PRIME business club

Serviced-office giant Regus has launched a series of offers to help cash-strapped small firms beat the recession. Pride of place among them is three-months free space for new startups.

“You have to start somewhere”, says Mark Dixon, founder and CEO of Regus. “I began at the bottom so I know what it takes to get things moving. Despite the gloomy economic outlook there is still opportunity for businesses to flourish.

“Through our Get Started campaign we want to encourage people to fulfil their entrepreneurial dream by making it easy for them to set up a new venture - giving them and the economy a much needed boost.”

You can apply online here by submitting brief details of your business or planned business. Competition is likely to be fierce, so it is a good idea to apply early. Places on the scheme are limited.

Here is what successful applicants get. If you have a clear plan and are ready to get started then Regus will provide free office space for up to three months. If your business plan is not yet finalised Regus will provide day offices for intense planning and meeting rooms so you can can meet with potential partners, suppliers and customers in a professional setting.

The scheme is also backed by British Chambers of Commerce, which will be running a series of mentoring sessions for new entrepreneurs in Regus centres across the country.

“We believe the key to kick-starting the economy is to help our entrepreneurs create new enterprise”, says Mark. “I’d encourage other private sector companies to support the movement and develop similar packages.”

Mark launched Regus 20 years ago after thinking up the idea on a business trip to Brussels. He noticed how many business people were forced to work from hotels for lack of a more professional environment they could simply rent at short notice as and when they needed it. His first business centre along these lines - in Brussels, has since expanded into a global chain of 950 business centers in 70 countries.

PRIME has teamed up with publisher Kogan Page to get you a discount off any of the publisher’s books. Kogan Page specialises in business books, and have many relevant small business titles. To get the discount just order via this PRIME book shop link (opens in new window), which shows a selection.

At the moment the discount is running at around a third off regular prices, made up of 25 per cent off from Kogan Page and 10 per cent off courtesy of PRIME, but we’ll be reviewing the exact deal in August.

UPDATE: It’s now running at 19 per cent, made up of 10 per cent from PRIME and nine per cent from Kogan Page.

Disclosure: Currently PRIME gets a further 10 per cent of the discounted price from any purchase you make. We are hoping this new revenue stream go a little way towards helping to fund the free guides we ourselves produce.

If you are still thinking about whether to start in business or not, the Essential Business Guide has an 80-page workbook to help you think through the issues. You can download it as a PDF for free to read or print out. The company - which writes books and courses for small businesses, also has two worksheets (in Excel format) you can also download.

If you don’t have Excel on your machine you can still make use of the worksheets. If you get yourself a free Googlemail account it comes with other free software, including a spreadsheet program that can read these files.

All the 150-or-so books from WeBooks.co.uk can be read for free online. The publisher makes its money if you buy a normal paper book or a printable PDF version should you tire of tabbing through page-by-page. But it is perfectly practical to read the whole book for free online, or at least dip into the relevant sections.

Here are some of the titles in the business list.

Book-keeping and Accounting for the Small Business
(Peter Taylor) A useful guide to managing accounts & choosing accounts software, as well as information on double entry bookkeeping, double entry accounts and small business tax.

How to Start Your Own Gardening Business
(Paul Power) All about starting a business in the gardening industry, including writing a gardening business plan, financing the business and managing the accounts.

Preparing a Winning Business Plan
(Matthew Record) A full guide to writing a business plan. It explains what a business plan is, why you need one and how it should relate to your business idea, objectives and projected growth.

Raising Finance for Your Business
(Mark Blayney) Covers funding a business, getting a business loan, as well as looking at the lending market and other sources of finance.

Raising Start-Up Finance
(Phil Stone) Covers different ways of building capital, sources of finance including business grants and business loans, as well as how to assess the true cost of borrowing money.

Setting Up a Complementary Health Practice
(Patricia Bishop) Setting up a health business, including information on working from home, the start-up costs involved, marketing your business and achieving a healthy work-life balance.

Setting Up and Running a Limited Company
(Robert Browning) How to start a limited company, from writing a business plan and choosing a company name to dealing with company accounts.

Start and Run Your Own Business
(Alan Le Marinel) Guidance on starting and running a business, tips on preparing and managing accounts, and ways on raising business finance.

