Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs
Complete our quick form that takes less than a minute. Let us know your big painpoints.
One of our membership team will be in touch to see if we have a solution for your business.
Sign up for a Business Essentials membership to save on costs and get peace of mind and protection.
Most people in the restaurant business know that their industry is a fairly risky one. This article discusses some strategies for surviving and then thriving as a restaurateur.
According to an Ohio State University study, the majority of new restaurants won’t stay open for a year. In addition, about 80 per cent will close within five years, finds Business Insider research. On the other hand, some restaurant owners get the formula right and manage to stay in business. These successful restaurateurs even grow their restaurant into a very established and popular food venue that lasts for decades or even generations.
Typically, if any business isn’t growing, it’s in danger of failing. Most people are at least somewhat familiar with a Food Network chef named Richard Irvine. He is partly famous because he hosts a TV show about failing restaurants and what can be done to save them. This experience makes him a good source of information about the things that restaurant businesses need to do in order to survive. He responded to a request for information about the main reasons that restaurants fail to thrive. With the famous chef’s answers in mind, it’s easy to come up with some useful tips that can help any eatery fare better.
Irvine says that he encounters many restaurant owners who can’t even answer basic questions about their profits and losses, labour costs, and food costs. He’s surprised to find that some owners have this problem even if they have run their business for a few years. They may have calculated food costs once. After that, they set menu prices based upon these initial calculations. Months or years later, they failed to stay on top of rising costs and never adjusted their menu prices to make up the difference. Suddenly, they may find that their revenues are the same or even greater, but their profits have tanked.
An investment in restaurant accounting software could help save both time and money. New software packages can even integrate with payment, inventory, and marketing systems in a very seamless and effective way. Mostly, just using good accounting software can help restaurant owners learn to properly track different kinds of revenue and expenses. They can also provide better information to base decisions upon. Good restaurant business software should be able to produce reports that make it easy to spot trends quickly.
See also: Best restaurant booking systems for small businesses
When financial professionals evaluate businesses, they tend to look at cash flow management as a primary indicator of success or failure. Cash flow is simply a term that describes how money comes in and goes out of a business. When revenues are higher than expenses, a cash flow is positive. It’s very true that most restaurants won’t enjoy a positive cash flow every day. Equipment purchases, repairs, or even payday may mean that a restaurant needs to spend more than it can possibly take in. However, there are ways to prepare for these issues without having to balance an urgent repair against meeting payday.
For example, it might be wise to open up a line of credit to provide funding for restaurant businesses. The good thing about a line of credit is that it works like other kinds of revolving credit. This means that the borrower only needs to pay fees an interest on money that they actually withdraw. At the same time, the flexibility of this kind of loan may make it easier to invest in business growth while managing operating expenses. New online lending platforms are usually faster to approve and fund loans, and some may be friendlier towards restaurant businesses than traditional financing companies have been in the past.
It’s a given that it’s cheaper and easier to keep a regular customer than it is to court a new one. Repeat customers bring in reliable revenue. In addition, it’s this type of pleased customer who is more likely to pass on the good news about a restaurant’s food to friends and family members. Mr. Irvine says that restaurant owners should focus on the basics of great customer service and good food as a first step. If a customer doesn’t like the food or the way that they were treated, he or she will probably choose another place to eat next time.
However, many food establishments go far beyond the basics in order to grow their customer base quickly. For example, a restaurant business might offer special promotions for customers who sign up for a mailing list. Subscription lists could include regular mail, email, text messaging, and even mobile apps. Periodic discounts or even menu updates could motivate diners to choose one restaurant over another one when they want to eat out. It’s also possible to encourage diners to act as brand ambassadors who bring in their friends and coworkers by offering great two-for-one or even four-for-two offers. Restaurant owners may need to try out a few different strategies to encourage repeat diners.
Also see: Advice on launching a website for a restaurant or pub
Naturally, a restaurant’s first year in business may be exceptionally risky. According to Mr. Irvine, restaurants that survive the first few years may face their own share of pitfalls. Restaurant owners may begin running their establishments by following very good practices for service, quality, accounting, and cash flow management. As time passes, the day-to-day demands of keeping the doors open may make it tough to keep up with the basics.
However, if a restaurant can keep increasing profits over time, that’s a good sign that the enterprise has been a successful one. In this competitive business, restaurant owners need to constantly strive for excellence in all aspects of their business and they will be able to reach their biggest company goals.
This article was supplied by Kabbage.
These are the main events and exhibitions for those involved in food and drink businesses which may be useful to attend if you are looking to stay current about the latest developments.
| Trade Shows | Website | Brief |
|---|---|---|
| Bellavita Expo | bellavita.com | An event dedicated to pizza, pasta and Mediterranean casual dining sectors. Incorporates the European Pizza & Pasta Show and Iberica Expo |
| Casual Dining Show | casualdiningshow.co.uk | Trade show dedicated to the casual dining sector. |
| Commercial Kitchen Show | commercialkitchenshow.co.uk | Industry event for buyers involved in equipping and running commercial kitchens. |
| The UK Food & Drink Shows | foodanddrinkexpo.co.uk | This event unites several shows together under one roof - The Ingredients Show, FoodEx, Food & Drink Expo, Farm Shop & Deli Show, and the National Convenience Show |
| HRC | hrc.co.uk | Hotel, Restaurant & Catering show for all those involved in the hospitality sector |
| The Ice Cream & Artisan Food Show | ice-cream.org | Showcasing the entirety of the ice cream industry across a three-day event. |
| IFEX | ifexexhibition.co.uk | Northern Ireland's largest show for food & drink products, catering equipment, and related services. |
| IFE, International Food & Drink Event | ife.co.uk | An event for food and drink professionals. Features the latest innovations from 1,500 international and UK suppliers. |
| International Drink Expo I.D.E | internationaldrinkexpo.co.uk | A dedicated show for the drinks industry for hospitality professionals. |
| Imbibe Live | live.imbibe.com | Diverse drinks industry event featuring products across every category. |
| Low2NoBev Show | low2nobev.com | Dedicated show for the low and no drinks sector. |
| lunch! | lunchshow.co.uk | An event for café, sandwich bar and coffee shop businesses. |
| Natural Food Show | naturalproducts.co.uk | A show for new food and drink products from organic, sustainable, net zero producers. |
| The Restaurant Show | therestaurantshow.co.uk | Showcasing the latest products, services, and innovations in the restaurant market. |
| Restaurant & Takeaway Innovation Expo | takeawayexpo.co.uk | An event for takeaway and restaurant owners. Runs alongside Coffee Shop Innovation Expo and Restaurant & Bar Tech Live. |
| The Source Trade Show | thesourcetradeshow.co.uk | The South West's biggest trade show for the food & drink sector. |
| Speciality & Fine Food Fair | specialityandfinefoodfairs.co.uk | For buyers across retail, hospitality, foodservice, manufacturing and wholesale sectors. |
| Street Food Live | streetfoodlive.co.uk | B2B event for street food and catering professionals. |
| Tea & Coffee World Cup | tcworldcup.com | A trade show and conference for operators in the tea and coffee industry - "from bean and leaf to cup" |
Welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. Today’s guests are Dr Megan Rossi (aka The Gut Health Doctor) and Jon Walsh, founders of Bio&Me granola and yoghurts.
We’ll be discussing how to win over buyers and create memorable social media content.
Listen to it in the media player below.
Or watch this teaser video.
You can also catch our episodes with:
We’ve got podcast episodes from the first series looking at:
To find out more about Small Business Snippets, you can download the trailer.
If you want to listen to the podcast elsewhere, it’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Watch the new video versions and subscribe over at our YouTube channel. It’d also be great if you could leave us a review.
Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case.
Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan.
Our guests for this episode are Dr Megan Rossi and Jon Walsh, founders of gut-friendly food brand, Bio&Me, launched in 2019. Their latest funding round closed £1.6m back in March 2022 and they’ve landed a recent investment from England captain, Harry Kane.
Megan aka The Gut Health Doctor is a dietitian and research associate at King’s College London and a regular on This Morning. She’s released two books and founded the Gut Health Clinic in London.
Jon has had a career spanning over 30 years in the commercial and marketing space, including roles at P&G and John West and a seat on the UK board of Nestle.
We’ll be talking about making memorable social media content.
Anna: Hi, guys, how you doing?
Megan and Jon: Hello! Yeah – really good, thanks.
Megan: For me, it’s really designing the products and making sure that every element of it is very much in line with the science. So as a background, I’m a scientist, and I wanted to make sure that all of my research and my beliefs on what’s really going to help people with their gut health is really emulated in this in this product. For me, there was a lot of pressure on getting the product right. It’s not just that, I guess, the science, but I wanted to make sure it tasted delicious. Because, as a dietitian, I know that even if something is really healthy for you, if it doesn’t taste good, people aren’t going to be repeat buyers. For me, it was getting that right formulation of the products.
Jon: Megan is spot on about the product. That was the number one thing to get right. I suppose the other thing that surprised me how it worked, like all those nice big companies you just mentioned in the intro, when you make a promise to retailers that like 100 per cent customer service, I just really hadn’t realised quite how much goes into making that happen. So many details. They really do matter. I remember at one point, before Covid, there was a shortage of cardboard in the world. I just couldn’t believe that, we’ve got the product, right, we’ve got the branding, right, but somehow, brown cardboard for outers was going to be the problem. There are just so many devils in the detail, you’ve just got to get it right. At age 48 that was a huge learning for me.
Jon: Um, so this is just going to make me sound like I’m flattering my co-founder, but what the big advantage that we had is that we have a USP, a unique positioning. We are the best for gut health, which is what, Megan, by designing the products we were just talking about, does. The retailers are really busy all the buyers. One cereal buyer was telling me that she was getting sent three or four new granolas a week. In order to stand out, you’ve really got to have that unique positioning. That’s what Megan brings to Bio&Me, which is, I think, our greatest strength. The other thought on it, I suppose, is I think there are some people out there who think that you just send one email, you’ve got your USP, everybody will realise it and think it’s fantastic and on you go.
Actually, you’ve just got to be charmingly persistent, you just got to keep going with very good humour, until you find the right moment. In truth, we’re a small start-up, we’re not the most important thing in most retailers’ lives. You’ve got to have a bit of humility and understand where you fit in the grand scheme of things, and then just be ready to grab your moment when it comes.
Jon: It really depends. I mean, if you can possibly find a warm introduction, so somebody who knows the buyer. If our strategy is quite obvious, you know, Megan has designed the products and knows how to make them best for gut health. I’ve got grey hair, so I worked in food for 20 years or so. So, although I you know, far from it, and you knew all the buyers, I probably only knew one but I might know somebody who knew somebody. So, if you can get a warm introduction, I would definitely recommend that. Emails can work but do prepare to be persistent. I saw one new wine brand who was on LinkedIn talking about the fact that they emailed the same buyer 200 times over a two-year period. That sounds like quite a lot of emails to me. So I think you’ve got to try and find your way to doing it in a way where you’re standing out but in a chillin one of the right way but you’re trying to be the fun part of the buyers job, not a hassle for them.
