Tag Archive for Partner content

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The importance of vocational rehabilitation services for SMEs

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By Partner Content on Small Business UK – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

The wellbeing of your employees will play a crucial role in the success of your people and in turn, your business. Every business risks losing employees to long-term absences due to illness or injury, and so, being prepared and having access to support when needed is key.

On top of health issues, lengthy NHS waiting lists can mean accessing support to get people on the road to recovery isn’t always easy. But there are steps you can take to help strengthen and protect your business and people through your employee benefits offering.

Rebecca Selwyn, Propositions Lead (SME) Aviva Group Protection

At Aviva, our Group Income Protection policy offers a range of different support, over and above insurance. It provides financial support if an employee is unable to work due to illness or injury, paying a proportion of their salary to help them keep their income up whilst they manage their health – and help you afford to gap fill.

But more than this, it also offers access to early intervention and vocational rehabilitation services, helping employees improve their health, sometimes before long-term absence is needed.

Early intervention and rehabilitation

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How should I select my business broadband provider?

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By Nathaniel Dalby on Small Business UK – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Sky Business has partnered up with  Small Business to take you through what you should be looking for in your business broadband provider and package.

Cost of contract and hidden fees 

The cost of your broadband is, of course, one of your primary concerns when you begin to look at bundles. When looking at the cost, it will likely be broken down into a monthly fee that runs for a minimum contract (which is usually 24 months but can vary).  

Some providers offer month-to-month broadband which you can cancel any time, but for business broadband, you’re more likely to need a contract. Sometimes price increases can occur in the middle of your contract, but planned legislation from the UK government could soon put an end to this. 

The UK broadband industry is incredibly competitive, so make sure you’re always comparing prices as you go before you settle on a specific bundle. 

Download and upload speeds

Other than cost, speed is the most important number for broadband deals. Most businesses these days require a decent level of speed, which generally means 100Mbps and over.

Thankfully, providers have realised this and rarely feature speeds under

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Hot Business News Today

What are the benefits of business broadband?

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By Nathaniel Dalby on Small Business UK – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

See if you recognise this: you arrive at work in the morning to find colleagues twiddling their thumbs. You ask what the problem is and receive the time-honoured answer, ‘the internet’s down’.

Broadband outage is a problem that can wreck your working day, but now business broadband  is a solution which many small businesses can take advantage of, whether based in a hairdresser, restaurant, café, newsagent or a home office.

We’ve collected some of the best reasons to switch to business broadband and how it can help your company, whether you’re scaling up or just starting.

Unique features

Business broadband offers a variety of features that you don’t usually get with standard packages, such as “always-on” internet. This, as the name suggests, protects organisations from the scourge of downtime by providing continuous digital access even when connectivity glitches are occurring.

It does this by automatically switching to a back-up 4G mobile connection, meaning a network outage which once brought work to a standstill is barely even noticeable. With Sky Business, 4G back-up keeps your key devices running during an outage, so disruption is minimised.

Sky Business broadband is one of

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Can businesses save money on CBILS repayment costs by refinancing for a RLS loan?

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By Funding Options on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

On August 4 2021 an article published in the Financial Times reported that as much as £5bn worth of government-backed Covid loans could go unpaid, as business continue to face disruption following the lockdown.

The Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) provided a lifeline for UK businesses across different sectors of the economy. By the time it ended in March, £23.28bn had been provided through 98,344 facilities.

The government covered the initial 12 months of interest payments for CBILS, and this helped take the pressure off businesses – for the short term, at least.

But the time has come for many businesses to start their repayments.

Understandably, some business owners are concerned about having enough cash flow to meet the repayments and others are looking for ways to reduce costs.

If your business took out a CBILS facility or another type of loan to get through the impact of Covid, you might be able to reduce your repayment costs by refinancing to the Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS).

Refinancing debt to the Recovery Loan Scheme – how it works

Due to the 12-month interest/payment free period, your CBILS repayment profile is shortened. Essentially,

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Hot Business News Today

Can businesses save money on CBILS repayment costs by refinancing for a RLS loan?

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By Funding Options on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

On August 4 2021 an article published in the Financial Times reported that as much as £5bn worth of government-backed Covid loans could go unpaid, as business continue to face disruption following the lockdown.

The Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) provided a lifeline for UK businesses across different sectors of the economy. By the time it ended in March, £23.28bn had been provided through 98,344 facilities.

The government covered the initial 12 months of interest payments for CBILS, and this helped take the pressure off businesses – for the short term, at least.

But the time has come for many businesses to start their repayments.

Understandably, some business owners are concerned about having enough cash flow to meet the repayments and others are looking for ways to reduce costs.