Starting a Business in the Country
(Wendy Pascoe) An in-depth look at starting a rural business - including start-up costs, rural advertising, working from home, marketing and research.

Starting a Sandwich - Coffee Bar
(Stephen Miller) How to set up and run your own coffee and sandwich business, from planning and creating your own identity, to hiring staff, sourcing suppliers and the daily running of the shop.

Starting and Running a B and B
(Stewart Whyte, Nigel Jess) Covers starting and running a small bed and breakfast business, including conducting a feasibility study, writing a business plan and financing the business.

Starting and Running a Catering Business
(Carol Godsmark) This guide includes a wide range of information, from writing a business plan, marketing, promotion and retaining customers.

Starting Your Own Business
(Jim Green) From the initial start-up costs, writing a business plan and marketing your business, to the different types of businesses and how to go after government grants.

Starting Your Own Childminding Business
(Allison Lee) Detailed guide to starting a daycare business, including the regulations, start-ups costs and running the business.

The Kitchen Table Entrepreneur
(Paul Power) Covers the initial stages of starting a business, including conducting market research, writing a business plan and self-motivation.

How do you start or grow a business if you don’t have much money? The answer according to US marketing guru Seth Godin is to focus on the advantages that your lack of resources brings. and build a business that consciously makes use of them.

This is not a collection of money-saving hints and tips. Instead it’s about something much more important. It’s about getting your business model and marketing strategy right so your success does not depend on resources you don’t have but is instead based on exploiting to the full what you do have. That’s why The Bootstrapper’s Bible is already a business classic.

Download The Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin

Don’t be put off by Godin’s American style. By page eight he has got the local cultural references over with and is well into a solid comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of rich and poor businesses. The remaining 90 or so pages is inspirational stuff, and likely to spark practical ideas about how you can turn your situation to your advantage.

A note on printing the PDF: it prints out fine on A4 as long as you select landscape.

There’s an interesting business story behind the work itself. It’s based on a book Godin wrote about 10 years ago. In paper form it sold about 10,000 copies before going out of print. Godin then got the rights back and adapted it into a downloadable e-book that Amazon sold for $3 a pop for another 18 months. Godin then decided there was one more thing he could do to extract value from it - turn it into the current 103-page PDF and put it out completely free.

Within a week of this free version becoming available Godin estimates that more people had downloaded and read it than both previous versions combined. This of course brought him no new revenue - but it did powerfully promote his more recent in-print books that do. So at very little cost to himself he has got large numbers of people sampling his product.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let renowned marketing expert Dr Alan Rae talk you through the essentials of doing business - for free. Adapted specially for PRIME from his course One Man Brand, each programme lasts 30 to 40 minutes and consists of Alan talking you through the key business principles accompanied by illustrations and slides. You can access them instantly now from your PC. Just click on the links below.

1. What’s Your Story

2. Telling it in Writing

3. Telling it Face to Face

4. Telling it On-line

It’s very simple - just click on the link, wait about 10 seconds for the programme to load, and - if your machine is capable of handling the podcast format, sit back and listen.

Most machines will run this course without difficulty, but if you are finding it blocked on a work machine try it from home - some firewalls block the flash podcast format.

It requires a browser with Macromedia Flash installed and a PC or laptop with sound capability.

Once the programme is going you can jump backwards and forwards in the programme using the page up and page down keys.

Free: marketing workbook

There’s also an accompanying 20-page workbook by Alan Rae, called “Your marketing plan”, that we are making available for a limited time only. It helps you define your customers and work out how best to approach them. Download your copy now by clicking on the link below (PDF format), then print it out and go through it with a pen or pencil to get started on Your marketing plan.

Skype allows you to make cheap calls to normal phones worldwide - and free calls to other people with Skype. You install some software on your PC to get it working - or buy a Skype handset from somewhere like Tesco.

You need also Internet access - home broadband is ideal. As a result small and home businesses have been much more active in adopting this way of making cheap phone calls than big businesses or the public sector, which are saddled with more complicated Internet arrangements.

There is discussion of the pros and cons of Skype in the forums.

Gordon Jones’s excellent Shoestring booklets are practical and brief, and pack a lot of good advice into 24 pages each. Written from a UK perspective, they concentrate on affordable actions small businesses can take.

PRIME Business Club users get all three booklets for £15.50 including post and packing, which is £2 off the usual price.