Authors
Stefan Töpfer, FIoEE
Group CEO & Chairman of WinWeb.
Founder, Editor & Author at The Small Business Blog
As Group CEO and Chairman of WinWeb Stefan has worked to extend the boundaries of the internet by using it in a unique way to simplify the working life of Small Business owners.
Stefan started this blog over 5 years ago and made it into one of the most read small business and micro business blogs on the world wide web.
He has now decided to share this platform with other authors to enhance the benefit to his readers. Over time more authors will be added.
Apart from his role as editor & author of The Small Business Blog, he has his own column on the US tech stock exchange website NASDAQ and on the Hotfrog Small Business Hub.
Stefan serves as the first Chairman of the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs (IoEE) Anvisory Council and is a member of the SFEDI Advisory Board.
Most of his time he spends on further developing his vision of a complete Small Business Infrastructure Framework to reduce micro business and small business mortality. It is his belief that most governments fail these businesses out of a lack of understand for the needs of these businesses.
He believes successful businesses are not derived from technology, software and marketing, but from vision, focus and creativity. His concept of a Small Business Infrastructure Framework aims to free the entrepreneurial spirit from the burden of unproductive admin and other equally distracting business functions like IT and marketing.
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Adrian Swinscoe, Director of RARE Business.
Author
Adrian Swinscoe is a Director of RARE Business, a boutique marketing & strategy consultancy that focuses on helping clients grow by focusing on developing their Customer Experience, Service and Retention.
Adrian is also an author and popular blogger at his RARE Business Growth & Marketing blog, where he writes about customer focused strategies to grow your business. He has a strong belief that many established business could dispense with their traditional marketing activities and still grow their businesses by focusing on developing and nurturing its existing customer base and retaining its current clients. Why not connect with him on Twitter @adrianswinscoe, LinkedIn or if you like his stuff then why not subscribe to his RSS Feed?
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Leonora Soculitherz
Author
Leonora Soculitherz was born in Ottawa, Canada. She graduated in English and Canadian Literature from Toronto University. Her initial journalism and broadcasting career focused on fashion and food. She became internationally known as a celebrity fashionista after a televised incident, with a bow, with her famous and ‘appalling’ (her words) ex –husband, composer/cellist, Gerard Brown.
Her latest book, written with Tony Robinson OBE is called ‘Stripping for Freedom’ It contains classic comedy, biting satire and is a really practical, useful guide to working for yourself. Now in its second edition and available worldwide through Amazon, Stripping for Freedom has received excellent critical reviews. ‘Snorting with laughter’ is not unusual.
All the reviews agree that the ‘Be Your Own Boss’ advice is spot on. Most successful entrepreneurs, sports stars and top entertainers have been willing to strip their lifestyle down to the bare enterprise essentials so that they can control their own destiny. ‘Stripping for Freedom’ shows you how to gain these bare enterprise-ready essentials in order to successfully start your own small or home business (and escape the rat race).
Her most successful novels are ‘The Edible Desire’, a triumph in magical realism, and, ‘Bong in the Orange Grove’ which was made into the film ‘Sweet Oranges, Bitter Lemons’. She began to gain a reputation as an investigative journalist, serious writer and presenter after collaborating with Tony Robinson OBE and Clare Francis, in the UK, on the book ‘Buzzing with the Entrepreneurs’ (2004).
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Lorraine Allman
Author
Lorraine Allman is Managing Director of Speed Mentor Central® www.speedmentorcentral.co.uk a company providing access to online expertise and services for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Lorraine has over 14 years experience of starting and running enterprises, from establishing one of the first online business information portals in the UK to running a highly successful business and educational research company.
Lorraine believes every country needs its micro-enterprises, which are at the heart of national economic and cultural life, therefore valuing and positively supporting the diversity of these enterprises will enable the business eco-system as a whole to flourish. You can connect with Lorraine on Twitter @beindemand or LinkedIn uk.linkedin.com/in/lorraineallman
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Stuart Anderson
Author
Stu is an award winning activist and advocate of enterprise and entrepreneurship in the UK, currently director of Shell LiveWIRE - one of the UKs largest support programmes for young entrepreneurs and has a 30 year history of supporting some of the brightest entrepreneurial minds through advice, information and a scheme of awards. After leaving school with nothing to shout about, and a spell at art college, Stu moved up to Newcastle from Devon to go to University, after persuading them to give him a place! This was after (daftly) turning down a place to play rugby for Melbourne in Australia and an offer to sail across the Atlantic to the Virgin Islands! Whilst at University, he started a couple of businesses to try to help fund his way through his studies and had lots of fun doing so. He ultimately found his niche working ‘on the doors’ of Newcastle, eventually ending up being a freelance ‘Bouncer’ in Europe. In his time as a Bouncer, Stu specialised in live rock music venues as he had an “empathy with the crowd”!
After leaving corporate life, Stu started to provide help and advice to small businesses, has advised over 3000 start up businesses, and been involved economic development throughout the UK working within local authorities, enterprise agencies, corporates and charities. The scope of his work has included many areas from piloting guidelines for Business Advisers working with entrepreneurs with mental health problems, to setting up social enterprises to address food poverty. An in demand expert, Stu regularly speaks on the subject of small business and entrepreneurship at conferences and events including the United Nations in Geneva. An advocate of getting things done, working in partnership and cutting through nonsense, Stu’s vision is to see entrepreneurs and small businesses used as a tool for social good. He is regularly involved in advising other organisations and Government on entrepreneurship and start up, and is a Ministerial Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship Week.
