David Cameron has chosen the current chairman of HSBC as Britain’s new trade minister. The unpaid role carries a seat in the House of Lords and a heavy responsibility – driving forward UK exports and British businesses in a period of uncertainty and recession.

The appointment is a doubly satisfying one for the coalition government because as well as settling a successful business leader into the trade role, Stephen Green is a ‘good banker’ in media terms, having managed to navigate HSBC through the credit crisis without needing a government bail-out. The City has been watching the appointment with some cynicism as several leading financial figures have turned down the post in the period since the election, but Green’s appointment is likely to prove popular with traders and bankers.

Trade relations key to future

It’s also likely to quiet some of the Tory ranks, who’ve been muttering about the fact that no Tory grandee has been seen as suitable for the role, but the Prime Minister has made it clear that strengthening trade relations with emerging powers like India and China required a complex balance of diplomatic and entrepreneurial skills.

Another area in which Stephen Green’s appointment calms political jitters is that he is likely to work well with those to whom he reports: Business Secretary Vince Cable and Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Big moves in banking signal change of focus

Vince Cable has already commented on Green’s ‘powerful philosophy for ethical business’ which might cause mild consternation in areas of business that are not as proactively ethically focused as the former HSBC’s chairman, himself a lay preacher who has donated a vast amount of his personal wealth to charity and good causes. Green is a stark contrast to the new Barclays CE Bob Diamond, who has caused some friction in the press, if very little in banking circles.

If Green’s appointment papers some cracks, Diamond’s move to the top job marks another fissure between government (where Peter Mandelson, Vince Cable’s predecessor, once described Diamond as ‘the unacceptable face of banking’) and business. The City increasingly views rewarding big hitters who kept their nerve through the banking crisis as a potential contribution to kick-starting the UK’s slow-moving economy, despite the way those rewards are reported in the media.

Green appointed Trade Minister is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Brands and Superbrands – why your brand matters It’s been major business news that Microsoft has knocked Google...
2. What to do when your bank says no Every entrepreneur knows that the past year has been incredibly...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

There’s a new source of funding available to small businesses in the UK. With the backing of some high profile private investors, who include the present and former heads of private equity firms, insurers, banks, IT companies and leading professional services providers. FundingCircle.com aims to help entrepreneurial businesses sidestep the high charges and slow response of major banks.

HM Treasury says that 92% of small business lending is concentrated in the hands of the ‘big four’ banks, which means that many businesses have limited options for finance because they can’t make themselves attractive either to the banks or to bond markets which focus on larger organisations.

Small businesses employ more than half the workforce

Yet those smaller firms employ 60% of those who work in the private sector and create 50% of the UK’s gross domestic product, so anything that strangles their growth also causes the economy to stagnate. 

At the same time, smaller investors and savers are struggling to find ways to make a reasonable return on their long-term investments. Funding Circle aims to unite the two needs in a mutually profitable marketplace where individuals can lend directly to small businesses, cutting out the cost and complexity of bank loans and allowing investors to support businesses that appeal to them ethically, profitably or for other reasons such as personal interest.

Limited risk and social leverage opportunities

Like Zopa.com, the concept behind Funding Circle is one of limited risk for each individual who can select the division of their funds between businesses so their exposure to individual companies could be as low as £20 or up to around £2,000. The advantage for businesses is that the loan rates will undercut the bank rates by up to 25%.

Bright businesses will shine

It could be a lifeline for businesses that have a quirky service or offering that has strong niche appeal but might not ever become mainstream, or those can make a grassroots appeal to a particular sector of society. For such socially appealing enterprises, the lower rates are only part of the appeal – being able to engage directly with funders can allow entrepreneurial businesses to communicate in fresh ways and to share their journey with supporters using loyalty-building messages that turn funders into advocates and salespeople, widening the company reach without adding a costly PR layer.

There’s a caveat for potential funders: any money invested through the scheme won’t be covered under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme and while there are risk-spreading methodologies in place to keep any potential problems to a minimum, if complete investment security is important to a funder, then this isn’t the right route for them.

FundingCircle.com is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Angels Den The popularity of TV programmes like Dragons’ Den has led...
2. Ways to finance your business In a cash-strapped period, innovative ways of financing business growth...
3. What to do when your bank says no Every entrepreneur knows that the past year has been incredibly...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Steve Blank has posted an amazingly honest and powerful statement, perhaps even a testament, on the difficulties he faced being a husband, father and entrepreneur. Like all personal stories, it will resonate with different people in different ways, but what I took from his life story of being a serial startup entrepreneur and a father of two daughters was three things.

