the source of Near’s data, is another site well suited for compiling big lists. Compared to Near you need to think a bit more when using it. For example it returned no results for a simple query about car auctions in Carshalton - because strictly speaking there aren’t any. But if you manually widen your area of search to Surrey or the South East it starts finding them. So it’s a bit literal in how it handle queries. But it has vast amounts of data and is good for scanning large areas of the country.

There are limitations on using any of these sites for compiling big lists. Partly these are practical. Thomson Local for instance limits the results returned to 200 in any one search, so if you are looking for a very popular category like pubs in the South East it will miss a lot.

There may also be restrictions in the terms of use that seek to prohibit you from using the data from the web site “for any kind of direct marketing, telemarketing or electronic marketing”. Whether or not these are enforceable in law is a moot point, but if you use the site heavily you may find it stops working.

What’s going on here is that many of these firms have other paid-for products that they would rather sell you for compiing big lists. These can be more convenient and indeed cost effective, by for example allowing you to sort on more criteria so that less of your mailing effort is wasted.

Returning to what’s available for free, UpMyStreet is a more elaborate site going well beyond a directory, but it’s worth investigating as it offers others sorts of free information that may be useful for your business. You can simply use its Find My Nearest feature - here’s the results it returns for car auctions near Carshalton, which are displayed by default on a map.

But it can also tell you much more about a neighbourhood in response to a post code or town name. This includes a brief free Acorn profile - Acorn is a marketing system that attempts to describe the type of people you can expect to find in the area, including their likely income level, age, the sort of homes they live in and some of their consumer interests. Here’s what it thinks of the residents of Chepstow.

Elsewhere on the site you can find out about local property prices and crime statistics. Obviously these features are mainly aimed at home buyers. But they are also of interest when researching likely areas for customers or premises.

Damage to the wiring at our central office was worse than expected, so the power has been shut down till Monday while it is ripped out and replaced. This means we have temporarily lost email and phones until the start of next week (6th of August).

However PRIME’s programme of free events in other parts of the UK is still carrying on. And you can contact PRIME partners for business advice in the normal way. Just use the Find Nearest search box to you right to find their phone number and web address so you can contact them directly.

Date: Wednesday 15th August 2007, 6pm to 9pm

Venue: Holiday Inn, Peterborough - West

Status: PRIME event

Finding New Futures is a free workshop especially for older people considering setting up their own business. It explores the pros and cons of different routes in to business including taking up a franchise.

Please book early to ensure your place.

Freephone: 0800 783 1904
or email faye.banerjee@ace.org.uk

Printable details

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