PRIME business club

The customer is not always right, argues this article from Business Week. If they are taking up too much time sometimes it’s better to part company and put the effort into finding new business.

“All that time and energy I had spent on resolving conflict was now spent on getting new customers”, reported one business owner whose revenues were up by a third six months after the split.

“When, Why, and How to Fire That Customer” also goes into less drastic ways of dealing with problem or unprofitable customers. Sometimes you can save them by re-negotiating the terms of the relationship.

There’s also a useful graphic that shows how to work out the profit on a given client.

easyJet founder and serial entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou is entering the serviced office business with a chain of easyOffices targeted especially at start-ups. The first opens in London on the 14th of November 2007. Other offices are expected to follow swiftly in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Like other easyGroup businesses Stelios has given his serviced offices a twist. The price you pay for a unit depends on how much demand there is when you book. So a unit that costs the minimum of £99 a week if you book well in advance will cost more if you leave it till there are few units left.

The London site, located in Kensington, has 35 units, which you can hire for a minimum of one week up to a maximum of three months. Booking is online at www.easyoffice.co.uk. At the moment there is a special offer of £10 if you book now for the first week.

According to Stelios, easyOffice is “designed with the true start-up entrepreneur in mind who knows it’s a smart business move not to waste money, especially at the start of a new venture”.

There are off course plenty of other serviced offices on the market, so it remains to be seen whether easyOffice will shake the sector up, either by reducing prices or introducing more flexible bookings.

But even if not, Stelios has a second string to his bow. In partnership with established brokerage firm Instant Offices you can search and book offices NOT owned by Stelios in around 4,000 locations in the UK and worldwide from the www.easyoffice.co.uk site.

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.

On the 1st of July 2007 the prohibition on smoking that has been in place in Scotland for well over a year and in Wales and Northern Ireland since April finally arrives in England.

For most businesses it won’t involve more than putting a few notices up - but there are penalties for failing to comply so it is worth checking what is required.

There are separate official guidance sites for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. They all contain brief summaries of the law, frequently asked questions and officially-approved no smoking signs you can download for free.

The ban affects almost all enclosed places of work and indoor premises open to the public. Strictly speaking it will be illegal for workers to smoke - or to permit customers or other members of the public to smoke - even if they all want to.

Vehicles used for work by more than one person must also be smoke free. And they must display No Smoking signs.

There some exceptions - residential accommodation, designated rooms in hotels, submarines and - bizarrely, refueling vessels.

In Northern Ireland interpretation of the law has already been relaxed to allow actors to puff away “if the artistic integrity of the performance makes it appropriate for them to smoke”. In Scotland this concession was only achieved after a struggle.

So England will probably get the law with some of the rough edges knocked off - but there is no guarantee of this. Basically, from the 1st of July smoking at work will be forbidden across the UK - but with some local variations.

Does the law apply to sole traders? It does if you work with someone else indoors or have customers or suppliers visiting you regularly in your enclosed space. But if you work entirely on your own, particularly in your own home, you are permitted to make your own decision.

Meanwhile the BBC is reporting that Cherie Blair has been hired by an erotic nightclub to challenge the smoking ban about to come into force in England.

“Dave West, who runs the HeyJo nightclub in London, believes the ban will breach the rights of staff and his guests.”

Funded by advertising and run as a small business, Armchair Advice was set up by Greg Paine after he unexpectedly found himself without a job in mid career, aged 46. The site is particularly good for those newly-made redundant or worried about becoming so.

The BBC web site has a collection of good short articles about starting in business.

Highlights include:

Getting started

Where to work

Business plans

Managing your finances

Research and marketing your business

Tools of the trade

Dealing with the law

Tax, National Insurance and VAT

When it all goes wrong

Business abroad

If you are thinking of becoming a self-employed sales person, distributor or agent then it’s worth reading the Trading Schemes Guide on the Department of Trade and Industry’s web site. It gives an idea of some of the pitfalls, and what is and what is not currently permitted.

You need to be aware that in the UK the sector is regulated by statute. The regulations are there to protect not just customers, but also people new to business who can end up in debt and with unsold stock on their hands. The rules give you rights as well as obligations, so they are not just red tape, but a response to past business malpractice.

The sort of businesses that must comply with the Trading Schemes Act, the Trading Schemes Regulations and the Fair Trading Act include direct selling, network marketing, multi-level marketing and multi-level franchising.

Franchising that only involves two levels - franchisor and franchisee, is covered by different rules, and is largely self-regulated. PRIME has produced a free guide about the pros and cons of ventures of this type for the over 50s called Buying a franchise which you can download here.

If you are considering getting involved in this sort of off-the-shelf business we recommend you also check out the British Franchise Association and Equal Create Project web sites.