The first was confirmation of what I already knew: it’s tough to balance work and family as an entrepreneur.

The second was his take on an epitaph. Thinking about what you want people to say about you when you die is a great way to establish your own priorities. Blank talks about how he found that visualising the kind of epitaph he wanted was one way of putting his work/life balance into a perspective that ensure he made the right decisions in both areas. The step beyond that is to turn your life priorities into your personal mission statement and to work on that with the same dedication and integrity as you do with your business plan.

The third thing I took from his statement is the value of personal support. I’ve found it essential to have peer support, to share learning and to bounce ideas and situations off a selection of people who know what the world of entrepreneurship is like. I get my peer support at the Entrepreneurs Organization and believe it’s invaluable to have an organisation that works with, for and in line with entrepreneurs and recognises their needs and what drives them.

Epitaph for an Entrepreneur is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Entrepreneurs’ Organization Forum meetings In May I will be taking over the presidency of...
2. Global Student Entrepreneur Awards: UK Finalists The Global Student Entrepreneur Awards programme is the foremost award...
3. Entrepreneur Resource: School for Startups Suppose you don’t want an MBA – suppose you want...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A pre-pack administration can sound like the ideal answer for a failing business, but is it really such a great solution for the business, and for the economy?

What is a pre-pack?

A pre-pack administration is a package that allows for the selling the assets of a company immediately after it has entered administration. In many cases, the previous directors or management purchase the assets of the company from the administrator and set up a new company. In a recent example, directors of Kiss Travel which collapsed in August, had bought assets from another travel company, XL Leisure group, which folded back in 2008, and which at least one director of Kiss had also been involved with at board level. The intention is to allow the administrator realise the greatest possible amount for the assets because the asset buying process allows for business continuity and the goodwill inherent in the company is both preserved and transferred. It is often the case that some or all of employees of the company transfer  to the new company, thus preserving jobs.

Why pre-pack should cease

The pre-pack system has rightly attracted criticism because it allows companies to continued without their creditors which gives, at very least, an appearance of failing to meet the minimum standards of business ethics. As a result, SIP 16 was introduced in 2009 to assist Insolvency Practitioners in pre-pack cases. It was designed to make the process more transparent to creditors and to ensure that fair value was obtained for the assets. However, from my personal experience, the opposite has happened because the pre-pack process removes any competitive activity around the assets being sold, because there is no scope for anybody outside the company to compete to buy them.

Pre-packs in retreat

In KBB, the trade magazine for the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom trade Danielle McCormick, a retail solicitor, has a different but equally uncomfortable view of pre-packs. She describes the pre-pack as a diet pill allowing failing companies ‘… to trim down on the unwanted calories in order to fit into next season’s mini, or ‘newco’ (new company)’.

But she points out those left in its wake are now fighting back.

1.  Landlords have won recent cases in which administrators of collapsed retailers were ordered to pay rent quarterly in advance, rather than paying rent weekly – clearly the latter gave them a massive advantage on potential outlay and cash flow. 

2. Banks are starting to reject pre-pack processes too – and because a pre-pack requires the agreement of the company’s main banker, this tougher line can stop pre-packs in their tracks.

3. Finally, HM Revenue and Customs appear to be intervening, they have apparently begun to ask for a winding up petition in some cases, rather than becoming an unpaid creditor following a pre-pack.

Pre-packs can be serial disasters

MPs have expressed concerns that it inadequately run businesses can avoid not only paying their debts, but the tax burden that should support the economy’s growth. For competitors it’s an even worse scenario – badly-run, failing, debt-laden and uncompetitive businesses are able to suddenly ditch their debts and return with a huge competitive advantage against competitors. This serial failure behaviour then adds to the pressure on financially sound and well-run businesses who are forced to compete against a pre-pack phoenix in a recession economy. The pre-pack process also prevents failing businesses being acquired by better-run and well-managed competitors

It is not right and the process needs to change.

Why Pre-pack Administrations are bad for business is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. We are up for another award ! Quayside are finalist in Online Business of Year Award I’m delighted to discover that we  are a finalist in...
2. How to write a business plan – and then tear it up Every business needs a plan for several reasons: a) To...
3. 10 reasons to enter business awards (and 4 reasons not to ) Many businesses never enter themselves for a business award during...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The Guardian newspaper has been considering the future of blogging – and the answer depends on where you stand.  According to their social media mavens, for the big tech blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch, there’s no contest, it’s WordPress all the way, but for the amateur blogger, and those who are time-short and twitterate, two mobile blogging systems are racing up the popularity stakes – but which is best: Tumblr or Posterous?
 