“One new wine brand emailed the same buyer 200 times over a two-year period”
Jon
Megan: Just to confirm that Jon and I don’t often give each other compliments or we like to flatter each other. Very rare for us. But to add, I think that is certainly one of Jon’s strengths in terms of just really being a people person, and being empathetic, but also being quite charming and how he can get in the inner circle and work with them. So I think that is a definite skill that Jon’s developed. Maybe it’s the ex-Nestle of 10 or so years and all the things you learned there, but you certainly have a way with people, I would say.
Jon: Developed it late in life, maybe.
Megan: For me, it’s just thinking about how you would talk to your girlfriends who might not have a science degree. What would grab their interest? What would motivate them to make some key changes in their life to support their gut health? That’s one of the key things. Whenever I’m writing a post, I think, well, how can I grab the attention of my girlfriends? I feel like that is a way that I seem to be able to get some of those key messages, but certainly isn’t something I always get right.
As a scientist, I want to always load the scientific information in there because I find it so exciting. But I need to realise that maybe not everyone appreciates the power and the potential of our gut microbiome, being fed that on a daily basis. Think of new angles to entice people.
Megan: Do you mean, me working with other companies? It would be potentially that, you know, there were some of the big guys who I thought I had a great opportunity to work together with when they approached me about being the face of their gut health range. But sadly, when it came into understanding what I was able to change in the products, sadly, it was very limited and their products just weren’t in line with the research around what’s good for your gut health. So that’s when I knew I had to go out and do it myself if I was ever going to get into food industry.
Megan: It’s a tricky one. I think a lot of it came down to their price challenges. And they were of the belief that the changes that I wanted to make to some of the recipes would have cost them too much in their margin and they wouldn’t have had a financially viable product. It motivated me more to be able to show them that, actually, you can have a product that is absolutely good for the gut and is a profitable business as well.
Now, of course, that’s not something I knew how to do. But I knew that I could find someone who had all those businesses skills, then be able to make sure that it was going to deliver that way. And that’s when I headhunted Jon, he has a different story. But we met in the middle, and we’d work together on another project. I just remember, again, I don’t like to give him any compliments, I’m going to have to pop his head at some stage in this podcast. But, you know, he did have all of those business skills that I knew I needed, and that I didn’t have, to have a viable business. So yeah, I think it really came down to that. And that’s why I am so incredibly proud of everything Bio&Me has achieved, because we’ve done good gut health the right way, but still being able to be a profitable business.
Jon: If we use the lucky word, we’ve been lucky, so far, in a sense of we’ve been growing very fast. As we’ve grown it, our volumes increase, therefore, we can buy our ingredients at ever cheaper prices, because of the volume discounts we can now get. Megan’s obviously designed the recipes to be the very best for gut health. That does imply that there’s a premium on the ingredients to make sure they’re the right ones. But as we grow, we can obviously buy them cheaper, therefore, so far, we’ve been able to offset inflation.
There’s also a sort of a happy coincidence for us where, when you were talking about product development earlier, you know, we launched in 2019, and then you get lots of feedback from consumers, they tell you what they love, the bits of the flavours they love. They also tell you some things they don’t like. So occasionally, we were getting comments about hardness and taking out the some of the hardness in the product. When we analysed it, that happened to translate to some of the hardest, most expensive ingredients as well, some of the nuts and seeds, etc. We were able to swap those out for softer ingredients, which also helped on the cost, which meant we haven’t had to put a cost increase through at all yet.
Anna: That’s the importance of customer feedback as well.
Jon: Yeah. And this time, we were just very lucky that the where the customers are asking us to go and we’re only talking tiny tweaks. In our fundamental principles of being the best for gut health, we’d never compromise on the taste and flavour side. You mean you listen to your consumers. That’s why, we’re mainly a retail business obviously, we’ve got our lovely partners Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, ASDA, Ocado, etc. But our ecommerce business is wonderful for getting customer feedback. Because they buy from you, they email you. We get lovely emails every day, we get, you know, three, four or five emails from people asking us questions, telling us what they like, occasionally wanting changes. That’s gold dust for us.
Megan: I think that’s also where the social media community comes into play. We’re looking at NPD (new product development). And we’ve got about 20 different products and put it to them. They’re so passionate about it give us really detailed feedback. So it’s brilliant to have that community on side as well.
Jon: So I saw a number one focus, by the way, I’m not sure if this is in your question, but is the UK. We quite often get asked about going international right now. We just want to make sure we get absolutely everything right in the UK, on our cereals and on our yoghurts. We’re obviously in two categories, and in truth that is more than enough to be getting on with. If you imagine our ambition is to have our granolas, our pouches and yoghurts in all the supermarkets, and in as many stores as possible in those supermarkets, there’s an awful lot of work for us to do still to do that. We’ve had a great start. We’ve had a great year with a lot of new launches but the truth about a launch with a supermarket is that’s just the start of the hard work, then you got to get a good rate of sale and grow your business with the supermarkets that you’re in so that’s kind of our number one focus. If we get that right next year [2023], I mean, what’s lovely is our business has doubled this year, we just get the distribution we’ve got right. Next year, we’ll double again. That is our absolute number one focus.
Megan: I think to add to that is Jon is very tight with money, which is actually a really beneficial thing.
Jon: Three compliments!
Megan: Is that a compliment? Maybe a backhanded compliment. So I think, again, our growth, the doubling has been done on quite a small marketing budget. We’re very cautious with how we spend the investment that we’ve gotten. And, again, it shows that, if we didn’t throw money at the marketing, like many other companies do, I think our growth could be even more accelerated, but we want to be obviously very savvy, going into some pretty difficult times. Some are quite cautious with that, but still have obviously been achieving pretty good growth.
Jon: I used to read a lot about social media. That is a big, big, big focus for us, partly from a brand awareness point of view. But also, that engagement piece that Megan was chatting about is so important, the relationships. You can build up there, then we spend as much money as we can, as close to the point of sale as we can, whether that’s ecommerce on our site or with our retail partners. What we want to do is try and grab people’s attention, when they’re literally in stores or on retailers’ websites, because, you know, we don’t have the millions to do TV advertising campaigns that the big companies like Nestle can do. We have to find ways to grab people’s attention.
Our best marketing really is our packaging and if we can just add our product and if we can get our packaging and our product into people’s hands, they can read Dr. Megan’s story on the pack, they can try the product and that’s what converts people to us. So yeah, that’s where our real focus is.
Megan: And I just think with the power of social media, the word of mouth, that free marketing, I think, again, that’s how we’ve been able to keep our marketing budget down is kind of utilising the community we’ve already got available to us. They really do believe in the Bio&Me brand and really support it. So, I think that’s helped a lot as well.
Megan: You know, I love that people ask me this. And I think everyone’s responded really positively, I think because I still work as a research fellow at King’s so I haven’t ‘sold out’, so to speak, I’m still ensuring that the products that we are developing are in line with the science. And I think that is something that my colleagues are really proud that I’ve continued to do. If I ever change that, I think I would cop a lot of flack. So I think they’ve been really positive and have loved being able to recommend the product to a lot of their clients in terms of, you know, my nutrition and dietetic colleagues, because they also saw that there was no product out there that, you know, was actually claimed namely good for the gut in terms of the no added sugar, the prebiotic claim that we’ve got and that plant diversity delivering the 15+ plants and each and every product so, they say they’re the experts, they see the product and they’re like, ‘Wow, this is actually really impressive’. And yeah, so I think overall it’s been really positive so far. Knock on wood.
Anna: Well, that’s it for me unless either of you have anything you’d like to add.
Jon: Nope! I quite enjoy these things.
Anna: Yeah, it’s nice to have a chat! Thank you both so much for coming on.
Megan: Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having us.
You can find out more about Bio&Me at bioandme.co.uk and Megan at instagram.com/theguthealthdoctor. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more on starting your own business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts, follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk (all lowercase) and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.
Welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. Today’s guest is Grace Beverley, entrepreneur, author, investor and podcaster.
We discuss productivity and taking part in sales events ethically.
Listen to it in the media player below.
Or watch a couple of teaser videos.
You can also catch our episodes with:
We’ve got podcast episodes from the first series looking at:
To find out more about Small Business Snippets, you can download the trailer.
If you want to listen to the podcast elsewhere, it’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Watch the new video versions and subscribe over at our YouTube channel. It’d also be great if you could leave us a review.
Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case.
Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan.
Our guest today is Grace Beverley – entrepreneur, author of the Sunday Times bestseller, Working Hard, Hardly Working, and host of a podcast of the same name.
Grace is the founder and CEO of two businesses, TALA and Shreddy. Fitness app Shreddy launched in 2016, followed by her sustainably made activewear brand, TALA, in 2019. In 2020, Grace was named first on the Forbes 30 under 30’s retail and e-commerce list at the age of 23. The entrepreneur landed a £4.2m investment for TALA earlier this year and is also an investor in Wild Deodorant, Clean Kitchen, Drink Nice and Your Heights.
We’ll be talking about productivity and the challenges Grace has come up against in raising funding.
Anna: Hi, Grace, how are you?
Grace: Good, thank you. How are you?
Anna: Yeah, not bad. Not bad at all.
Grace: I think there really is no one size fits all approach. Of course, it’s different to every business. And when it comes to sustainability, especially with any area that kind of talks about consumption, obviously, it’s not black and white at all. As much as, for one business, what’s more sustainable might be less so for another business. I think that’s really, really important to bear in mind that, if you’re running a small business, and it’s a really important time of year for you, especially coming up to gifting season and you’re competing against much bigger companies, I think what’s really important is not shaming smaller businesses and more sustainable businesses for getting involved in that.
Now, with that being said, I think it’s very important define the parameters in which you are going to get involved in something like Black Friday. What we do at TALA and Shreddy, we created a Black Friday pledge. So that was essentially saying what we are going to do and what we’re not going to do. That allows the transparency for a consumer to then be able to say, ‘Yes, I am going to buy’ or, ‘No, I’m not going to buy.’
I think when you shame sustainable businesses out of participating in any discounting time, it’s very, very difficult, then, to create a landscape where sustainable business can play any part in changing these industries. When you look at fashion, of course, sustainable fashion is always going to be an oxymoron, it’s always going to be contradictory. But at the same time, in order for the mass market and the mainstream to be better, there needs to be options for companies who produce more ethically and more sustainably, even if that’s not perfect, because sustainable fashion will never be perfect.
I think one of the most important things, and it’ll be different for every business, is to really establish what makes you feel comfortable as a business, what furthers your mission. I think anything that compromises a mission definitely isn’t the right thing to be doing. For example, at TALA our aim is to disrupt the activewear mass market. We want people who usually shop mass market activewear brands to start shopping better, start thinking about sustainability and ethics. We’re completely transparent about the ways that we do and don’t do that in order for people to be able to, I guess, facilitate just the conversation and talking about it and thinking about it a bit more. So, with that in mind, it furthers our mission to be able to offer 10-30 per cent discounts on Black Friday, dependent on the product. That is because we also completely understand that there are gifts to buy and leggings to replace and, in terms of making sustainability accessible, that needs to be a price point. Black Friday will be the only time where certain people can access certain products and therefore we do think that it is really important to create an offering around this time but be really clear about what that is and what that isn’t.