If your business took out a CBILS facility or another type of loan to get through the impact of Covid, you might be able to reduce your repayment costs by refinancing to the Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS).

Refinancing debt to the Recovery Loan Scheme – how it works

Due to the 12-month interest/payment free period, your CBILS repayment profile is shortened. Essentially,

Read more...

Hot Business News Today

Embrace your unconventional superpowers

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By The Inside Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Brij Thankey started out in the corporate world, “a numbers guy” as he puts it, but he grew weary of conventional thinking and jumped ship to create a different kind of business.

A decade on, that business – Precision FM – is a national leader in facilities management across the UK and Ireland, and CEO Publication has recognised Brij among the UK’s Top 20 Dynamic CEOs.

One of Brij’s guiding principles is that honesty and transparency are what connect with people, and as you’ll see he’s still more than happy to give voice to ideas that go against the grain.

For starters, there’s the notion that big businesses can learn a lot from the way that small businesses operate. When he was starting out at Precision FM, Brij believed he could base the new business on the assumptions he’d acquired in his corporate career, but he soon came to realise he’d need to rethink things from the bottom up.  

Above all, he says, big businesses get too obsessed about the bottom line. They need to recognise that their greatest assets are their people, and that they’ll get

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How to build your business

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By The Inside Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

In 1988 Andrew Walsh founded the AW Repair Group. Starting out on a shoestring, with a staff of just two, the business has grown to become one of the leaders in the UK’s bodyshop industry, with eleven branches across the East Midlands and a workforce of more than two hundred. In recent years, the Group has been selected among the London Stock Exchange’s Top 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain, and Andrew himself has just been named among the industry’s top influencers.

Among the factors behind the Group’s success have been its ability to identify and anticipate trends in the automotive industry, and its willingness to invest in people and technology to keep it ahead of the field. But there’s obviously a lot more to it than that, and over the course of this series of this Masterclass series Andrew will share some of the experience he’s picked up along the way.

As we’ll see in this first episode, he’s a great believer in the power of the brand. Right from the start, he feels, a business needs to think hard about the image it wants to

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Hot Business News Today

How to grow your team

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By The Inside Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Of course it’s great when your business begins to grow, but growth can generate a fair few challenges too. In this Masterclass Andrew Walsh, founder and CEO of AW Repair Group, will look at some of the issues entrepreneurs face as they start to scale up.

There’s one particular danger that they need to look out for: the temptation to spend too much time working in the business rather than on it. For Andrew, the image that springs to mind is of a captain who’s down below in the engine room when they should be upstairs on deck with their hands on the wheel. If all their attention is on shovelling fuel they won’t notice when the ship starts heading towards the rocks.

So as their business gets bigger, entrepreneurs need to accept that they can’t do everything – or at least that they can’t do everything well. They need to build a team and they need to learn to delegate.

Andrew reflects on the qualities to look for in a new recruit and on the strategies you need to keep people fully motivated and playing to

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Hot Business News Today

Adopting a small business mindset is key

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By The Inside Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

When Precision FM was still in its infancy, founder Brij Thankey began to realise that he couldn’t transfer the ideas he’d picked up in his corporate career straight into his fledgling start-up.

In his earlier life, there were too many instances where desktop modelling on a spreadsheet to see how much money the business could save by ‘getting the machete out’ was the order of the day. But he now saw that he needed to think less about the business’ numbers and more about its people. Get the people side of it right, by recruiting good people and building strong teams, and the numbers would follow.

When it comes to recruiting, Brij’s motto is to look out for the undiscovered gems. He came to realise that when someone did well in an interview, all that told you was that they were good at doing interviews. It was all too easy to reject people at first sight, just because they performed poorly in an unnatural situation that bore no relation to the job they were being interviewed for. Give them a chance, look a little deeper, and

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Hot Business News Today

Embrace your unconventional superpowers

by  •  • 0 Comments

By The Inside Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Brij Thankey started out in the corporate world, “a numbers guy” as he puts it, but he grew weary of conventional thinking and jumped ship to create a different kind of business.

A decade on, that business – Precision FM – is a national leader in facilities management across the UK and Ireland, and CEO Publication has recognised Brij among the UK’s Top 20 Dynamic CEOs.

One of Brij’s guiding principles is that honesty and transparency are what connect with people, and as you’ll see he’s still more than happy to give voice to ideas that go against the grain.

For starters, there’s the notion that big businesses can learn a lot from the way that small businesses operate. When he was starting out at Precision FM, Brij believed he could base the new business on the assumptions he’d acquired in his corporate career, but he soon came to realise he’d need to rethink things from the bottom up.  

Above all, he says, big businesses get too obsessed about the bottom line. They need to recognise that their greatest assets are their people, and that they’ll get

Read more...