Readers question: I have seen this little gadget in another country and I found it really useful. I would like to know how I can sell this product in this country do I need to get patent for this product? I would be very grateful if you could give me some information. No you don’t [...]

Reading Seth Godin’s post For a nickel it occurred to me that many business could become more environmentally friendly by charging a little more – here’s what he says: The current Fast Company reports that when Ikea started charging a nickel for shopping bags, consumption went down by 50% (95% in the UK). Clearly, it’s [...]

Lindsay recently posted some customer service statistics some of the key figures are: 26 out of every 27 customers who feel they have a legitimate complaint, NEVER COMPLAIN. 91% of the 26 customers who wanted to complain, but didn’t, will never return. Each of the 27 customers who feel they have a legitimate complaint, will [...]

Entrepreneur.com has an article 10 Businesses Facing Extinction in 10 Years in which they suggest that the following ten businesses will be gone in ten years time: Record stores Camera film manufactures Crop dusting Gay bars Newspapers Pay phones Used bookstores Piggy banks Telemarketing Coin-operated arcades The question is not so much if they’re right [...]

We’d all like to be better and we’d like our businesses to be better but it’s all to easy to dismiss big jumps in improvement as being too hard, or requiring too much time when we’re just too busy to spare it. Mostly we’re just making excuses however. As the old Chinese proverb says: A [...]

For years I’d heard small business owners raving about this excellent book call The E-Myth, but as it was around the time of the dot com hype when everything was ‘e’ something I assumed it was just another book jumping on the bandwagon. In actual fact the title refers to the Michael Gerber’s belief that [...]

Coffee shops seem to be springing up all over the UK, but with little if anything to differentiate them. So what can an entrepreneurial coffee shop owner looking for new marketing ideas do? Well Lindsay over at Stuff4Restaurants has recently posted about Latte Art. I think people will remember and talk about coffee’s like these. [...]

I’m often asked how I come up with business ideas and while I provide a list of tactics for finding business ideas it’s sometimes easy to examine a real example. So here’s the business idea I’ve just come up with. The business idea: Matching Speakers To Engagements. Hardly a new idea though, but the difference [...]

If you’ve got an idea for a business or application based on Facebook then now’s the time to act as Facebook has announced that grants will be made available to inspire new applications. Grants will come out of a $10m pot raised by Facebook’s primary backers Accel Capital and The Founders Fund. The two groups [...]

Barclays Local Business latest survey reveals how employees showing signs of distraction are likely to leave to start their own business. With 44% of today’s UK business bosses admitting to having plotted their entrepreneurial future whilst daydreaming in the work place of a previous employer – I know I did – I needed something to [...]