In the same breath, we need to make sure that we are educating on overconsumption. Education on things like panic buying and planning you’re buying, all of those things that can make you have a more sustainable Black Friday. I personally don’t believe that shaming people completely out of engaging in consumption as a whole, like buying gifts, is necessarily going to fix the whole market, I’d rather there be better options within the marketplace.
For those small businesses, I’d say, transparency around the way you engage, but also, small businesses are always going to be far more sustainable than larger businesses. If it’s an important time of year for you engage in it in the way you want to. Just be clear about why you’re doing that and what you are and are not doing.
Grace: Yeah, sure. I mean, anyone can go to the TALA pages to have a little look at what that might look like. We make sure, at the beginning of any sale period, to put a blog post out that goes into detail about why we what we do participate in and what we don’t participate in, about the risks of overconsumption, about all of these kinds of various different things. And I think that when you’re involved in that industry, it’s really easy to assume that everyone has that background of actually understanding the different industries and that way.
I think that the majority of the time, when I tell some of my friends, for example, the horrors of some of the fast fashion things, they’re kind of like, ‘Oh, my God, what?’ I think when you’re very much in that space, it’s easy to assume that everyone knows that and chooses to ignore that. We try to just make sure that, for example, before the sale goes live, we release something saying, ‘This is everything that’s in the sale’, so that people don’t panic and buy within that moment. We share long-form writing (especially from our sustainability manager) on how to shop better, but also some things you probably didn’t know about Black Friday, etc, etc.
Anything educational, both to help the consumer in their individual shopping experience around Black Friday and around the holiday season. Just general education as a whole on the industry.
Grace: I would say that women raising capital is definitely the most important part of that to talk about.
When you look at the funding landscape, especially venture capital, but actually all forms of funding, women took 2.8 per cent on the highest year ever of venture capital funding. So that is 97.2 per cent of the entire industry going to male founders. I think that becomes particularly problematic when you think of the fact that everyone’s job is likely to be for a business and that business was going to have to be started from entrepreneurship. Now obviously, all of those weren’t taken funding in some way, but the majority of the big ones were and so that becomes really problematic when you think about it that way. There’s definitely something that I’m completely surprised that it’s never talked about on a like a wider scale. It seems like a niche part of a niche industry. But actually, it’s relevant to the large majority, that’s how all businesses are starting, then how do we get wider gender equality in terms of pay, in terms of every other area of the industry. So, I think that’s really, really important to talk about.
The statistics are stacked completely against women when it comes to funding – that gets far worse when you look at black women. I think the stat for that is 0.024 per cent of funding, which is just the most appalling statistic I think anyone can possibly imagine. The fact that that doesn’t hit the papers every day is completely surprising to me. If you looked in any other industry and 0.024 per cent, was like, ‘That is really, really appalling’.
I also went to Oxford, and we know that founders who went to Oxford or Ivy League are much more likely to get funding. And so there’s, of course, there are elements that would have held me back. I also think that, in part, the influencer way would have helped to kind of spur that forward in terms of being able to guarantee a certain amount of demand, but definitely didn’t make it as easy as certain contingents in terms of being able to kind of get that funding. I think that yeah, as I mentioned, the women getting funding is the most important part of that to talk about.
I was really lucky in our funding round that we raised. TALA was my second business that we were raise funding for, and we raised that 2.5 years post-revenue. We already were able to prove a certain amount of the business model working, and therefore there was less of having to take a ‘risk’. It’s still a risk, of course. Our next stage of growth is reliant on us being able to deliver that and increase that demand far beyond my existing audience.
As you can probably imagine, not having revenue and just betting on an idea, investors are far more likely to choose success stories that they know work, which is more likely to be, as you can expect, usually men in tech.
Obviously, there are a lot of things that do. We were really lucky to be raising 2.5 years post-revenue. We got six term sheets after six weeks of pitching for about nine hours a day. It was gruelling. But that was obviously incredibly exciting. There were definitely challenges along the way, I have no doubt that we probably walked into some rooms and some people thought, ‘Oh, this seems strange, a female founder and a female managing director. I wonder how on earth they can make money.’ But I’m lucky to be here, very excited about the business delivering on our targets and about to embark on the next stage of TALA.
Grace: I mainly invest in businesses that I think I could help in some way. So, that’s usually businesses where I have some experience in the sector, whether that’s a young female demographic customer, whether that’s sustainability, whether that’s fitness, whatever that might be – those are generally the ones I have the most interest in, because I feel like I can help them. That might be their digital marketing strategy, that might be their organic marketing strategy – a lot of these kind of various different things – those are what I generally try to invest in.
But of course, as you’ve mentioned, I do try to invest in women as much as possible. I think that is one of the most important ways for us to be able to start to reallocate those funds. I guess, though, when you look at the gender funding gap, you can probably only imagine the gender wealth gap. he The onus cannot just be placed on women to be funding more women. Of course, it’s part of my strategy. But ultimately, it needs to be a change that happens. People in very different situations from me, and funds to be able to really change that industry.
Anna: Oh, yeah. 100 per cent. A lot of change needs to come from the structure of boards and panels as well.
Grace: Absolutely, and women on investment committees as well within those. I think we saw with industries like beauty through the whole pandemic, you’re shutting down a multibillion-dollar industry for longer than you’re shutting down any other industry purely because actually the people in the decision-making rooms probably don’t value that industry. It seems so superficial. It seems like ‘Well, do you really need to be getting your nails done?’ At the same time, pretty much every other industry was open.
Just looking at the kind of decision-making processes and that probably if you don’t have people in the room who use the services, you’re also going to be missing out on huge opportunities. Because if in that investment committee room there aren’t women there who have problems to be solved by great new businesses, huge opportunities are going to be missed.
Grace: So this is my favourite thing, I could probably talk about it for the rest of my life. Essentially, this method is based off the fact that I very easily get overwhelmed. That’s probably because I take on too many things. I have an insatiable appetite for taking opportunities, which is great in some ways, really bad in other ways.
What I essentially realised was, I started doing this at university, I believe. I’d started my first business at this point and then I was also doing my university course alongside and, what has happened, is I’d have a 40-task-long to do list. Every time I was going to a new task I’d be trying to work out which was the next most important task and like, ‘Oh, but I have 15 minutes until my next tutorial, so which one can I do?’ You shouldn’t constantly be trying to find that next task.
What I decided to do instead was just split that to-do list up into tasks, quick ticks and projects. Quick ticks are things that take under five minutes; tasks are the things that take five to 30 minutes; and projects take 30 minutes plus. This enables you to be able to instinctively prioritise, but also time block, because you can probably do a load of quick ticks together or a few tasks together when you have a bit of time.
It essentially just means that everything is a lot easier, both in the moment, and when you’re actually planning out your time. Because, for example, it’s a particularly hectic time. This week, it’s coming to the busiest period in the retail year, which means that there’s a lot on at the same time. We are planning for January, which is a huge area in the fitness space. I’m having all of these approvals coming in that might be approving a marketing campaign for January. But there’s also something really urgent that needs to be done for this week. At the same time I went up to Manchester this week with Meta and have been doing some work with them on their Good Ideas Studio, which means that I was spending time with a few small businesses there, talking to them about their problems, how to resolve those, just getting to know people, getting to network.
All of these different things then come into your schedule. It’s really difficult to be able to block that all out, but also to have full visibility over your tasks. I find methods like that particularly important in terms of being able to actually decipher what you need to do next, how you can be most productive and stop getting yourself so overwhelmed because everything looks the same weighting. Actually, there are three really important tasks and 20 things that you can probably blitz out in half an hour.
Grace: So I think what’s really important is to try in part – and I know this is not very useful – but to try in part to see it less as something that you need to absolutely stick to and more like parameters or recommendations throughout your day. However, I would also say on top of that, if you continuously find yourself running through the blocks, you probably don’t know how much time tasks actually take you. I think that that’s something that I definitely struggled with.
One of the first things to do, to actually understand how much time tasks take you, is to start writing it down. Take a one-week or two-week period and just start writing down, say, composing an email. I think that takes me 10 minutes, but it actually takes me 25, or whatever it might be. There are all of these different things that you start to have a bit more understanding. Then you can use that as a manual for how long things will take. What I generally do as well is I add on probably about like a 30 per cent buffer, because I understand that I’m not great at being able to understand that. If I think something’s going to take me half an hour, it’s probably going to take me 40-45 minutes, and I just work that in.
You really do need to be setting yourself up for success rather than failure. Otherwise, it’s going to constantly feel like you’re not doing enough and you’re doing it incorrectly. But I think that’s one of the best things you could do is to start planning and buffers. Same goes if you’re in a job where things often come flying in that need approval within the next hour. Just actually making sure that every two hours, you have a 15-minute block that’s just set aside for urgent tasks. I share my schedule on my Instagram Story every day and what I usually have during that is I have, essentially, allotments for the time that urgent tasks, when it’s going to come flying in, I’m going to need to be able to deal with them.
Grace: I’d say I probably don’t keep it [in check]. In fact, I’d say probably that’s the most simple answer. But I really tried to and I try to – every time I get it wildly wrong, I try to really take some learnings out of that in order to be able to make sure I don’t run into that situation again. So, I think there’s a lot of importance of trusting your team and delegating. But then there’s also a lot of importance in starting to give yourself time to recharge and really recognising rest as a form of productivity. I think we see rest is opposite to productivity whereas actually, if you don’t have rest, you can’t have productivity. If you don’t have productivity, you probably can’t have rest, especially if you’re the type of person who has like that entrepreneurial mindset.
So, I think that one of the most important things is there is a temptation to say yes to everything. But obviously, the key is to prioritise things which you feel most passionate about. So, at the moment, for example, this past week, I’ve been doing the Meta Good Ideas Studio, that’s something I’m really passionate about. I’ve really enjoyed meeting the small businesses.
It’s just, I think, it’s really important to prioritise those things that really hit right on your passions, because I feel like you’re going to spend a lot of the time, especially as an entrepreneur, doing things that you don’t want to do. It’s a very natural part of the business. There’s so much admin, there’s so much logistics and you pretty much have to be a jack of all trades. You’re probably only good at about half of those things. I feel like it is really important to, even if something’s extra, those things that are things that you’re really passionate about, like I’ve been doing on that extra project. It’s something that’s been super busy at the moment in the busiest time of the year. But actually, that’s the type of thing I really want to do. It recharges me in a different way, if that makes sense.
Then on top of that, obviously one of the biggest things has been making sure that, over time, and especially over this year, how TALA’s doubled its headcount now, which is fantastic, but it also means lots of new people. In order for that to work, there needs to be a lot of time spent building up people’s confidence, building up systems to make sure that the teams work best with each other.
