When people are planning to start a business, they are often looking for external support – for someone to guide them on their journey, to give them a few pointers and to reassure them as they take their brave first steps into self-employment. Others go ahead without consulting anyone or taking any external advice. Whilst both methods can work, we would actively encourage anyone thinking about setting up a business to get some support in advance – the benefits are clear, those who do seek external support when starting out are much more likely to survive and thrive than those who don’t – so if you want your business to have the best possible chance of success then what harm can it do? [Read more…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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