Small business startup advice – SmallBusinessVoodoo.com

How many times have I heard small business management tell me “I don’t need a business plan”?

Let’s get this straight. All businesses plan. Whether they like to think they do or not. As soon as you order additional inventory or take on new staff in expectation of a greater workload, then you’re planning. So the issue is not whether you should plan or not, you can’t help but plan. The issue is how do you go about business planning ?

The only businesses who may legitimately say ”I don’t need a business plan” would be small scale and steady state – in other words not growing in turnover or contracting. In such a case everything stays more or less the same week in week out. Thus all the information is probably in the proprietor’s head anyway and that’s fine.

But as soon as growth or contraction is imminent, you can no longer say that you don’t need a business plan.  It becomes critical to make assumptions about how that growth is going to look and that means, you guessed it, planning.

Let me put it this way. Let us suppose that I have in my possession a piece of software that allows me to input your personal details. And from that I am able to map out a model of the next ten years of your life. Wouldn’t you at least be a little curious?

What if you could see that at the age of 39 you were going to die of sclerosis of the liver from excess alcohol intake. Wouldn’t you like to know that? Wouldn’t you like the chance to do something about it now and avert such a calamity? 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 »

“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 »

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 »