Allowing that kind of time and space to understand that, actually, pretty much a whole brand team has started within the past three months, and therefore I’m not going to be able to delegate everything at this time. Or I’m going to have to spend a lot more time in work than I probably would the rest of year.
I guess those are the driving factors and the rules I have around busyness. Do the things that you’re really passionate about and make space for those because that is a different type of recharge. Especially if you’re usually in the nitty gritty of the business, and then also get really good at delegating, but understand that it’s not always going to be possible to delegate. Sometimes you just have to factor in that time to spend a little bit more time with people, especially if they’re new.
I think we always have this expectation that we’re going to be able to hit the ground running on everything and it’s just so not the case. So, giving yourself that kind of grace and time in order to be able to adapt, I think that’s incredibly important.
Anna: Well, that’s it from me. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Grace. It’s been great. That’s hard to say!
Grace: Thank you so much. It’s been lovely to chat to you.
You can find out more about Grace at Instagram.com/gracebeverley. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on productivity. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts, follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk (all lowercase) and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.
As an entrepreneur, there are several reasons why you might want to write a book, from writing a bestselling business manual through to promoting your coaching or consultancy business. But with anything up to 200,000 books published in Britain each year, how do you cut through the noise and market your book?
The best bit of marketing advice as to how to market your book is to be able to sum it up in a couple of sentences. What is your pitch? “This book is a soup-to-nuts guide to starting and growing your e-commerce retail business” or “Case studies from the lives of some of the world’s most successful tycoons and how they can be applied to small business.”
You need to be able to sell your book in a couple of sentences to readers.
One of the attractions of writing a nonfiction business book is that you don’t actually have to write the book to see if there’s any market traction for it.
Nonfiction book publishers want to see a proposal first, with a detailed synopsis and some sample chapters.
If you are a first-time author, there is a plethora of freelance editors out there who can mentor you, some of whom work for major publishing houses. You can find them on freelance editor platform Reedsy.
>See also: How to write a marketing plan
The UK publishing market is trifurcated into three arms: traditional business book publishers, such as Bloomsbury and Hachette; smaller independent publishers, such as Practical Inspiration Publishing and Rethink; and self-publishing your own e-book.
These are the big five publishing houses – Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Hachette – and the only way to approach them is through a literary agent, who acts as a gatekeeper.
Pro tip: To find a literary agent who might be interested in your book, go to your local bookshop, and find titles similar to the book you want to write. The author will always thank the agent in the acknowledgements. That way, you know the agent is interested in your kind of book.
The advantage of having a traditional publisher is that they have a marketing budget and pay an advance. The bigger the advance, the more they will spend to market your book.
The downside of traditional publishing is your lack of control, the long lead time before publication – which can be up to two years – and the narrow recoupment corridor of about 10-15 per cent of each copy sold.
These are smaller publishers who often will not give you an advance but give you the cachet of still having a paperback book in a Waterstones or your local bookshop.
Another plus is that book revenue can be split as high as 50/50.
The downside is that, having given away your control, there is often negligible marketing and sometimes independent publishing can seem to be the worst of both possible worlds.
Publishing changed in the mid-noughties when Amazon launched its Kindle e-reader, which meant anybody could self-publish a book. Anybody could publish their own e-book, not only on Amazon KDP but also through rival publishing platform Kobo.
Not only that but as a self-published author you are in complete control, from the book cover to deciding how to market your book. And with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing royalties can be as high as 70 per cent.
However, the problem is how to market your book and get visibility when you’re drowning in a sea of Kindle e-books. Not only that but less than one in five British readers read e-books, with the combined e-book and audiobook market only accounting for 29 per cent of sales.
Even mainstream publishers expect you to market your book yourself, whether it’s whipping up interest through your social media accounts or communicating with readers directly.
Having an email database is the single biggest thing you can do to help market your book. That way, you can sell to your subscribers directly when the book is publishes.
Add the names of people you meet at conferences and events to your address book. Once you have a reasonable number, start emailing them a regular newsletter detailing your doings. If data is the new oil, then having your own email list really is black gold.
Katie Sadler, a freelance book marketing consultant who has worked for HarperCollins and Quercus, says: “An engaged email list is always a good idea for authors. Social media is great for all sorts of reasons, but you are at the mercy of an algorithm which can change at any given moment.”
Pro tip: If you want to build your list quickly, you can give away your first e-book for free to people you meet at conferences, as a marketing tool. Or you could build a landing page for the book on your website that you direct people to, and people could request the ARC there instead. This whole process can be automated through a service such as Bookfunnel and StoryOrigin.
Every social media platform from Facebook through to TikTok is hungry for your advertising dollars. Facebook, because of its older audience, is especially attractive for authors – and its ability to micro target customers is very powerful. For example, you can target potential readers incredibly specifically: male > living in the UK > aged over 30 > small business owner > likes Dragons’ Den.
The downside of Facebook et al is that it hoovers up cash very quickly without any tangible benefits. The marketing rule of thumb is that it takes seven “touches” before somebody buys a product. Plus Amazon takes three months to make its first monthly payment post publication, so there’s a lag between you spend to market your book and actually seeing any income.
Speaking of Amazon, the world’s biggest bookseller enables you to market your book directly with Amazon Ads, the theory being that if you want to fish, go where the fish are.
On the other hand, as a business book writer, it may be that the best social platform for you is LinkedIn, which is aimed squarely at business professionals.
Pro tip: If you are running Facebook ads, positive reader reviews consistently deliver strong results in ad images.
Personally, I would never buy a book on the basis of somebody pushing an ad to me on Facebook. Although personal word-of-mouth is hands down the best marketing tool for a book, good reviews are crucial.
Says Sadler: “Reviews provide social proof that your book is worth reading. If someone comes across your book and they maybe don’t know much about you, plus there are zero reviews, it takes an even bigger leap of faith for them to part with their money to buy it.”
One tool to drum up reviews on publication is to offer Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) either directly to those in your email database or through a paid service, such as NetGalley.
Why reviews are crucial
Because the Amazon algorithm increases visibility for books with lots of reviews, which in turns means you can market your book on sites such as Bookbub, which is a pay-to-play book promotion service for e-books and has a database of millions of potential customers for your business e-book.
Anecdotally, Bookbub only accepts e-books for promotion which already have 50 or more reviews on Amazon so it’s a self-generating flywheel – the more reviews you have, the better your chances of getting reviews = more overall sales.
It has been estimated that the cost to any business that doesn’t have a website averages at £173,769 per year in lost revenue, despite the average monthly running cost of a website being less than £18.
If creating a website for your business can boost your profits by nearly £200,000 a year, the only question left to ask is…
| Site 123 | Wix Business Unlimited | Weebly* | GoDaddy online store | Square Space online store basic* | Basic Shopify | IONOS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accept online payments | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ |
| No transaction fee | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |||
| Unlimited bandwidth | 5GB | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||
| Storage | 10GB | 35GB | Unlimited | Unlimited | |||
| Connect your domain | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||
| Ad free | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||
| 10 video hours | ☑ | ||||||
| Analytics | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |
| Free domain for one year | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |||
| Free SSL security | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |
| Site search | Product only | Product only | ☑ | ||||
| Product badges | ☑ | ☑ | |||||
| Inventory management | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |||
| Shipping calculator | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||||
| Integrated shipping labels | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||||
| Shipping discounts | ☑ | ☑ | |||||
| SEO | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ |
| Lead capture and contact forms | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||||
| Support | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||
| Mobile optimized websites | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||
| Products on Instagram | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |||
| Integrated accounting with digital accounting | ☑ | ☑ | |||||
| Staff accounts | 2 | ☑ | ☑ | ||||
| Sales channels | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |||
| Discount codes | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||||
| Abandoned cart recovery | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |||
| PayPal button | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||
| Email marketing | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||||
| Social media integration | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||
| Built-in shopping cart | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | |||
| Product reviews | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||||
| ADI | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ||||
| Pricing plan pm | Free > £11 | £20 | £18 | £13.99 | £28 | £19 | Basic website £9 + basic e-commerce site £19 |
Below are capsule reviews of seven of the most popular off-the-shelf e-commerce platforms in Britain to help you choose the best website builder.
Until a few years ago, you had to hire a website designer if you wanted to sell off the internet. Today, you can rent a bells ‘n’ whistles e-commerce platform from a Weebly, a Squarespace or a Shopify.
Related: How do I build a website for my small business?
Small Business has tried to compare entry-level e-commerce packages aimed at small businesses that want to sell through the internet. Several of the providers below offer more powerful packages, so it is difficult to compare them directly. Some bundle more features than others (see table), so it’s like comparing apples and oranges.
However, each of these website builders have their own strengths and target markets, which should help you decide.
>See also: Top social media tips for small businesses
Over 150 million people worldwide choose Wix to create a website and manage their business online.
Wix is a classic drag ‘n’ drop template website builder. You can choose from over 500 industry-specific templates using its drag-and-drop editor.
However, like GoDaddy and Site123, Wix also offers artificial-intelligence-powered design, which takes most of the decision making out of your hands.
You could compare Wix to a prefabricated building: the shape of the house is there and cannot be changed. However, you can repaint the walls and use its 280-strong app store – both free and paid-for – to customise the interior.
Wix’s site pages are also optimised for mobile, which means they look good on smartphones.
Easy to use and well designed, its AI-powered design help means you can build a great looking site without knowing how to code.
If you want to sell more than 50 product lines, you might be better off with a specialist e-commerce platform such as Shopify.
Price: There are four packages available: ‘Light’ comes in at £9 pcm (no e-commerce with this one though), ‘Core’ is £16 pcm, ‘Business’ is £25 pcm, and ‘Business Elite’ is £119 pcm
Site123 is built for businesses that need a website up fast with as little fuss as possible.
Like GoDaddy and Wix, it uses artificial intelligence in design. Site123 asks you a couple of questions about the kind of website you want to build, generating you a template with relevant features.
Site123 is incredibly intuitive and timesaving.
First, you can choose from a range of templates designed for different business types. The process is intuitive and flexible offering a professional-looking parallax scroll.
Templates are well-designed and their apps easy to integrate, enabling you to sell products through your website.
All premium plans offer e-commerce functionality, with advanced e-commerce features on the “Professional” and “Gold” plans. These advanced features allow you to sell digital products and add coupons. That said, Site123 is reportedly investing in improving its e-commerce features.
Site123 is the best website builder for a small businesses that want to showcase their company info and contact details, or if they want to sell a few products.
If you’re a retailer who wants to scale up your business fast however, it’s probably best to look elsewhere.
Price: Free rising to £11 per month.
Weebly currently powers more than 40 million websites, which works out at roughly 2 per cent (and growing) of all websites on the internet.
It is probably the easiest to use of all the non-AI powered website builders being reviewed. Its intuitive website builder has bolt-ons that you buy through its app store to migrate your site to an e-commerce platform.
However, unlike Wix, Site123 and GoDaddy, there is no ADI design option, where artificial intelligence uses your selections to automatically create a site for you, saving you having to think.