Anyone thinking of taking up an off-the-shelf business opportunity that isn’t proper franchising needs to do some very careful checks first - to make sure everything is above-board and legitimate. A first port of call might be the Direct Selling Association www.dsa.org.uk which has codes of conduct that are worth reading and that members sign up to.

The government-funded Business Link network is a good source of advice on a whole range of business issues, including trading schemes and franchising as well as original one-off businesses. You can find your local Business Link at www.businesslink.gov.uk

Citizen’s Advice can also often help with specific problems, such as business and personal debt and legal disputes. But if you are investing much money selling something for someone else you probably need your own lawyer. The BFA has a list of solicitors experienced in this area.

Finally for those thinking of becoming self-employed or setting up their own original business the UK has a network of local enterprise agencies that offer free impartial help. Enterprise agencies in partnership with PRIME can be found on this site - just click on the relevant map or symbol for your region.

You’ll never know if you don’t try.

EnterQuest, the excellent free enterprise newsletter from Cobweb, has a useful summary of the awards and competitions announced so far this year.

 As EnterQuest says, though applying for an award can be a distraction, it can also be an excellent way of benchmarking your business and generating some PR.

You can sign up for the EnterQuest newsletter at the site.

Peter Jones, one of the dragons from BBC 2’s Dragon’s Den and the tycoon of ITV 1’s forthcoming Tycoon has an interesting mixture of tips, opinions and business resources on his site.

There’s also a forums area you can contribute to (don’t forget to add your web site address if you’ve got one at the end of your posting - it’s a good habit to promote your own site at every opportunity).

1. Business Link
Business Link is a government-funded chain of advice shops located throughout England. Different arrangements apply in other parts of the UK.These government-backed agencies will generally also know about any public-sector grants for business, although these are much less common than many people believe - and often have strings attached.You can find your local Business Link from the link above. The web site also has a good section about the different options for financing a start-up business. For local sources of start-up finance, including CDFIs operating in your area, Business Links are also worth contacting.

2. Business Eye
The equivalent of Business Link in Wales. You can find your nearest office from the map on the link above.

3. Business Gateway
Government-funded business advice network for Scotland. The link above explains the sorts of finance, loans - and sometimes even grants, available in Scotland. The banking laws are different in Scotland, so many schemes operating in England aren’t available north of the border. For more on Scottish business support see here

4. Northern Ireland
A free Start a Business Service is available right across Northern Ireland. It includes help with finding finance.

All the big High Street banks have small-business information on their web sites, but this set of free factsheets from Lloyds TSB is particularly useful.

Highlights include:

Is self-employment right for me?

Before deciding to start your own business, there are a number of important questions you should ask yourself.

Starting up for yourself - what you need to do

If you want your business to do well, you can dramatically raise the chances of success by following a few simple but time-honoured tips.

Business plans

A business plan can provide you with a clear sense of direction. It can give your business something to measure its progress against - helping you identify any problematic issues early on and take appropriate action.

Legal pitfalls that can catch new businesses out

We all make mistakes but sometimes the law is not very forgiving – ignorance of it has never been a defence.

Choosing and protecting your business name

Be creative with your business name but make sure you protect it.

Download and print out Ideas for Business, a free workbook from PRIME. It’s based on a successful series of live workshops we’ve been running around the county.

The workbook takes as its starting point your individual interests and experiences. After all, if you are over 50 you should have plenty to draw on.

You can download the workbook from here. Alternatively email prime@ace.org.uk or call on Freephone 0800 783 1904 and we’ll send you a paper copy.

NatWest is giving away a free business startup course that’s delivered by email. You can sign up on the NatWest web site by giving them a few details , including your name and email address, business idea and nearest town.

You should then immediately get back a set of relevant fact sheets (from Cobweb Information, a specialist publisher that PRIME also sometimes uses), followed by daily emails on key startup topics over the next week.

• Day 1 Planning and information about your business idea
• Day 2 Researching your market
• Day 3 Choosing premises
• Day 4 Finding the money to start your business
• Day 5 Starting up legally
• Day 6 Who you need to tell before you start-up
• Day 7 Who to ask for help, information, finance and support in your region

The emails then continue at a reduced frequently over the next few months.

Microsoft Office Live is a free, ad-supported service that gives you a web site with your choice of domain name (e.g. www.examplefirm.com), a set of matching e-mail addresses and tools to manage customer contacts and existing documents. The UK version launches in “beta” (public test) mode on 15 Nov 06, the same day the US version completes testing and goes fully live. Microsoft has said the UK version will remain free once testing completes, with the revenue to run it coming from advertising.

More details at ZD Net UK

Business Link for London now has a set of free online self-assessment tools on its site. They let you check how your business is going or whether your start-up plan has unspotted flaws. You don’t have to be from London to use them. You do have to register but the site still works if you give an address outside London.