The BPS Blog

How will the Budget affect your business?

So George Osbourne has delivered his budget speech and with it a number of announcements that will affect our businesses, at some point.   Particularly relevant ones include:

• a new tax free child care scheme from Autumn 2015
• a £2,000 employment allowance against NICs from April 2014
• headline corporation tax down to 20% from April 2015
• a 1 year extension to the capital gains tax reinvestment relief for Seed Enterprise Investment Schemes
• increased R&D incentives for large companies

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When Vision Meets Reality – For Real!

The subject of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning’s “Enterprise Tuesday” in Cambridge the other week was entitled “When vision meets reality”! One of the founders and the CEO of a company developing biopharmaceutical technology for new cancer treatments gave the talk.

For most starting a new business, “vision meeting reality” would be about when our great ideas are tested by the reality of trading.  Do people actually buy our wonderful product or service in sufficient numbers and at the price we anticipated?  But that wasn’t the concern of these two guys.  Their “vision meeting reality” was about overcoming the technical challenges of molecular engineering.  The commercial challenges didn’t even enter their thinking.  Why not?

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Headless chicken syndrome?

Cut off a chicken’s head and apparently it will run around for a while, at great speed but randomly as though pulled in many different directions, getting nowhere fast.  Running a business can be like that.  Sales are down so we must change our marketing strategy.  Margins have fallen, so we must make our operations more efficient and cut costs.  There’s a new market opportunity so we must quickly develop and launch a new product before the competition.  New legislation is being introduced which affects our industry, so we must change the way we do things.  Staff are leaving us so we must adopt new personnel practices.  So many things to think about, and none of them seem to relate to any other.  Concentrate on any one of these and it seems to pull us in a different direction to that of the last one.  And so, all the time the business seems to be going nowhere while all our time is spent “fire fighting”.  Nightmare!  How can we gain control?

Imagine a situation where you have all these issues focussed through a set of co-ordinated strategies.  An operational strategy that relates to your marketing strategy delivering products to a specification and a cost that your customers want to buy.  Staff motivated by a common vision, committed to helping you achieve overall success for the business and helping you deal with the different issues.  No nasty financial surprises.  You feel properly in control.

Dream on?

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Burn the plan or change the thinking?

Alexander Osterwalder’s provocative post in the Wall Street Journal the other day “Burn Your Business Plan – Before it Burns You” has produced some lively discussion, not least from James Roberts who passionately and eloquently defends the importance of business planning.  Who’s right?  Well, you might expect that we, whose very business is about helping people produce business plans, will be firmly on the side of the latter.

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Getting Yorkshire businesses growing again…

The UK’s top business planning company has chosen Leeds for its first venture in the North of England and is determined to help get Yorkshire businesses growing again.

Leading BPS Leeds is local businessman Peter Rivett-Jones, a former director and co-owner of Leeds advertising agency Poulters. Rivett-Jones was an obvious choice by BPS’ management to lead the company’s growth, having built and sold several businesses and undertaken Non-Exec roles in the marketing agency sector as well as running The Data People, a data planning consultancy.

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BPS gets ready for Global Entrepreneurship Week 2012

BPS will be participating at the London Business Village as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2012. Come along to the BIPC at the British Library in London on 12-13th November and get everything you need to know about how to successfully sustain and expand your business to the next level. Get all the personalised advice you need from over 30 experts and partner stands.

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Facing the challenges of job loss

The announcement by Dairy Crest of the likely closure of its dairy plant at Fenstanton as reported by the Cambridge News (see http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/200-jobs-face-axe-at-dairy-in-Fenstanton-17042012.htm) is a further economic blow. The company says that it is having to respond to an “extremely challenging” market for liquid milk and that this decision will help “protect the future of the dairies side of the business.” Like so many other industry sectors, the dairy market is changing all the time and those operating in it have to respond, often ruthlessly.

What choices do they have? How should they respond?

Sound business planning is essential. Help is at hand and attending one of our business planning workshops will start the essential thought processes (see http://www.bizplans.co.uk/our-services/planning-for-the-future/business-plan-seminar/ )

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Aspiring to be a “Cambridge Killer”?

Tony Quested’s review “Cambridge ‘Killers’ –Technology’s Most Wanted” published yesterday in “Business Weekly” (see http://www.businessweekly.co.uk/hi-tech/13898-cambridge-killers-technologys-most-wanted) paints a truly impressive picture of Cambridge businesses, each a world leader in its sector or with the potential to be such a leader. In order to have attained this status these businesses have, between them, raised billions of dollars of investment.

Is your business one of these “Hot 100”, “Killer50” or “Ones2Watch”? Should it be? Could it be?

Is this something you can do yourself? Don’t worry, help is at hand! Call 01223 853611 or email roger.hetherington@bizplans.co.uk.

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Think you have a great idea? Prove it!

Have you ever seduced friends and family with a business idea?

Guess what? They’re biased! Your enthusiasm, along with the fact that the people you question are influenced by their connection to you, means this data is far from honest and accurate.

Having a great idea needs to be proven. Moreover it must be proven in a reliable way. Questioning biased participants is not viable and will not aid your product or service launch, if anything it will hinder it as you go forward with your business plan with unreliable and biased figures.

Allied to our business plan writing services, Business Plan Services provides access to over 10 years’ experience in cost effective, fast, online market research and an international panel of over 950,000 panellists, delivering viable facts and figures bringing reliable statistics and insight to your business start-up. Find out more here or contact us to discuss how we can help you with your market research.

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Funding at your fingertips

So, after weeks and months of hard work, your business plan is finally ‘finished’…at least for the time being anyway. The moment has come when you can start your pursuit for funding but where do you start?? Whether you are looking for investment, debt finance, grant funding or, in rare instances perhaps a combination of all 3, your quest for the appropriate audience for your business plan can be just as much hard work and even more time consuming than preparing the business plan itself.

BPS can save you weeks of manual hard work to get you ahead of the funding game with a bespoke Funding Report, custom-built to provide you with up-to-date information on over 1000 sources of business finance – ranging from £1k start-up grants to £multi-million investments.

Don’t let your business plan gather dust while you research where you should be sending it to. Contact us today to start raising finance tomorrow.

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