To a certain extent it depends on how you respond to each platform – both are simple to use, each has advantages and disadvantages, and each requires you to learn a few new tricks to convert your old blogging behaviours to new micro-blog ones.

What’s new in blogging?

Posterous has been running an aggressive campaign to seduce users who are familiar with blogger and wordpress systems, as part of which it’s just gone live with a WordPress blog important which means that old blog content established in a WordPress platform, can be grabbed, along with comments and tags, and dumped straight into a Posterous account. On the downside, it doesn’t mean that you can transfer your URL structure and that means you can lose quite a bit of your ‘Googlejuice’ – the mojo your site has created through links to your blog.

But when you look at the usage stats, rather than the functionality, there’s no doubt that at present, Tumblr is leading the field. As PC Magazine puts it, when you’re ‘fatter than Twitter but thinner than Blogger’, you’ve positioned yourself just right for the average user!

The future of blogging: Tumblr v Posterous is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Posterous – small business saviour? Posterous is making news at present and it could be...
2. Posterous shows you the 6 things you must do to resolve a major customer service issue. This is the email I received today from Posterous. This...
3. Emarket.com – the future of FMCG trading Hailed by The Grocer magazine as “the eBay for grocery”...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This global programme aims to let startups in the software based industries really boost their development efforts by providing three key benefits, for free!

What You Get

1. Software – startups who enrol in the programme are given free access to Microsoft’s development tools and platform technologies
2. Support – meaning that network partners around the planet are on call to offer advice, networking and development synergies
3. Visibility – a worldwide audience of potential investors, clients and partners are linked to the startups through Microsoft’s virtual networks.

There are other benefits too, such as technical training and access to Azure, Microsoft’s own cloud platform for problem-solving.

Are You Eligible?

To fit into the programme you have to:

• Be in the software development business
• Have existed as a commercial entity for fewer than 3 year
• Be generating annual revenue under USD 1 million. (and see the note below for regional variations and fine print details)

How To Join Up

You can sign up BizSpark through a valid BizSpark Network Partner or a Microsoft BizSpark Champ – either of which can provide you with a BizSpark enrolment code. The entry into the programme is free, but you will pay a USD $100  fee when you leave after three years.

What’s In It For Microsoft?

Well, they get in on the ground floor of a lot of innovative software based development, they hope that startups will go on to license themselves through Microsoft, and they benefit from offering peer-to-peer exchanges to the next generation of commercial enterprises which could lead to useful synergies and cooperative ventures for them.

Small print

Microsoft say that:

[a] Startups cannot be in the business of providing services to others such as hosting, web agency, system integration or outsourced development.
[b] Startups who are actively engaged in software development but have not yet completed the formalities of establishing a business are also eligible for entry into BizSpark.
[c] There are local variances calibrated to economic conditions in the startup’s place of business, below. If a Startups’ place of business is not listed below, then the revenue limit is USD $1 million.
USD $750,000 China
USD $500,000 Greece, Korea, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, Spain, Ukraine
USD $250,000   Egypt, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam 

Startup Support in Profile: Microsoft BizSpark is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. NACUE in profile The National Consortium of University Entrepreneurs may not be well...
2. Entrepreneur Resource: School for Startups Suppose you don’t want an MBA – suppose you want...
3. Business profile: Slydial So, what use would you make of a free voice...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So, what use would you make of a free voice messaging service that connects you directly to someone’s mobile voicemail? 

It’s an interesting question – there are good reasons for using a system like Slydial, and less good ones, and Slydial are open enough to list some of the ‘shadier’ uses in their Frequently Asked Questions, but if you have a service-centred business, for example, Slydial has a real benefit for you.

Say you want to let a series of customers know their order has shipped, but you don’t want to get into long conversations with all of them? Using Slydial means they get a totally personalised message but you control the length of the call and the information conveyed – it’s bespoke but you’re the only one who gets to do the speaking!

How it works

In most cases the person you’re slydialing just receives a new voicemail alert around a minute you leave your message, although with some mobile phones, the recipient’s phone gives a half ring before going to voicemail. Several reviewers have tried to catch it out, but nobody yet has managed to grab their phone before slydial slips over to messaging.

