It seems that the level of income tax you will pay for having a second job is widely misunderstood. There seems to be widely held belief that all 2nd jobs are taxed at 40%. It’s wrong. Your tax rate is calculated based on your entire income, not on whether it’s your primary, second, third or [...]

How many of us: Use a Smart-phone and still maintain a paper diary? Use a Smart-phone and enter contact information manually when we could easily synchronise information from an email client? Have boxes full of business cards collected whilst networking and yet do not have a contact database? Competitive Advantage In 1972, Southwest Airlines made [...]

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 [...]

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 / [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 the [...]