Enterprise Capital Funds (ECFs) are part of the UK Governments continued efforts in its crusade to address the “Equity Gap” for growth companies seeking up to £2m in equity capital. The “Equity Gap” is a market failure based on entirely rational economics – the monetary returns that professionals have made from early stage investments have [...]

Last week I took part in the Litemind group writing project. All the entries have now been submitted so it’s time to vote. There were a number of great entries but as always I favour any that are business related. Here is my top three: No Cost Business Tools: 37 Free Applications That Make Your [...]

Rob over at BusinessPundit recently wrote about his experiences at a Shell Station where a speaker in the petrol pump played an advert to him while he was filling his car. He has this to say about it: I think it is a smart idea to market to me at the gas pump. Usually I [...]

I saw over on TechCrunch UK that ex Dragon Doug Richards is looking for “very young startups who have web companies that think they could go big”. According to the TechCrunch UK: Doug emailed [them] to say: “I will be arranging an informal pitching morning and from that I will choose one company who will [...]

This week the business ideas pitched on Dragons’ Den were: Back To The Movies – This was a new musical production playing tribute to movie sound tracks. Aimed at everyone unfortunately with only one night booked it didn’t look like it was going to be a success and a marketing budget of £300 per venue [...]

If there’s one thing that really puts me off dealing with small business “professionals” it’s being presented with what is clearly a free business card. You know the ones, they have something like “Get your 250 FREE business cards from www.aprintingcompany.com” on the back of them. Now I appreciate that small businesses have limited budgets [...]

There’s no doubt that the commercialisation of the Internet had a massive impact on business. The Internet enables any business to reach a global audience something never before possible. As such it’s allowed people to grow businesses in what would previously be unreachable niches. It’s also created some incredible business success stories. So here’s what [...]

A new study shows that Gordon Brown’s popularity with SME business owners is currently at an all-time low. A substantial 71% of SME business owners and managers now believe that Brown and Alistair Darling are bad news for UK enterprise, according to a survey by research consultancy FreshMinds. Nearly half of those who took part [...]

I doubt any significant endeavour has ever been accomplished by mankind without someone somewhere having first written down the goal. For example consider putting the US efforts to put a man on the moon. The idea wasn’t new but despite the Russian lead in the space race at the time it was the USA that [...]

Businesses today depend more and more on knowledge workers, that is workers whose knowledge and experience is specialised and according to Peter Drucker should be viewed by a company as a capital asset. A point on which I agree with him entirely. Software developers are a great example of today’s knowledge workers and they are [...]