What Weebly is though is a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) website builder. This means you can click and edit, as well as drag ‘n’ drop media, without needing to know any code or, unlike WordPress, flick back and forth from the backend to what the site will eventually look like.
One of Weebly’s simplest and most effective features in editor mode is that it dims the rest of the website you’re working on so you can concentrate on the element in hand.
Weebly offers around 70 “themes” – website templates – covering everything from clothing to travel and luxury goods – which you can use as a template for your own website. The volume is around the same as Shopify but far fewer than Wix’s 500 plus.
Like Site123 and Wix, you add e-commerce functionality through buying apps in Weebly’s app centre. Weebly offers over 300 apps, more than 50 of which are free. This way, Weebly’s core website builder is kept simple and not bloated with code. Most paid-for apps have free trial periods, so you can give them a test drive without having to commit any cash.
In addition to grouping apps by function, such as sales, traffic and social media, Weebly recommends apps which would improve the functionality of your site.
And because Weebly was bought by payments provider Square in 2018, its e-commerce functionality is as good specialist e-commerce platform Shopify. E-commerce features that Weebly supports include gift cards, adding customer accounts, dealing with abandoned shopping carts and enabling in-store collection.
Weebly is great for small businesses, making it a strong choice for entrepreneurs, start-up companies, and small online stores.
Price: £18 per month
Need to get your e-commerce store up quickly? Then GoDaddy is the e-commerce solution for you, mainly because of its use of ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence), which helps steer your design based on a few questions.
Unlike Squarespace and Shopify, GoDaddy does not have a library of pre-designed themes. Rather, it’s ADI means it can support over 1,500 different types of businesses. That said, its ADI also prevents you from fiddling too much with its templates. However, unlike Wix and Site123, you can junk your existing theme for a new one, and GoDaddy will import all your elements.
Probably the simplest to use, given its ADI support which takes website building out of your hands, based on a few questions.
However, if you’re selling more than a few product lines, you might be better off with a more scalable platform, such as Shopify.
Price: £13.99 for the GoDaddy online store
Squarespace is best for more design-led websites and for those who have a little website-building knowledge. It’s especially aimed at creatives such as photographers, musicians and designers, and its celebrity endorsers include Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and John Malkovich. It is not as easy or beginner friendly as either Wix, Weebly or GoDaddy.
Like Weebly, Squarespace is another What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor. With some platforms, such as WordPress, you make changes and edits in the backend, and only see what it will look like live when you preview it.
Squarespace’s editor interface is more polished and flexible compared to Wix and Weebly.
Squarespace’s templates are all beautifully designed, as if you’d spent thousands on getting in a professional designer to code it to you.
Templates include online stores, restaurants and the generic “business”, and all templates are mobile responsive, so your website looks strong on any smartphone.
Once you have chosen a template, you layer in images and content using their design. The templates themselves are malleable. Or you can create your own website from scratch. Unique to Squarespace, you can customise your own URL. And the live preview function allows you to see what your unpublished website is going to look like.
And, unlike Wix and Site123, you can switch templates even after you have gone live.
Squarespace has just 60 themed templates compared to Wix’s 500 plus and Weebly’s 70.
Enabling other users to help manage your website is crucial, especially if you are selling goods online. Squarespace gives you the option to manage accounts with different access levels.
The £20 per month online store basic plan is the cheapest option for selling through the internet. It removes transaction fees from lower-level plans and adds extra e-commerce features, including inventory management and label printing.
Squarespace is the best website builder for anyone who has an eye for design, who wants a unique and visually impressive website, and is happy putting a little time into building their pages.
However, spending time in understanding how this product works is recommended before onboarding. If you want a website live within a couple of hours, then Squarespace isn’t for you – try Site123.
Price: £28pm for the Squarespace online store basic plan. Squarespace offers a 14-day free trail before you to decide whether you want to upgrade to paid-for.
According to Shopify, the platform has over one million users running 800,000 online stores which have generated over $100bn in sales.
One Wall Street analyst predicts Shopify’s share of the e-commerce market will triple to about 9pc within five years.
A big differentiator between Shopify and rival website builders is that Shopify has its own physical point-of-sale hardware you buy with barcode readers, tills and receipt printers. It’s an all-in-one system for anyone with a physical shop.
The first thing you see on Shopify is an easy-to-understand dashboard overview.
Uploading products is easy for anybody used to a WordPress-style CMS.
You can add new plugins for your site, including a range of 1,200 apps which sync offering shipping, accounting, social media and advanced reporting. However, the sheer number of apps can be overwhelming and a black mark in Shopify’s book for not including more basic functionality in its packages.
Shopify offers just 10 free e-commerce templates or “themes” that you can use. However, there are another 60 paid-for themes. Like Squarespace, the themes are beautifully designed and offer whizzy features like parallax scrolling and video backgrounds.
One niggle is that Shopify does not automatically resize uploaded photographs, so if you have product shots in different aspect ratios, you must edit in Photoshop before uploading to your website.
Shopify integrates with Snapchat, Facebook, Pinterest and Manager for easy sales though social media.
The platform recently unveiled an “impressive array of product launches” to enhance e-commerce, according to US analyst Josh Beck of KeyBanc, including “complex” shipping automation capabilities, multi-currency features and improved developer tools.
One downside with Shopify is that, unlike Wix, Weebly and Squarespace, Shopify does charge 2.2pc on each credit card transaction plus an additional 20p.
Shopify is the best website builder for businesses that have a physical shop but also want to sell online.
Price: £19pm for the Basic Shopify plan. Shopify offers a free 14-day trial.
IONOS is the largest hosting platform in Europe managing 12 million domains with contracts with eight million customers worldwide.
However, it also has its own easy-to-use website builder with affordable plans for creating basic websites and online e-commerce stores. All sites are mobile friendly with SEO and analytics functionality.
The IONOS website builder has you choose from pre-designed templates and insert text and images where you want. What this means is that there are no individual elements you can move around, but rather, full-width page sections you can move up and down.
There are only 18 templates to choose from, including:
Still, templates can be useful, especially if you want to launch your site quickly.
IONOS also makes it easy to set up an ecommerce store – all you have to do is add a store page to your site. If you already have your products listed in a spreadsheet, you can import a CSV to populate your storefront.
Overall, this website builder is a decent option if you want to launch a professional-looking website quickly and cheaply, and don’t mind giving up some creative control along the way.
– Inexpensive ecommerce plans
– Sites look very professional
– Sell across multiple channels
– Builder comes with AI assistant
– Only 18 templates
– Limited customisation options
Price: There are three packages: ‘Starter’ plan comes in at £10 a month, ‘Plus’ plan is £16 a month, ‘Pro’ plan at £30 a month (all excl. VAT)
Top five online businesses you can start today – Ground-breaking companies have been founded in garages, dorm rooms and home offices. Here are five online business ideas for inspiration
Your guide to starting an online business – A survey of small and micro-businesses found businesses with a website were 51 per cent more likely to grow than those without
Advantages of a merchant account for your e-commerce business – A merchant account acts as the buffer between your customer and your business account. Think of it as a holding pen where your money is parked while your e-commerce sale is validated
“Customer is king” has never rung truer than it does in today’s retail environment. The rapid growth of online retail means people have more choice than ever before. Businesses that don’t offer what the customer wants, when they want it – in short, premium customer experience – are at risk of falling by the wayside.
What I call a “MeCommerce” strategy puts the person you’re trying to sell to at the forefront of your strategy. Customers feel valued through communication and engagement with the business and its values. The products they buy are tailored to their specification. Everything is centred on the customer.
Applying the ideas of MeCommerce has allowed my business, Engravers Guild, to reach new audiences and give my customers a truly personalised experience. While personalising products is central to my business, that’s just one small part of MeCommerce. Any business can succeed by making the customer feel like the world revolves around them.
I’ve put this guide together to help other businesses who are thinking of adjusting their strategies.
Giving the customer options is central to a successful MeCommerce strategy. In the tech industry, companies like HP let you select the processor, RAM and storage capacity for your laptop or PC, giving you the freedom to tailor the machine to your needs.
For ecommerce sites, this might mean offering size or colour variants. For B2B companies, tiers of service are a sensible way to suit differing needs.
‘Any business can succeed by making the customer feel like the world revolves around them’
It is no longer enough to simply provide a good product – you need to make the customer feel special. Excellent service throughout the customer experience journey is needed, letting them engage with your brand’s values and opening communication between business and consumer.
Cosmetics retailer, Lush, has perfected this feeling of care. Its brand values are at the forefront of all of its marketing, and each product is labelled with the name and face of the person who prepared it. It’s a nice way of adding a personal touch to what can be a somewhat faceless process.
>See also: The pros and cons of selling through your own website
In an online world, customer convenience is key. The modern shopper doesn’t have to visit a store when they can order through their phone at any time of day. They also shouldn’t have to browse; you should be recommending products for your customers based on their shopping habits.
Technology has become democratised to the extent that small businesses can incorporate many things that were formerly unique to major retailers.
Most website building platforms can allow users to log in, view past purchases and see products recommended for them based on their buying habits.
This feels like an obvious point, but it’s more important now than ever before. Offering convenience means allowing people to order through their mobile. 54 per cent of e-commerce sales were made through mobile devices in 2021, and that number is only going to increase.
It’s not just a case of making your website responsive. For a truly mobile-first and customer-centric experience it should be possible for customers to buy items, track the progress of their order (and shipment), leave feedback and engage with customer service through mobile too.
Used correctly, a website is one of the most powerful assets your business has – but many businesses fail to take full advantage of the capabilities of online selling.
Your website can collect customer data (based on purchase and browsing habits) to provide tailored recommendations and highlight popular products based on demographics.
The customer should feel that your business truly reflects their values and can allow them to become an ideal version of themselves. Reviews, testimonials, and helpful information should all be placed around the site to help the customer feel supported, understood and valued.
>See also: Taking payments online for ecommerce businesses
The website is usually the hub of your business online, but it’s not everything. Social media plays an increasingly important role in modern commerce – and there’s no better way to engage with customers in a direct way.
It can be hard to achieve an authentic, value-based connection with your audience by treating social media as a junior discipline. Social media posts need to be regular, eye-catching and should be consistent with the tone of voice used across other marketing channels.
In short, the messaging on your social platforms should reflect your target demographic, their values and the factors that make them want to buy.
Social media also offers a way to literally speak to customers by responding to comments and questions. Consider it your direct line to customers and treat it as an opportunity to impress them.
Marketing automation is a complex discipline, but these are two basic systems pretty much anyone can set up quite easily:
Using past data to predict what customers might need means you can offer up-sells, cross-sells and more – and plugins make it easy to set up.
Offering customisability where possible means some retailers may need to re-evaluate their inventory. Tailor-made clothes, personalised engravings and custom-built PCs means many MeCommerce businesses are carrying less inventory and instead focusing on making items “to order”.
Send your customers deals on their birthday. It’s a simple idea but it makes them feel loved. Other automated emails are: order updates (confirmation, dispatch notification, tracking info, feedback request); reminders (“You might be running low – is it time to re-order?”) and more recommendations (Since you bought x, we think you’ll like y)
Businesses need to adapt to survive in today’s e-commerce retail environment. John Lewis may have built its brand on in-store personalised shopping experiences, but its recent pivot to close physical stores and focus on online sales highlights that times are changing.
