Welcome to the Essential Business blog pages. Here you’ll find articles, comments and opinion pieces by Julie Stanford and Marianne Whitfield, directors of Essential Business and, from time to time, guests whose opinions we value.
You can comment on any of the articles and we are always interested in hearing what you have to say. There’s no such thing as absolute truth in business (or in life!) it’s all a matter of opinion – and the more opinions, the better.
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…]
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…]
In 2014, a record number of new companies were formed in the UK, according to the national campaign group Start Up Britain.
‘Record numbers’ of anything results in two different media reactions — the “Wow, isn’t it amazing, aren’t we doing well” and the “Oh no, that’s far too many, what are we going to do about it”.
An additional 580,000 companies registering within one year might, to some, seem like an achievement. To others, like me, it seems like a growing bubble that will some day burst. [Read more…]
“Business is not just about money!” I just read in a post on LinkedIn.
To a certain extent, I agree with the author. There’s still that popular misconception that all business owners are greedy ‘fat cats’ who live off the toil and sweat of their underpaid, beleaguered workforce. In a few, usually large businesses, or businesses in certain sectors, that may well be true. In reality, of course, in most micro and small businesses, the owner is often last in the queue when the money is being apportioned. [Read more…]