In the USA you can just dial 267-SLY-DIAL (267-759-3425) to use this service completely free, but for the advanced features such as the apps for iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile smartphones (and to avoid the advertising that precedes each usage you make of the service) you have to pay a small monthly fee.

What is it good for?

Slydial has a list: you might be short of time, wishing to avoid a painful, embarrassing or tough conversation, playing the field, wanting to pass on some complex information without having to get through the necessity of the person on the other end interrupting or trying to take notes as you speak and you don’t want to have to text it all, you might want to speak without interruption or to convey a message to somebody who is on holiday or in a meeting but who would benefit from having an update on a situation that’s too complicated for a text.

The Slydial downside

It’s simple – the person you’re calling has to have a U.S. mobile phone number that isn’t a pay-as-you-go, the callee also has to have voicemail on their phone and it doesn’t work with google voice, youmail or other similar third party systems. So for UK users, as of now, there’s no way to incorporate the Slydial experience into your domestic life.

Business profile: Slydial is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Startup Support in Profile: Microsoft BizSpark This global programme aims to let startups in the software...
2. Business Profile: Groupon Groupon is taking the bargain world by storm. The company...
3. What are the best Online Business Tools ? Having been recently being doing some research on online business tools...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Groupon is taking the bargain world by storm. The company offers a single ‘Groupon’ daily in each of the cities it serves, and the groupon (contraction of group coupon) is based on an online assurance contract that contains a tipping point algorithm. This means that if a certain number of people sign up for that day’s offer, then the deal becomes available to all of them, but if the tipping point isn’t reached, nobody gets that deal. Retailers love the concept because it means their risk is massively reduced and Groupon profits by taking a share from the retailers. Groupon, which bought out its European rival MyCityDeal a couple of years ago, has 11 million subscribers in 22 countries and is available across the UK in 37 cities from Aberdeen to York.

But now the model has evolved from single daily offer per city, per day into something called a Personalized Deals initiative which means that subscribers in several US cities will get deals tailored to their personal tastes and previous purchase record. As the Groupon blog puts it, ‘Personalized Deals will start out dumb, but like a baby dipped in some sort of mutating ooze … get smarter quickly. As Groupon gets to know you better, we’ll target your inbox with scarily accurate deals and scarily accurate hand-drawings of you.’

Marketing to the Individual

What does this mean? It’s a huge change in the nature of marketing, allowing retailers and service providers to increase the number of deals made, but with no control over who they’re made to. That power lies in the hands of the intermediary (Groupon) which uses the details supplied by its subscribers to avoid wasting their time, which is one of the biggest complaints people have about advertising and marketing – when it’s done via mass media, it reaches many more markets than the target ones.

This also allows Groupon to have more masculine deals on offer to men – while women have driven the growth of Groupon through social networking, the masculine market can be better serviced through less ‘sexy’ but more man-friendly offers, like power-tools and hardware deals.

Business Profile: Groupon is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Business Leader profile: Askar Sheibani Born in Azerbaijan, Iran, Askar Sheibani arrived in the UK...
2. Online retail the real 2009 winner UK shoppers, buying online, spent more than £5.4 billion, according...
3. Business Planning Resources round-up While there are many tools and information sources online, picking...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Heather Townsend has an interesting article at Real Business on how to give feedback to a poorly performing team member. She has five key tips to making feedback work for you, the recipient and their team:

1. Don’t shy away from the conversation – Townsend says the longer you leave it, the tougher it gets to open the discussion. Also, I’d add, the further you are in time from the event that caused the need to give feedback, the more likely it is that both you and the recipient of the feedback will have begun to forget the details of what happened, allowing them to get into denial about the situation and you to start to feel insecure about your own memory of the event/situation if you were present.

2. Be specific – Townsend recommends using the Situation – Behaviour – Outcome approach, which is a good way to establish the grounds for feedback. You need to state the situation in which the behaviour occurred, and outline the behaviour which needs to change before describing the outcome you require. As an example:

Situation – a busy day in the office when everybody was under pressure
Behaviour – the person was heard speaking rudely to a client on the telephone
Outcome – In personal terms this person needs to recognise her pressure levels and manage her own well-being by taking regular short breaks in high-stress situations. Professionally, ensuring she uses a script for the calls she makes means the person can avoid losing her temper and get through calls without losing her cool.