Harnessing the power of the internet is key. Those willing to create responsive, engaging websites and embrace social media can deliver better value for their customers, through accurate data and open communication. Consumers drive retail, and businesses that place them at the centre of their strategy will see greater success.
Elliot Bishton is the founder of Engravers Guild of London, an online start-up designed to be the pre-eminent destination for all personalised goods, delivered direct to the consumer.
Q&A: Adrian Swinscoe talks about improving customer experience
There’s no denying the power of influencer marketing. And businesses across all industries are cottoning on to this growing channel with a huge potential to expand their brand’s reach.
This is particularly true in hospitality, where word-of-mouth recommendations are invaluable.
But as a fairly new phenomenon, there are still a lot of unknowns, both in terms of measuring ROI and the logistics and processes around securing the right influencers and managing campaigns.
Having worked for a startup that tackles admin issues in hospitality previously (and running a side-hustle micro-influencer account) Mike Radley and Jamie Frew saw a real opportunity to create a business specifically connecting food businesses and influencers.
In this exclusive interview with Small Business, co-founder Mike shares more about why Nibble is such a timely proposition, the challenges of finding the right investors and why speaking to your customers regularly is key to success.
To be honest, I’ve never seen myself as an entrepreneur.
Nibble was an idea we first started talking about two years ago. This is just a situation where we identified a real problem, I experienced it myself, and we figured out a solution. The timing couldn’t be more pressing and only through market research and launching an MVP did we realise how right we were.
Jamie and I were on a work trip at our old company – Trail. It was out in the sticks, mid-winter, somewhere in Norfolk. We were sat in a pub round by a fire having whiskey (like the start of most romantic novels) and I told him the problem and we fleshed it out together.
Influencer marketing as an industry is booming, and it’s not slowing down. Yet when it came to process and management, it was completely inefficient for both influencers and marketers who would just spending hours emailing back and forth trying to arrange a collaboration. Then there’s the follow ups too. Unless you’re a celeb with a PR agent, most influencers struggle with admin.
The reality is most social media influencers have full time jobs and spend any free time editing content, attending events, engaging with other social accounts and researching hashtags or the right soundtrack to play over TikTok reels. Keeping up was a struggle, I wanted to make life easier really.
We realised hospitality brands were equally frustrated and there was very little way of measuring influencer marketing as a channel. Everything should be measurable. With Nibble we have the opportunity to be the leading micro-influencer marketplace for any physical location, whether it’s a salon, gym, pet shop, pub or restaurant. Local marketing that’s affordable and measurable which couldn’t be timelier considering tighter budgets and costs rising.
There’s no process. Most brands don’t know where to start when it comes to influencer marketing, others outsource it to agencies who can help but it’s still a manual, expensive process. We built Nibble to simplify the booking management and communication process whilst giving influencers more choice, on demand.
Restaurants need footfall and bookings. If I owned a vegan café in Clapham, it makes sense for me to work with a South London vegan micro-influencer/foodie with a local audience that suits my brand. I get authentic content creation for socials and I reach a niche, local audience likely to visit my cafe. A complimentary pizza in return for content and coverage doesn’t cost me too much and that’s less of a risk than paying a macro influencer or celebrity (and their agent) a lot of money that just isn’t there anymore for most hospitality businesses.
Marketing budgets are tighter than ever, it’s no longer viable for brands to spend heaps of money on Meta ads or PPC where it’s over £0.30p a click or impression. With Nibble, it’s about 0.001p – and we’ve made this measurable which up until now has been a struggle for marketers. Plus, influencer content is authentic and not recycled stock images used on ads that everyone’s bored of.
Finding the right investors took us a while. There were a lot of chats, but ultimately with the wrong investors. Fortunately, we figured this out early and we couldn’t be happier with our cap table in this early stage. Everyone brings different advice and experience; we really wanted each investor to add something different and we got it.
Fortunately, this hasn’t been too difficult. Nibble is free for influencers and saves them time whilst giving them more choice – an easy sell really. 52 per cent of influencers we’ve reached out to have signed up. Social media has been the best way to communicate with them which was expected.
We’ve been busy making sure our product is ready for go-to-market, and we’re pretty much there now which is exciting. Massive shout out to Dan, our technical lead, for the hard work. We’re working on the brand experience now, and recently integrated to TikTok.
We’ve just launched on the App Store and we’ve got targets in place over the next 12 months associated to number of influencers, number of brands and number of bookings whilst testing and learning things along the way.
Never assume you know the answer. I thought I knew what customers wanted at the start, but it changed. Speak to your customers all the time – as much as possible. I learn something new every time. We had some early adopters on the app who have been so supportive and helpful. They share our vision and really champion what we’re doing – finding those in the early stages is golden.
You can reach Michael at michael@nibbleapp.com or connect with him on LinkedIn or via Nibble App’s website.
Employers are increasingly committed – at least publicly – to improving workplace mental health, but what does the reality of that look like?
Whilst a growing number of businesses are introducing Employee Assistance Programmes, there has been lots of criticism that they are simply a box-ticking exercise.
After experiencing his own personal mental health challenges, Matthew Vamplew sought therapy privately and found the process of finding the right support both inaccessible and complicated. Matthew knew there had to be a better way to bridge the gap between the need for help and the vast number of qualified therapists and mental health practitioners.
Here, he talks to Small Business about the inspiration for his matching minds platform, the challenges of transitioning from a prototype to a scalable tech solution and why it’s OK to be vulnerable in business.
My background is in innovation management. I graduated in 2012 and began working for a technology consulting firm where I worked with emerging technology to solve business problems in the insurance industry. This gave me an interesting insight into the world of innovation. What really got me into the world of entrepreneurship was my next role with a management consultancy company. I was there to set up the innovation function within their insurance consulting team where I got a chance to work in an insurance startup incubator.
I then moved into being an innovation manager in my own right and was involved with incubating and accelerating new ideas with fintech, lawtech and insurtech startups. I’d find myself out talking to entrepreneurs on a weekly basis to try and co-launch innovative new ideas in the form of a proof of concepts. That proof of concept would then form a business case which may or may not get the green light. It was a useful experience and showed me what it takes to launch a new idea!
I’ve always wanted to start my own company and that ambition followed me throughout my career. And I’ve since used all the skills I learnt to help launch Paranimo.
The story behind the company came from own experience of seeking mental health support back in late 2018. I found it hard and pretty stressful to find the right mental health support provider (counsellor or psychotherapist) and get that right “match” i.e. someone that had relevant experience and I could get on with and trust. There’s no rulebook, and the current models involve you going through directories where there are loads of counsellors and psychotherapists listed. And they all say that they’re good at everything, because that gives them the highest chance of getting business. But the reality is, how do you choose who’s right for you? It’s trial and error and there’s potentially lots of time and cost wasted.
So I thought, what if there could be a way to match people to the right mental health support? I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea. I spoke to therapists and to people that had gone for support, and they all said it would be beneficial for both sides of the spectrum. I then explored the idea with my now co-founder, Dan (he was doing a PhD in neuroscience at the time), and together we founded Paranimo which in Latin means “match minds” – setting the foundations for the company and its purpose.
As a company, we help organisations (and we work mostly with tech-driven SMEs) to improve workplace mental health and wellbeing through two SaaS offerings called Personal Wellbeing and Burnout Insight and a consulting service we call Cultural Wellbeing.
Our flagship Personal Wellbeing solution focuses on matching employees to the right mental health support, using our matching intelligence system, so they feel better faster. The effectiveness of our Personal Wellbeing solution is backed by primary research. We conducted a three-month pilot study with 25 people. The result: 93.3% of therapy users found a counsellor who matched their needs with an average reduction of 58% anxiety, 51% irritability and 40% depression after therapy! This solution was inspired by own experience of seeking mental health support back in 2018.
Burnout insight is a SaaS solution that integrates with digital communication tools like Microsoft teams and slack, operating as an early warning detection system to uncover burnout risk in the workplace to mitigate the cost and impact of negative mental wellbeing on productivity.
Our Cultural Wellbeing solution focuses on increasing staff retention through a consulting service delivered by sector specific therapists with cultural change experience to build psychologically healthy cultures.
In terms of the ambition for the company, our vision statement is that we believe that everyone should get access to the right mental health support and feel empowered to live a happy, healthy, and productive life. And that’s quite a big ambition but we want to be the trusted advisor, and trusted provider, for companies that can rely on us to provide support for their staff.
After I had the idea for the company in late 2018, Dan and I formally set it up in May 2019 and officially launched in December 2020. My co-founder developed the prototype, and I was using my experience of customer testing, and working with therapists and people that needed support. But of course, there’s the big challenge, which is how do you transition from a prototype to a scalable tech platform?
We didn’t have the experience or the funds to do it, so we were reaching out to people through LinkedIn and Facebook and then the Innovate UK COVID-19 Business Response grant came out. It was created to support socially good businesses doing good doing COVID-19. There were 8,600 applications for this £50,000 grant, and only 800 places so less than a 1% chance but we won! It was an incredible moment as we then had some money to start building the right thing.
We worked with an outsource company to build our solution out, and originally in our heads we were planning to build a B2C company. We partnered with the National Counselling Society, they’re the second biggest Mental Health Association in the UK who provide us access to some great counsellors and psychotherapists. We then won another grant from Innovate UK for £85,000 (and a follow on for £10,000) and that gave us enough to launch in December 2020. What we soon realized though is that B2C is hard and takes a lot of marketing spend.
We then transitioned through accidental opportunity to B2B. We started working with charities, because they fund a lot of support for the people that we care about. And then, ultimately, we pivoted again to tech businesses. The reason for that is they often have a very high cost of absence – given the high salaries – plus they have a high risk of burnout.
A lot of our competitors such as Employee Assistance Programs are just a tix box exercise for companies to say they are looking after their staff, yet they use an unfair delivery and pricing model. They recruit mental health providers increasing their costs and price for access to support based on an assumed usage model to cover salaries. For example, providers often assume usage of around 30% of all employees at a given company will access support, when in reality utilisation for these services is around 5%. This means companies are often paying for more than they actually use! Our competitors also do not match people to the right support but rather based on availability.
We have Business Model innovation, which is a huge advantage for us and touches all our solutions. We have a marketplace of support providers so we have a huge volume capacity but also the ability to match effectively. We match based on relevance to need and personality fit – because the better the therapeutic relationship, the better the mental health outcome. And availability, so you get seen quickly which is important. That alone gives as pricing and access to the right support advantages over our competitors.
I touched on it before but transitioning from the minimum viable product to a scalable solution. It was a big challenge, very stressful and at times it really felt make or break. Dan and I were trying to decide when to take on investment (and sometimes disagreeing) as I’d seen startups raise too early during my time working in incubators.
