Monthly Archives: June 2021

Hot Business News Today

How to get more from your business plan

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Originally written by Dan Matthews on Small Business
A business plan is an essential tool for start-ups and established organisations alike. It helps you make sense of your offering, the market in which you operate and other essential factors such as costs, revenue and projected profit.
But most businesses have no formal plan, perhaps because most entrepreneurs see little value in creating a rigid strategy that becomes obsolete within a few weeks of its completion.
They have a point, but those who reject the idea of planning wholesale risk missing out on a golden opportunity to isolate needless spending, spot opportunities and expand into new markets.
Jonathan Dowden, Product Marketing Manager at Sage, argues for a new approach to business plans, one in which bulky, static documents are eschewed in favour of practical information that changes as fast as the markets they describe.
“For start-ups it can actually be quite dangerous to write a business plan,” he says. “Unless you have data then you can’t know what will happen. If you go down the route of traditional business planning methodology then the template becomes, not an objective document that helps your business, but something that falsely convinces you that the idea is going to work.
“It’s

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Hot Business News Today

Sunak ignores small business pleas for more help to get through lockdown

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Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has ignored small business pleas for more taxpayer support to help get them through extended lockdown until July 19.
Small business owners, and especially nightclub operators, face going out of business because of the government pushing back the lifting of lockdown restrictions until end-July. The fear is that government scientists will again point to Covid-19 infection numbers again going in the wrong direction, and Britain remains at the current level of restrictions until spring 2022.
The Treasury has pointed to local authorities still having £1bn at their disposal to help small businesses cover such things as business rates on a case-by-case basis. Other than that, its arms are folded.

From the start of next month, small businesses will have to start contributing to the salaries of furloughed workers. Currently, the government covers 80 per cent of wages of workers in the furlough scheme. Next month that becomes 70 per cent, with employers having to cover an extra 10 per cent
Hospitality, leisure and retail operators will also have to start paying one third of their business rates bill from the start of July, ending more than a year of the bills being waived.
Small businesses

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