3. Be clear about what you and don’t want to happen – using a technique described in Crucial Conversations, Townsend outlines how to handle a feedback session: “I’m having this conversation because I want to see you be more successful in meetings. I don’t want you to think that I’m getting at you, or for you to think that I think you’re incapable. I do want you to be listen and digest this feedback carefully – and I don’t want you to dismiss the feedback as not important. I am giving you this feedback because I want to see your career develop further in this firm, and in my opinion, changing this behaviour will have a positive impact on your career development.”

4. Listen to the reaction – defensiveness, undue emotional response or an attempt to avoid the conversation, means you need to make the conversation safe again, before you give more feedback and you do this by restating what results you do and don’t want to happen.

5. Work with the other person’s agenda – Townsend says that feedback works best your purpose is supportive, so talking to somebody when you are in a bad mood with them is counterproductive, because you need to be able to see the benefit of giving constructive feedback, not just wanting to let off steam.

I’d add that what you do before, during and after the feedback session can make a substantial difference to how your feedback is received and how the person you’re talking to handles the need to change their behaviour:

• Prepare yourself by making sure you’ve double-checked facts and positions (perhaps the employee was dealing with a personal call, not a work one, in which case your feedback needs to be about time use in the workplace, rather than rudeness)
• Deal with excuses calmly but factually – and don’t fall into dealing with the excuse rather than staying focused on the behaviour that needs to change
• Make sure people can make the changes you are asking of them – this may mean providing training or a mentor, setting a target that will be monitored or just something as simple as giving them a go-to person if they feel they are slipping back into an unacceptable behaviour – the role of the go-to is to provide a safe space in which the individual can explore why they aren’t keeping up their performance so that if they need something further, they have identified it before they go to their line manager or mentor to request further support to maintain their constructive change.

Photograph by Stan Random under a creative commons licence

Giving feedback to improve business performance is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Use a bit of monkey business to replace performance appraisals Recently Cameron Herold told me about an interpersonal review process...
2. Growing your Business: The essential weekly meeting according to Verne Harnish In his excellent book, Mastering the Rockefeller habits, Verne Harnish...
3. Hiring the right people into your business Choosing the right people to develop your business is essential...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

When I was studying Management the key research that described the role and function of motivation was the work of Maslow.

His hierarchy of needs was the classic model by which management designed the processes that were supposed to lead to greater productivity.

Daniel Pinks looks at motivation in a different way in an entertaining clip that is, in itself, evidence of how thinking differently can lead to different outcomes – it’s an example of using mastery, technology and imagination to change the face of business presentations.

What Pinks explores is the way that a wide range of studies show that paying people more to do better work doesn’t achieve the desired result when that work ceases to be monotonous physical effort and requires intellect and complex thought.

Instead, once you ask people to do more sophisticated tasks to achieve their bonus, they actually do LESS well when the incentive of meeting their ‘hierarchy of needs’ is used as a motivating factor – ie if they are offered more money on a sliding scale, they actually perform less well.

So what factors can lead to better business performance today? They are factors relating to personal satisfaction are and achievement:

Autonomy – the desire to have control over our thinking processes. It has been proved in several studies, including some run by MIT, that when you free up employees to think for themselves, they come up with fixes, solutions and improvements in the workplace – not because they want a bonus for a good idea, but because given the chance to make things better, they often focus naturally on improving workplace performance because it’s a big and important part of their lives

Mastery – the inbuilt need to get better at things may be an evolutionary advantage; individuals like to develop their skills, whether it’s the time it takes them to complete a Rubik’s cube or the ability to play a Chopin sonata on the piano. This drive towards mastery is innate and can be harnessed to improve workplace performance when linked to autonomy: people want to improve, but forcing them to improve destroys their autonomy and makes them resistant so you need a balance that recognises these two drives working together with the third

Purpose – having a big purpose helps people want to do better. Money is not a big purpose for many people and ‘more money’ doesn’t inspire a lot of people to get up and do something. Purpose comes from believing you’re doing well in helping make something better – just doing well in a business that is not making something better (or may be making something worse) demotivates the individual so businesses need to look for ways to be ‘good at being better businesses’ as well as just for ways to ‘get better at being in business’.

What motivates people at work? is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. How to recruit and keep the best people According to GH Smart in his New York Times bestseller...
2. Hiring the right people into your business Choosing the right people to develop your business is essential...
3. 10 reasons to enter business awards (and 4 reasons not to ) Many businesses never enter themselves for a business award during...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.