Grants are such an amazing option when you are early stage and you’re trying to get some money but aren’t ready for investment and don’t want to take a loan, but a lot of businesses don’t necessarily know about them, and they’re not the easiest thing to find. I just remember working basically three weeks solid every single day on our grant application, but it paid off.
We are looking to raise beyond our £150,000 round to £238,122 (to be exact!) after raising £146,996 so far. The plan here is to extend our originally planned 12-month runway to 18 months. We then want to hire key sales, technology team members and outsource a creative content writer to drive sales of solutions targeting 81 new businesses in 18 months’ time. We also have some cool new features we want to add to our Personal Wellbeing solution, enhance our matching intelligence and improve data security.
Matthew Vamplew is the co-founder of Paranimo. You can email him on matthew.vamplew@paranimo.co.uk or connect with the business on LinkedIn to find out more.
If you’re thinking of starting up a plant business, you may well have to import them.
It’s not just a simple matter of ordering the plant and waiting for it to arrive, either. You’ve got some protocol to follow.
The following guidance covers England and Wales. Scotland’s rules are a bit different. For contact details and more info on plant imports in Scotland, read over the Scottish government’s plant health guidance.
As for importing to Northern Ireland, there are no changes to the way plants are imported from non-EU third countries to Northern Ireland. Imports can continue in the same way as before.
But if you’re importing to Great Britain, the guidance differs between importing from EU and non-EU countries so be careful when filling out forms.
Before we begin, note that import controls on EU goods to Great Britain planned from July will not be introduced in 2022. Controls that have already been introduced will remain in place. Dates for new import controls will be coming in autumn 2022 – keep up with the government website for more.
According to government guidance, ‘plant’ means a living plant or a living part of a plant at any stage of growth. This includes trees, shrubs and seeds. A ‘plant product’, meanwhile, is a product of plant origin that is unprocessed and has had a simple preparation, including wood and bamboo.
Sally Cullimore, technical policy manager at the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA), told Small Business: “Importing plants is complex and highly regulated, so The Horticultural Trades Association recommends that any business considering importing plants or plant material registers with their relevant Plant Health authorities first to obtain advice and legal guidance.”
Now for the need-to-knows. From January 1 2022, the following regulated and notifiable goods imported from the EU (except the Republic of Ireland) must go through plant health controls:
A full list of regulated and notifiable goods can be found on the Plant Health Portal.
The high-priority goods list includes:
There is a set of steps you need to follow if you import high-priority goods. You can find them here.
If you are importing ‘regulated and notifiable’ plants and plant products from the EU (excluding Ireland), Liechtenstein and Switzerland to GB after January 1 2022, you will need to pre-notify them. The likelihood is that you’ll be registering for IPAFFS – more on that in a moment.
‘Pre-notification’ means giving advance notice to the responsible authority for goods that arrive in Great Britain. You must give notice:
Failure to give enough pre-notification notice means that your consignment may be held until the requirement is met. It could also result in your consignment being destroyed.
After you’ve pre-notified, you’ll receive a message on the relevant IT system to say if your goods need any checks.
Those importing from the EU will need to meet their customs requirement as well as having an EORI number.
>See also: EORI number: What it is and how to get or check one
You’ll also need a phytosanitary certificate.
If you are new to the process of pre-notifying your goods, register for and use IPAFFS (Import of Products, Animals, Food and Feed System). If you are currently using PEACH for EU pre-notifications (that’s Procedure for Electronic Authentication for Certificates from the Horticultural Marketing Inspectorate – you can see why it’s shortened), please continue to do so until directed to move to IPAFFS.
A phytosanitary certificate, which is what the UK requires since leaving the EU, is needed for each consignment from the plant health authority in the country where your supplier is.
It’s a statement from said authority that the plant has been officially inspected and complies with standards to come into Great Britain and is free from quarantine pests and diseases. The inspection must be done no more than 14 days before the consignment is dispatched from the country where your supplier is. Someone at the inspecting plant must have also signed it within the same 14-day period.
You don’t need a phytosanitary certificate to import these plants into Great Britain:
These unregulated plants and plant products do not need to go through any plant health controls and won’t need a phytosanitary certificate:
It may be possible to import prohibited goods into Great Britain with a scientific licence, if they satisfy criteria. Take a look at the government’s website for more.
Phytosanitary certificates have a ‘quantity declared’ section which may trip you up. Just remember to measure the quantity of flowers by their stems. Meanwhile, quantities must be stated in kilograms (kg) for fruit, vegetables, soil and branches which have foliage, potatoes, grain and the following plants for planting: bulbs, corms and rhizomes, plants in tissue culture and seeds. As for any other plants for planting, the quantity has to be listed as the number of items in the consignment.
If you’re importing from the EU and need a phytosanitary certificate for your consignment, check that your EU exporter has issued a phytosanitary certificate before it arrives in Great Britain. Make sure you get a scanned copy from your exporter.
Within three days of your consignment reaching Great Britain, post the original phytosanitary certificate to your animal and plant health agency (APHA).
For consignments landing at Heathrow or Gatwick, send the certificate to:
Animal and Plant Health Agency
1st Floor
Building 4
Heathrow Boulevard
284 Bath Road
West Drayton
Middlesex
UB7 0DQ
For consignments landing anywhere else send the certificate to:
Animal and Plant Health Agency
Foss House
1st Floor
Kings Pool
1-2 Peasholme Green
York
YO1 7PX
Get in touch with the Forestry Commission for orders of wood, wood products or bark. Your local forestry inspector will agree with you which address you need to send the phytosanitary certificate to.
If all or part of your consignment fails, an inspector might be able to advise you on what to do to help it pass. If your inspector decides that the failed goods pose a risk to plant health, they could destroy your goods or ask you to return them. If you need to return goods to the EU, they’ll be considered an export. You’ll need an exporters licence for that.
After your shipment passes plant health controls, you can move it on. You will need a UK plant passport for movement of goods from the first place of destination if:
The EU plant passport is no longer recognised in Great Britain. UK plant passports have replaced EU plant passports but even then, plant passports are only really issued to professional operators.
If you import goods from a non-EU country to Great Britain via the EU, your goods could be treated as an EU import. While in the EU, they must have:
They will be treated as a non-EU country import if they didn’t enter into free circulation or pass plant health checks in the EU.
You’ll have to pay fees for each consignment imported from a non-EU third country. Inspection fees for documentary and identity checks are split.
How much you have to pay for imports to England and Wales will depend on the type of plant material as well as its risk level.
If you’re importing from the EU and your shipment needs plant health checks, these fees will apply:
Check out this link for more about risk levels and the associated inspection fees for EU imports that apply in England and Wales.
Ring the HMRC helpline 0300 322 9434 Monday-Friday 8am-10pm and Saturday-Sunday 8am-4pm if you need more guidance.
For more information on plant imports in England and Wales, email planthealth.info@apha.gov.uk or phone 0300 1000 313.
To learn more about physical checks and importing goods with wood packaging material, check out the government guidance on importing plants from EU and non-EU countries.
Small Business spoke to Joe Thompson, director of operations at Underleaf. The company purchases lots of indoor, tropical and subtropical plants along with lots of planters and associated materials, plus items such as special wheels for the pots.
He explains why importing plants has become more difficult in recent years.
Where do you get plants and plant products from?
We purchase from various different suppliers, but most comes from one supplier in Holland. We get the odd Mediterranean plant from Holland as well.
The supply chain is really interesting. We purchase lots of plants from suppliers in the UK, which originated in Italy in Spain. They’ll come with plant passports, but we won’t have to deal with the import processes for those. We also buy planters and pots, which will originate in China or Vietnam that will come through Europe. Some of those will be subject to import tariffs.
All indoor plants come through Holland, the biggest hub in the world. They’ll be buying from Spain and Italy or importing from Costa Rica. Some of those people further down the chain will also be having to produce the passport.
We have to be registered with Defra (Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs) for various numbers that we need to have. That gives us the right to import these items.
Why do you advise small businesses against importing plants?
It’s really costly. Part of the issue is we getting our heads around all the costs that are associated with importing, because it has become very complicated. We now have to pay VAT on these items. You have to have a VAT deferment account in place with HMRC to be able to manage that process. If you don’t have one of those accounts, which we don’t, because we don’t know how to set it up as it’s too complicated, then we use the VAT account of an import agency, who will then charge us for that service.
Duty’s different for different products. There’s a lot ambiguity. The agency that is organising that on our behalf charge us for that privilege. There’s a cost to having everything inspected, which is undertaken by our supplier and depends on the product that you’re importing.
Then we’ll pay double, because then Defra will charge us for inspection, once the goods get to the UK. That’s particularly painful. The feeling we got was that we got a bit clobbered when new regulations came in this year, and the agencies are doing on our behalf. We’re getting to grips with all of these new regulations and I think they then charged us for the extra time [they spent].
Then the other issue is that we have to now have the addresses associated with our PEACH account. Every time we’re importing, we’re paying £35 for that shipment to be registered. We could just do it ourselves, but we don’t really have the know-how or the resource. At some point, when we have some time, we’ll look into it and see if we can bring some of this process in-house because I just know that we’re getting hammered left, right and centre by all these different agencies. The sooner we can do it ourselves, really, the better.
What other issues have you encountered?
We had so much flexibility before. So firstly, the time that it took to get things was much reduced. We could place an order and get something two days later. Then if there was a problem with that order, we could send it straight back, you just refused to take it. That’s not possible now because we have to be a registered exporter in order to send something back. This has horrendous consequences for us. We were doing a project up in Scotland, which was a massive project for us, and all of the plants for that project got sent to London – two months early. So suddenly, we had £5,000 of plants that we had to find a space for. Unless you’ve got really good greenhouse conditions, the quality of those materials decline so quickly. So, we had to deal with all these plants that we couldn’t send back and our supplier was just shrugging shoulders. So yeah, a lot of consequences like that.
Roughly, how much do agencies charge? Where do you find such an agency?
The agencies have just been given to us by our suppliers. Our supplier was very good in that they managed the whole process on our behalf. We just went with it, because we couldn’t not get our plants – that would have been catastrophic. But we’re just getting to grips with how much they’re charging. It could be between five and ten per cent. It’s opaque because different products have different levels of duty and that’s not really broken down clearly. So yeah, we haven’t quite worked that out yet.
It’s been like an avalanche of paperwork. We’ve been receiving invoices left, right and centre. And you think, well, it’s very important to understand what you’re getting charged for. But we’re firefighting on so many different fronts, so it’s lower down the list of priorities. We were just getting through the few months, what we were focused on. Now it’s at the back of our mind, we really need to get to grips with it to find out what they charge.
What’s been the biggest change post-Brexit?
The flexibility was a big one, because we could place an order and receive it two days later. If clients had last-minute requests, we could fill them quite easily. We could normally just add something onto another delivery. First of all, we had more deliveries, because we’re now in a position where you have to spend the minimum amount which is much, much higher. We could spend £1,000 and it wouldn’t be a problem. Now if we place an order of £1,000, we’re going to lose money on it. I think our business developed because we were so flexible, and we were able to deliver things very quickly for our clients as a lot of our projects time are time-sensitive.
