There are millions of sources of business advice. Some are good. Some are less good. It is often relatively straight forward to keep asking people for advice until you find someone who advises you to do what you wanted to do in the first place. This can be good. But it is unlikely to lead [...]

Talking to a fellow business owner this week, he had spent all weekend bringing his accounts up to date – ready to hand to his accountant for the year end process. We had a conversation about being organised and it led me to write this week’s ditty.
How to be organised

Be ruthless with your time

Value your [...]

As regular readers will know, I’m always interested in buying small businesses.
In the vast majority of cases I end up walking away, often without having made an offer for the business. Why? Well it’s usually because the vendor – or more typically their business transfer agent (you can read a little more about my [...]

Since getting back into the habit of visiting the gym last year I’ve also started reading some of the more popular forums related to weight training, most of which are aimed at bodybuilders (sadly weightlifting, powerlifting and strongman seem to be far too niche to survive on their own).
Whilst bodybuilding isn’t my thing, I [...]

I’ve previously written about business transfer agents in my post Selling A Business: Don’t Waste Your Money On Business Transfer Agents. As you can gather from the title I wasn’t impressed.
I’m even less impressed now. Let me recap:
Having drawn up a shortlist of businesses for sale I set about contacting the vendor / vendors agents [...]

It’s no secret that most small businesses fail.
For those of us that have spent most of our professional lives working in, around and with small businesses it’s no surprise that small businesses fail.
Sadly, in my experience, most small businesses are doomed to failure before they are even started (I’ve also explored this theme in [...]

Dear reader,
I’d like your help please.
I’m putting together some articles and tutorials that will be posted in the new year and to make sure they are as useful as possible I’d like to gather up a list of the problems faced by businesses. I’m also interested in the problems that those wanting to start a [...]

For several years small town centre retailers have been blaming Tesco for all their problems, claiming that Tesco drives them out with unfair competition and ultimately hurting the consumer. Friends of the Earth have also insisted Tesco is evil and we should all support our local shops.
Eventually after vigorous campaigning small shopkeepers forced [...]

If you regularly go out and meet a large number of business then Google might have an ideal business opportunity for you. Google are expanding the maps/local coverage and as such are looking for Google Business Referral Representatives to visit local businesses, collect some basic information about them (address, phone numbers, website, opening hours, types [...]

I’m doing the good neighbour thing at the moment and watering a neighbours garden plants while they are away and as always when I’ve got some time to myself, it got me thinking about business opportunities. I know my neighbours have invested quite a bit of their time and money getting their garden to look [...]