Monthly Archives: October 2019

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LendingCrowd and Thrive win big at British Business Awards 2019

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Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Small business lender LendingCrowd and digital health marketing agency Thrive were the big winners at yesterday’s British Business Awards 2019.
Thrive, whose clients include Johnson & Johnson, walked away with two awards; one for the best work/life balance while director Daphne Metland won Female Business Owner (digital communications).
Meanwhile LendingCrowd, which has lent over £66m to small business over the past six years, won both Alternative Finance Provider and Business Lender.
In total 255 individuals and businesses were nominated for the British Business Awards 2019, which are now in their fourth year.
Yesterday’s event was held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in central London where nearly 300 guests were on hand to celebrate the best of British business.
Childcare group Fennies Day Nursery and Preschool, which runs 11 children’s day care centres across southern England, won the prestigious Better Business Award.
Dane Hardie, head of commercial at Fennies, said: “For us, this award represents where we’ve come as a business over the past five years. I think the British Business Awards are fantastic with a huge amount of diversity in the businesses that are here. Coming from an industry where women make up 90pc of our workforce, that’s hugely

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Brexit extension: ensuring your business is ready for the new deadline

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Originally written by Jo Thornley on Small Business
Brexit uncertainty is now very much, in US parlance, a ‘known unknown’ which will affect everyone in the UK in a variety of ways.
The good news is that now that the deadline has been pushed back to 31 January, you have more time to prepare.
Brexit opportunities and challenges
Preparing for withdrawal from the EU should be slightly easier for a small to medium-sized business simply because their smaller size means they can often respond faster and more flexibly than their corporate competitors. So as an astute entrepreneur you should try to stay alert to any such niche opportunities Brexit may send your way.
However, your chief concern will be to weather Brexit uncertainty as best you can. To do this successfully, your first and most vital step must be to keep yourself informed about political and economic Brexit developments at both macro and micro levels.
This will require 360-degree vigilance because some issues may directly affect your business trading, perhaps in the form of new legislation. Other issues may indirectly affect your cash flow by impacting upon your supply chain or by altering the priorities of your customer base.
Elsewhere, there may be other changes which affect

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How cloud telephone systems can help your small business

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Originally written by Partner Content on Small Business
Having a phone system that’s both reliable and easy to use is vital to every small business. Without one, the all-important communication on which you and your employees rely on to stay in touch, deliver projects on time and provide great experiences for customers can break down.
These days, choosing the right phone system for your business is more complicated than ever before. It’s impossible to ignore that the way in which employees communicate has fundamentally changed.
>See also: ‘Hello?’ Research suggests telephone greeting could lose you customers
Businesses have more communications tools to contend with such as email, instant messaging apps, mobile and social media. Old models and ways of thinking have become obsolete. Businesses need communication tools that can be compatible with each other. Traditional phone system providers fail to take this into account.
Cloud telephone systems
Business telephone system providers were once notable hotbeds of innovation spearheading features such as voicemail and call forwarding.
Today the rate of invention in personal communication has vastly outpaced its enterprise counterpart, shining a light on the shortcomings of the outdated legacy hardware still permeating offices.
What if phones could work alongside all these other tools? What if you could have

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Influential MPs call for government to rethink broken business rates

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Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Parliament’s influential Treasury Select Committee has called on the government to examine alternatives to the broken business rates system.
MPs say that the government should examine alternatives to the current system in time for the chancellor’s Spring Statement 2020.
Unfair business rates penalising small businesses are seen as the number one problem affecting 5.7m SMEs.
>See also: Business rates reform key, says Labour business chairman Rachel Reeves
Business rates are outpacing inflation and growing as a proportion of tax paid by small businesses, say MPs, and this unfair system penalises high street shops and sectors like manufacturing over online businesses.
Experts have warned that high streets face the loss of 200,000 jobs unless the Government acts to revive traditional town centres hit by the rise of internet shopping.
The committee concludes that the complex web of reliefs currently available demonstrate that the current business rates system is broken.
However, MPs are unable to recommend any system to replace the current one, from a sales tax to an energy tax, profits tax, turnover tax or land value tax, as all have their own disadvantages.
Business rates generated £31bn of income for the government in 2018-19.
Alison McGovern MP, the Treasury Committee’s lead member

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