a lot of talk and lip service but very little action. Government should have a limited role in the private sector but where they can help is by not just trying to force the banks into lending but more importantly they should be looking at the tax regime. They need to set the tax system and regulation to encourage investment in both startups and SME’s and its something the government have immediate power to do.
The 50p rate of tax and capital gains
are the
longer term things that need addressing but an entrepreneur is not going to stop starting up a business because of unfavourable capital gains rules. The reason they’re not going to start a business is all the bureaucracy around hiring people and the cost of doing that- so to have an effect on smaller business it’s cutting bureaucracy around hiring people, exemption from NI for your first 5 employees. When you’re going from number 5 to number 6 its not such a big leap but when you are looking to take on your first
employee it’s like wandering into a wall of red tape and cost. It’s an easy win.
People Don’t Have Strategies for Their Social Lives
Social media is very important whereas a social media strategy is not important at all. Who wakes up and wants to have a conversation with a corporate identity? You want to talk to people not brands.
On twitter we have maybe a thousand people following the Kashflow account whereas on my personal account we’ve got 16,000 and that’s because I’m a person and am tweeting about
37 entrepreneurcountry
things which resonate with SME’s.
After Dragon’s Den a few weeks ago (Series 9 Episode 7) I followed Kiddimoto, the guys with the balance bike but all of their tweets were in the third person which is faceless. People want to engage with people not brands, so the most important thing about social media is the social life- I’m not sure if your have a strategy in your social life but I don’t think the strategy element is as important as people make out.
Perfect It- Don’t Re-Invent It
One of our competitors blogged a year ago about a change they just made which gave customers logging into their site a whole wealth of information on how to maximise using and engaging with the site. I just thought to myself ‘how blindingly obvious is this and why on earth are we not doing it’ – so we went staright ahead and borrowed it and I have no shame in admitting we do it- it’s called being smart.
Sensible Acceleration
It may not sound sexy but getting your processes and procedures in place is essential because with those in place you can delegate as you grow without people constantly coming back to you with what they need to do about this or that because it’s written down.
Until recently we’ve kept our board small, my only investor being Lord Young who brings a wealth of experience and credibility to us. I recently just hired a COO with 17 years experience and lured him from one of our big competitors across to join us and then sought out a CFO with specific experience in the tech startup scene so everyone we’ve brought to the table has brought more than just cash. So, my second word of advice is to hire slowly but the right people because there is only so much you can do- don’t rush into hiring okay people- go only for the best.
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