Stu is a member of the Courvoisier Future 500, a trustee of the Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, an advisor to SFEDI, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (IoEE). He holds an MBA from Northumbria University and is currently studying for a PhD in Entrepreneurship at Newcastle University. He continues to have a tiny business in France called Chamflat, with plans to grow….time permitting!
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Tony Robinson OBE
Author
Tony Robinson OBE is an Enterprise Champion, Author and Speaker but is also a Chartered Marketer, Founder Fellow and Chief Executive of the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs and is an HR professional by post graduate qualification. He has started, owned and run his own micro enterprises, with his business partner, Clare Francis, for 25 years
Tony’s work in developing solutions, including the SFEDI Group, as to how the UK can meet the learning and skills needs of start-ups and small firms and drive up the quality of small business support led to him receiving an OBE for services to small firms and training in 2001. Then in 2007 he received the IAB Special Award for Championing Entrepreneurship in the UK.
Tony is currently Founder/Co-Owner/Director of SFEDI Group (www.sfedi.co.uk) , Chief Executive of the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs, Founder/Director of the International Enterprise Promotion Convention, Non- Executive Director of CFE – a national skills and employment research and policy consultancy, Vice President of the National Federation of Enterprise Agencies (now the National Enterprise Network), Non-Executive Director of Yorkshire Coast Enterprise Agency and Founder/Co-Owner and Trustee of the Enterprise Rockers.
Since 1986 Tony has co-owned and directed with Clare Francis BAB, The Business Advisory Bureau Limited which since 2001 has traded under the name Entrepreneurs UK (www.entrepreneursuk.com) It specialises in supporting Tony’s writing and speaking engagements and developing training and support media for engaging with and delivering enterprise information, skills, products, business opportunities and services. Prior to starting his own business Tony was Personnel Operations Manager for NCR Limited and then Corporate Services Director for Amway (UK) Limited where he later became Managing Director.
As Founder/Director/Co-Owner of SFEDI Group (SFEDI Solutions, SFEDI Awards and the IoEE) Tony has worked with all the major business membership and business support national organisations in the UK and many, internationally too. SFEDI Awards is the government recognised awarding body for learning and skills development for prospective and existing entrepreneurs and for personnel that provide business support to them. SFEDI Accreditation and Qualifications are now nationally and internationally recognised by governments around the world as the benchmark for prospective and existing enterprise owners and all business support practitioners.
Tony has been on many government committees and steering groups on enterprise including the Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership-Small Firms Group and the Ethnic Minority Business Task Force as well as being Investors in People (UK) Small firms Ambassador.
Tony has written a number of business books, manuals and guides on enterprise, start-up, marketing, human resource management and consultancy and is in constant demand as a writer, facilitator, negotiating and influencing skills executive coach/trainer and speaker at client events, seminars, workshops and conferences. His latest book available from Amazon is entitled ‘Stripping for Freedom’.
Tony has specialised for the last twenty years in researching, championing and developing solutions for enterprise owners to start up, survive and thrive. He assists policy and practice development, primarily nationally and internationally. This includes strategy, media development, engagement and delivery of learning and information products and services, particularly for prospective and existing small and home business owners and all those wishing to develop entrepreneurial skills and know-how.
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Martin Kirby, author, journalist and olive oil exporter.
Author
Since appearing on the first programme of the first No Going Back television series on Channel Four in 2002 Martin Kirby, his partner Maggie Whitman and their two children Ella and Joe Joe have been called the emblematic “living the dream” family. Documentaries about the family have now been televised around the world.
Their farm, Mother’s Garden, has spawned a brand, two lifestyle books No Going Back and Shaking The Tree, a stream of articles for newspapers in the UK and an olive oil business that has won top awards.
Martin was deputy editor of the English newspaper the Eastern Daily Press before the family radically changed the course of their lives in January 2001, selling up, leaving secure employment and moving lock, stock and biscuit barrel to a ramshackled 10-acre farm in Catalonia, north east Spain. Ella was five and Joe Joe was 6 months old. Martin was 41, Maggie was 39.
The challenge was to get back to nature, to learn from the Latin family-orientated way of life, to be independent and to value time before it is lost. Both Maggie and Martin believe firmly in the fulfillment of independence, the priceless worth of family time, and the truth that the greatest regrets in life are the things you didn’t do, not the things you did.
Martin’s novel Count The Petals Of The Moon Daisy is now a film project.
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Tina Boden
Author
From a background of self-employment stemming back two generations, small business has inspired me since my early teens. Watching my parents develop their businesses and getting involved in what they were doing motivated me to want to do the same and when I bought and developed my first business, in partnership with my Mum, I never imagined I would end up being so passionate about the impact of micro business on not only the national but the global economy. Along the way I have had some real disasters as well as achievements but this has never stopped me from wanting to get those all so regular new ideas off the ground. I can see a business opportunity in almost any situation which has lead me to run businesses in four sectors all with a heavy focus on customer service; hospitality, construction, property management and retail; now however I take a slightly slower approach – a little more planning must be the attribute of an ageing entrepreneur.
Over recent years my love of all things entrepreneurial and enterprising has drawn me to work for a number of companies helping to empower young people, women and hard to reach community groups; developing their understanding of enterprise, the impact it can have on their well being and learning business skills to turn a small idea in to something they can believe in.
And people, I am never happier than when I am networking; through this I have met some fantastic people some of whom have inspired me, some of whom have influenced me and many who I have helped to turn their business dreams into a profitable reality.
Business is not the only thing that makes me tick though, voluntary charity work has played a large role in my life and helps me to understand the importance of the social impact on the things that I am passionate about and there are plenty of things that fit in to that category being a Mum, Wife, Trustee for Ellie’s Fund – Brain Tumour Trust, serial volunteer, skiing and of course micro business.
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