Blog - Essential Business

February 10, 2015 by Julie Stanford Leave a Comment

Tired of the word ‘passionate’

Passionate. Brilliant. Awesome. Fantastic. Ultimate. Yes, even Essential.

In the hype around content marketing, hailed as the ‘new’ way to market our wares, we’re overdoing it with the adjectives. So says Jay Baer in his video, We’re destroying our important words.

I couldn’t agree more… and if someone tells me once more that they are passionate about their business, I won’t be responsible for my actions. But if they tell me that they care about their customers, well then I’m interested. I want to find out more. (Marianne and I struggled with finding the right words for our About us page. How exactly do you get across just how much you care without the use of superlatives? It’s not easy, granted. But we all to have to find a way. We must ditch the hyperbole!) [Read more…]

February 4, 2015 by Marianne Whitfield Leave a Comment

Policy makers and dual entity

I attended an interesting event at the RSA yesterday which focused on the needs of self-employed people in the UK.

The event was attended by a wide array of individuals, from MPs and economists to micro-business owners and freelancers.

There were a number of panel events during the day, and some enlightened discussions, but one issue stuck out for me throughout. All of the rhetoric and statistics around self-employment focus on the business, not the person who runs the business. [Read more…]

January 28, 2015 by Marianne Whitfield Leave a Comment

Scratch for business

A few years ago, when I was looking to turn my young twins into a mini geeks, I discovered a fantastic tool for teaching kids to code.

The Scratch project was initiated back in 2003 by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. I started using Scratch in 2009 and have spent five happy years watching my son and daughter learn how to create simple games and animations, without having to program one ‘real’ line of code. (Okay, my son is a lot more interested and engaged in this than my daughter, but I’m working on her!) [Read more…]

January 20, 2015 by Marianne Whitfield Leave a Comment

The importance of personal profit

I was a child of the eighties, and I can vividly remember Harry Enfield’s character ‘Loadsamoney’ shaking his wads of cash at me while I watched him on my parent’s 9-inch, full colour TV screen. I can remember the news being full of stories about Yuppies who drove Porsches, drank champagne and worked in advertising.

I can also remember feeling ‘inspired’ by the thought of having loads of cash and driving a fast car. But I had absolutely no idea how to achieve it. [Read more…]

January 19, 2015 by Julie Stanford Leave a Comment

Starting a business is no box-ticking exercise

Over the last few years, there has been a fundamental shift in the options available to people who want to learn how to start up and run their own business.

Alterations to funding in business support have encouraged some organisations to offer qualifications for business start up, some of which are funded by the Skills Funding Agency.

For eight years, our own business start up workbooks have successfully been used by individual start ups, and by enterprise agencies and Chambers of Commerce to deliver their own funded training programmes. Now they are also being used by training companies, work programme providers and colleges across the UK for people looking to gain a qualification. [Read more…]

Tired of the word ‘passionate’

Policy makers and dual entity

Scratch for business

The importance of personal profit

Starting a business is no box-ticking exercise

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