Small business startup advice – SmallBusinessVoodoo.com

EIB Loans For Small Businesses…

Alistair Darling proudly announced last week that £4bn has been earmarked for lending by the European Investment Bank to the UK’s small and medium sized business sectors over the next four years as part of a European initiative to support SME’s through the current credit crunch.

His performance reminded me of the old yarn about a company chairman who stood up at the annual general meeting and announced: “Last year I had to report that the company was standing on the edge of a precipice. This year I am delighted to announce that we have taken one giant step forward…………” Read more »

How many employees do I need for my small business startup?

The small business startup process can be a daunting one.  So much to do so little time.  And even less help.

Whether you are starting your business on a shoestring with only a reluctant spouse to call on or an ambitious startup with plenty of shareholder cash in the bank, you will inevitably be shorthanded.  Voodoo’s First Law Of Small Business states that: “No matter how many employees you have, you will always need more”.

Don’t worry though. This is actually a desirable outcome for a number of reasons; Read more »

Your small business needs effective leadership.  Possibly your most important asset besides your product is your intrapreneur.

You have decided that you are entrepreneur not intrapreneur.  Your business needs an intrapreneur – the entrepreneur inside the business. But how can you identify such a key component of your team? You can’t afford to get this one wrong.

To help, I have highlighted 30 ways to spot an intrapreneur, those key traits which mark him out as the special one, the one that your business can’t do without.

An Intrapreneur ……… Read more »

Knowledge is power. So wrote Sir Francis Bacon in 1597. Far be it for me to argue with such an esteemed philosopher and statesman but if that was the case, why aren’t taxi drivers running the country?

An attitude prevails even today in UK small business that somehow to have the knowledge is to hold the balance of power. There is a reluctance to share information as to do so Read more »

Failure is an “act that does not achieve success”.  So to ask “how does failure breed success?”, we must first define success.

Success is “the act of achieving a desired or planned outcome”.  This definition makes no reference to an absence of failure. In other words, success and failure can co-exist.

Pairs of muscles in the human body work antagonistically. One pushes and the other pulls. For instance, the biceps and triceps are a pair of muscles that work antagonistically for the common good of the arm – allowing it to bend and straighten.  The arm cannot function without the presence of both.

In a similar way, success and failure work antagonistically for the common good of the project, task, or whatever.

They say that success is a journey not a destination.

But surely failure is the journey, success the destination. Read more »

“The customer is always right.” Right?

Wrong!

Customers are just people like you and me, none of us are always right (with the possible exception of my wife) so clearly this isn’t the sense in which Harry Selfridge, founder of the prestigious Selfridges department store in London in the early 1900’s, intended to focus his staff on customer service. A noble sentiment but unwittingly misguided and demotivating for staff.

What about if he had said Read more »

What’s the difference between an Entrepreneur and an Intrapreneur? and why should I care?

“An Entrepreneur is someone who has the skills, passion and financial backing to create wealth from new business opportunities and is willing to take full responsibility for its success or failure.”

“An Intrapreneur is someone who Read more »

I’m sorry to be the first to break this to you but your small business ideas are worth diddlysquat.

I know that comes as a shock because you were relying on at least one of them to provide for your pension.

Everyone at some stage in life has at least one Read more »