THE SMALL BUSINESS BLOG

The top 5 tips weekly post is always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.

• Seek advice from a tax professional – although it won’t be free, ultimately it will save you time and money.
• Keep records of all income and expenditure.  Don’t throw away or lose your receipts.
• Set aside your tax payments well in advance and resist the temptation to dip into this fund.
• Make sure you take advantage of any tax breaks that you might be entitled to as a small business owner.
• Schedule a “tune-up” with your tax advisor every twelve months to re-evaluate your situation.

If you have additional tips, please share them in the comments section.

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The top 5 tips weekly post is always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.

• Send out invoices as soon as possible to avoid cashflow problems over the Easter period.
• Make sure in advance that you have enough stock because you may have difficulty sourcing any extra.
• Use the downtime to assess your market as a whole and plan for future growth.
• If you have spare time, start getting your tax returns ready during the 4-day break.
• Most importantly, remember to relax and have fun!

If you have additional tips, please share them in the comments section.

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I’m sure everyone has had days, weeks, months or even years of feeling snowed under with work, stressed and like they have little time for family or friends. Within a small business it seems that this is compounded, with less people to delegate to and, if you are the small business owner, a vast majority of tasks falling to yourself.

Planning how to manage your time is not a waste of time! Once you have decided how to plan your time you will become much more efficient saving yourself a lot of time, which you can then spend with your family and friends.

Here are some key ways to improve your time management:

- Track your time The first step to successful time management is to find out where you are wasting time. Keep a log of your daily activities; and if there are huge amounts of time missing from your day then you know you are procrastinating somewhere!

- Prioritise, prioritise, prioritise! If you have an endless amount of tasks to complete, knowing where to start can be impossible. Write down everything you need to do and assign numbers to each task. This will give you focus and increase your productivity.

- Set goals. If you have a clear goal in mind for every day, or even each hour, then do all you can to achieve those goals.

- Establish time limits for specific tasks. Only allow yourself a certain amount of time for tasks that can become time consuming, such as reading and responding to email.

- Outsource and delegate! Remember, there are only 24 hours in a day, so let other people help you. Delegate to others in your business, or if you are a sole-trader, outsource work that you do not have to do yourself. Bear in mind that your time is money!

There will, of course, be times when deadlines need to be met or work just has to be done that will make even the most well organized small business owner feel that they are not managing their time effectively. But, if you stay on top of time management the majority of the time then a happy work/life balance shouldn’t be impossible.

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The top 5 tips weekly post is always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.

• Many equipment manufacturers offer free training to companies that purchase their products.  Don’t overlook the usefulness of this.
• Attempt to form a training co-op with other local companies to cut costs.
• If you have close links with customers that have a standardised training routine already in place, consider working with them to train your employees also.
• Try to encourage employees to take advantage of the training opportunities offered by their unions or local universities.
• Consider sending one employee for training and then have them train the others when they return.
  

If you have additional tips, please share them in the comments section.

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Today, Alistair Darling revealed the budget for the coming year. A lot of policies were focused was on helping small businesses with a “£2.5 billion one-off growth package”. Really, though, this is going to do little to really help small businesses.

The chancellor included tax breaks, better access to credit, better payment terms from the public sector and lower business rates for small businesses. In summary:

- SME’s can double claims for investment allowances during their first year of business, allowing claims of up £100,000 from taxable profits to be invested in to the business.

- A cut in business rates for one year for SME’s – with up to 345,000 small businesses paying no rates at all.

- The threshold for capital gains tax to be charged at 10% will be increased from £1million to £2 million.

- State-controlled banks would offer up to £47 billion in loans to SME’s in the next year.

However, these headline grabbing, unsubstantial and inflated promises hide many policies that will place a huge strain on SME’s. The increase in National Insurance contributions will hit small businesses hard, as will the increase in fuel duty.

Whilst there are numerous policies in place for SME’s in this budget, I consider that many of the policies are headline grabbing and clear electioneering in the face of the forthcoming General Election. In truth, there is little new money in this budget for SME’s, and little of real substance to help those that are struggling. In my view this was a token effort from Mr. Darling to rescue his government from the brink.

What small business needs, Mr. Darling, is help. Not policy.

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The top 5 tips weekly post is always full of hints and tips for small, home & micro business owners.

• Try to figure out exactly what it is that you want to know about your customer base.
• Develop a set of questions to ask them.  You could use these for direct mail, telephone marketing or focus groups.
• Unless you have marketing experience in-house, you may wish to hire a marketing firm to develop questions and analyse findings.
• Instruct employees to keep a record of all feedback they receive and then discuss it at staff meetings.
• Make the necessary changes once you know exactly what your customers want.
  

If you have additional tips, please share them in the comments section.

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