Anyone starting a business will tell you they need two things at the outset: advice and discounts.
Discounts
Deals, preferable terms, two-for-one offers: any kind of discount is important to every new business. Bootstrapping your new business is the order of the day. Haggle like crazy if you really do need to purchase services.
Advice
Practical, trustworthy advice is important in the early years because we can’t be expected to know everything about how to run a business on Day One. Finance, marketing, accounts, IT… none of us our expert in all of these areas. A source of good advice that can make your business better is an extremely valuable asset.
Small Business Britain
There are countless business advice websites out there (I list the best below), but here’s one interesting initiative I hadn’t seen before. Aimed at the UK’s newest businesses, ‘Small Business Britain’ (from Intuit bookkeeping software) is designed to bring small businesses together by providing a place to share thoughts, concerns and find solutions to the most important Small Business issues.
There’s a rather grandiose charter, which asks members to:
“Pledge to work with each other and with the wider business community to find and adopt business solutions that will ensure real success and real prosperity in the future, and we call on like-minded businesses to do the same.”
It’s a laudable aim, but one that most people might skip over. Which is a real shame, because hidden away in the Small Business Britain website are some rather brilliant hands-on learning modules.
Learning as you go
These free business tools are excellent at taking users through a series of steps to learn about a topic and apply it to their own business. The five main areas covered are:
- Getting started
- Plan your business
- Getting the basics right
- Building your business
- Being more effective
To call these learning tools ‘online diagnostics’ suggests they are theoretical and boring. Quite the opposite.
Working through each lesson, we are asked to enter information and ideas about our business. We’re prompted to make choices, informed by our own business situation. There’s help along the way in the form of suggestions, tactics and tips. And lots of downloadable resources like spreadsheets and samples help make the learning quick and effective. The process really focuses the mind on the topic in hand and how it affects a business.
Now make it happen
Here’s the best bit.
Because answers and data are collected along the way, this clever system customises an Action Plan for each user. This Action Plan can be taken back to the business an used to implement change. I like.
Other resources
- Marketing Donut has proved to be a winning formula with people running smaller businesses. Excellent advice and tools — with no annoying adverts.
- BusinessZone offers equally strong advice, very good community interaction and a distinct editorial view.
- Smarta is very lively, well designed and with regular new case studies and interviews.
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