We had lots of difficult conversations with clients where we say, “Things are different now – you have to give us a lot more warning.” Also, that poses logistical difficulties, because it’s a lot easier to deal with £1,000 order in terms of taking it in and stocking whatever you’re doing. Having double or triple that takes more organisation and more space. So yeah, that’s one main area that’s really got a lot harder.
The supply and demand has been very difficult. That’s partly because of Covid. There are certain plants now that we can’t get hold of because they’re subject to different restrictions. And so there’s one particular plant, a staple of ours for lots of projects, and we used to be able to get those in from Spain or Italy, but we can’t get them anymore because they don’t have the plant passports.
We used to get plants delivered directly to sites where we were going to use them. But now because you have to register the address of that site a week in advance, it sometimes doesn’t line up properly. More and more, we’re taking deliveries in to where we have our basic operations. And then we are taking those plants ourselves to the site in question. So that’s incurring more delivery costs there as well.
Are you using more British plants and products now, as was the general expectation when we left the EU?
The Dutch have ruled the world when it comes to plants. There’s no way that the UK could match up to their expertise and their infrastructure. We’ve thought about whether it would make sense for us to have a nursery in the UK, but the cost associated with it – you need massive investment just to get started.
The cost of setting up a proper greenhouse is astronomical. You can do it on a small scale and be a specialist producer. But if you’re doing it on a scale then that could potentially be millions and millions of pounds.
Obviously, there are those places like flower markets where lots of people will go, and I guess for smaller businesses, they’ll do. But then there’s another step in the chain and what tends to happen, obviously, the cost doubles and the quality isn’t as good, which is why we import. They’re buying from other suppliers that maybe aren’t as good and buying in volume and may be holding on to them longer so they may be deteriorating and possibly buying them from sources which aren’t as good, getting them at a lower price.
The New Covent Garden Flower market (wholesaler) is very accessible for all sorts of people, both businesses and end consumers. We don’t tend to buy indoor plants there but if small businesses want to avoid the rigmarole of importing plants from Holland, it’s a good place to go. My recommendation would simply be to check quality carefully before buying.
Another channel is the SE Asian growers that send plants in the post. A lot of them sell on Instagram and Etsy but it’s a very risky business so I would avoid buying any so called ‘rare’ plants from those sorts of sellers.
>See also: 4 steps to help your small business grow on Instagram
What common mistakes do small businesses make when importing plants?
I know the mistakes that we make – our retail business doesn’t make any money at all. I have a feeling that there are a lot of others like coffee shops, though dozens and dozens out there, they’re probably not making that much money. There’ll be a person that is putting every hour of their life into it. They’re enjoying it, but not really making any money.
My feeling is if you want to be successful, then you have to be really disciplined and keep your range narrow. You should probably figure out how to make online work. You can lose a lot of money on plants, they deteriorate. It’s hard to keep plants looking good for any length of time, you really have to know what you’re doing and have good conditions. Although you can have some plants sitting in the shop for months, I think in a lot of cases after a week, after a couple of weeks, they’re not going to look very good. You’re going to lose a lot of money on waste.
What we specialise in, or what we focus on, is really knowing your plants and being able to recommend the right plants to the right place. That’s important. There are a lot of businesses that just kind of churn out the same plants and treat them like flowers for so you can keep them for a month or two and then just replace them. I think people are getting more and more concerned about where plants are coming from and working on supply chain procedures. I guess it’s the same for many businesses – just be passionate about what you do. Let that passion shine through to your customers.
In this article, we’ll show you how to set up an Amazon US seller account, how to make your product stand out to US customers, and how to fulfil your products whilst remaining VAT compliant.
We’ll also give you tips on how to reduce the costs associated with selling internationally on the world’s biggest marketplace.
What are the benefits of selling on Amazon US?
The short answer is: you can sell more stuff.
Amazon US net sales in 2021 totalled $314 billion according to Statistica. That figure is nearly 10 times greater than the UK, which pulled in a mere $31.91 billion.
As well as reaching a larger audience of online shoppers, you may find that your products enjoy greater market fit in the US than in Europe.
The brand Bugaboo is an example of this phenomenon. Bugaboo initially launched in the Netherlands and enjoyed marginal local success. But it wasn’t until they expanded to the US that they became the chic buggy of choice for parents worldwide.
Before you launch on Amazon US, you’ll need to register as a global seller by following these steps:
And you’re done!
You will now be able to manage your Amazon US and UK sales from a single linked account.
Selling internationally comes with some tax complications.
To ensure you remain VAT compliant, you can use a specialist accountant or VAT service such as Elver eCommerce Accountants or SimplyVAT.
You can also use Amazon’s VAT calculation tool to automatically calculate the applicable VAT at your checkout.
How much does it cost to sell on Amazon US from the UK?
Amazon charges its merchants a host of fees, although they would argue that these fees are lower than the amount you would pay to sell and fulfil your products with other providers.
You can roughly break Amazon’s fees down into seven categories. Categories 1-6 apply whether you’re selling at home or abroad, whilst category 7 only applies to international sellers.
Amazon Pay Multi-currency allows merchants to collect payments from customers in a variety of local currencies. However, if your Amazon account is linked to a UK bank account, you will be charged additional fees when customers pay you in US Dollars. These include:
Fortunately, there is a way to reduce these fees.
If your Amazon account is linked to a UK bank account, you will have to pay additional fees when accepting payment in US Dollars.
To get around these fees, you have two choices:
You can open a US Dollar bank account from the UK and connect it to your Amazon US seller account. By funnelling US sales revenue into this account, you can avoid Amazon’s cross-border and currency conversion fees.
The problem here is that high street banks also charge high FX and transfer fees. That means when it comes to transferring your money back to your UK bank account, you could be charged up to 3.5% above the interbank rate, plus a transaction fee.
Sign up for a free global business account with Airwallex and you can open foreign domicile accounts in multiple currencies – including US Dollars, Euros, Pound Sterling and Hong Kong Dollars – in a click.
Connect your Airwallex USD account to your Amazon US seller account and collect USD from your customers with no forced currency conversions or unnecessary fees.
Airwallex charges a more reasonable rate of 0.5% above the interbank rate to exchange USD to GBP. Considerably cheaper than Amazon Pay and UK high street banks.
Depending on the volume of your international sales, you could add hundreds of thousands of pounds back into your bottom line using this workaround.
You’ll also have the convenience of managing your money from a central account, rather than dealing with several foreign currency bank accounts. For this reason, Airwallex is a great business bank account option for eCommerce businesses that wish to scale across borders.
Before you launch your products in the US, you need to work out the logistics. There are three steps to establishing a sound fulfilment process:
If you’re dealing with large volumes, it makes sense to import your products in bulk to the States and store them in local warehouses, rather than posting individual items to your US customers.
Importing in bulk will reduce your shipping times and costs, and make your products more desirable to US customers.
To move your products through customs, you must have your paperwork in order. It’s best to hire a customs broker to advise you, or choose a freight company that offers brokerage as part of their service.
The US is a big place, almost as big as the whole of Europe combined, so it’s best to research where your core customer base is and choose nearby warehouses to store your products.
Warehouse options include ShipBob, FedEx and of course, Amazon itself.
Amazon requires that goods are packed and shipped to an exacting standard. You must check that your fulfilment company meets these standards to avoid incurring a fine.
A smooth returns process is also mandatory, so double check that your chosen warehouse has one.
If you prefer an easy life, Fulfilment By Amazon (FBA) will take care of all three steps for you.
By choosing FBA, you’ll know your products will be stored, packed and shipped to Amazon’s standards, and your returns process will be taken care of.
Merchants who use FBA may also be eligible for Amazon Prime benefits, such as next-day delivery, which can dramatically boost your ranking and sales.
You’ve set up your Amazon US seller account, you’ve linked it to a multi-currency business account, and you’ve sorted out your fulfilment process.
As they say at NASA, you’re go for launch!
Here’s how to make the launch a grand success.
The Amazon marketplace operates a bit like a search engine. You must include relevant keywords on your product pages in order to rank for customer searches.
Keywords differ by region, even in English-speaking countries. In the US a baby’s cot is called a crib, trainers are called sneakers, jumpers are called sweaters…you get the picture.
To ensure you’re hitting the right keywords, research the descriptions your competitors use on Amazon US marketplace. You can also use Google Trends to discover the terms customers use when searching for your product in the States.
Some US events, such as Black Friday, have been exported to the UK. Others, such as Independence Day, Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day and ThanksGiving, remain unique to the States.
Take note of these public holidays and plan your marketing campaigns around them.
Reviews play a big part in both search ranking and sales conversion on Amazon.
Your UK reviews will show up on your US pages, but they won’t be featured in the main review section, so it’s best to generate some local reviews too.
The best way to get customer reviews is to ask for them. Use an automated email tool to encourage customers to review your products after they receive them. To boost response, you can make use of Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program.
With a global audience of 1.2 billion, Amazon provides a perfect platform for UK businesses to launch internationally.
As well as offering a gateway to millions of online shoppers, Amazon removes many of the obstacles that can make international fulfilment difficult for smaller businesses.
If there is demand for your products in the US, and you’re able to make a good profit margin when accounting for Amazon’s fees, you can use the world’s biggest ecommerce site to push into new markets without ever leaving home.
Welcome back to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk.
Today we have a special episode, brought to you by Microsoft. Guests Nico Charritton, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft and Tiffany St James, founder of Curate 42 and Transmute consultancies, discuss hybrid working and the tech tools that can make it happen.
Listen to it in the media player below.
Or you can watch a couple of video teasers below.
You can also catch our episodes with:
We’ve got podcast episodes from the first series looking at:
To find out more about Small Business Snippets, you can download the trailer.
If you want to listen to the podcast elsewhere, it’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Watch the new video versions and subscribe over at our YouTube channel. It’d also be great if you could leave us a review.
Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case.
Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan.
Today we have a special episode, brought to you by Microsoft. I’m joined by Nico Charritton, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft and Tiffany St James, founder of Curate 42 and Transmute consultancies, to discuss hybrid working and the tech tools that can make it happen.
Anna: Hello, both how are you doing?
Nico and Tiffany: Very good. Very well, thank you – and yourself?
Anna: Yeah, yeah, very well. Very excited about this podcast!
Nico: Yeah, sure. I’m Nico. I’ve been with Microsoft for about 11 years now. I lead our go-to marketing strategy for the modern work and security solutions in the small business space from a Microsoft perspective. So, everything around Teams, Windows 365, Office 365, and all of those beautiful things that we know and love very much – that lands with me.
Tiffany: Thank you so much. I’m Tiffany St. James and I’m a digital strategist by trade at Curate 42. We help large businesses and complex businesses with deeper digital engagement. So, really helping to understand new technologies and how that can help people connect with their audiences.
Tiffany: Yes, certainly. So, I think business owners more than anything, and particularly small business owners, have to be more adept, really. I mean, small businesses who are perhaps, you know, more flexible, having a smaller remit of people. But really, you’ve got to understand technology, be able to set your own meetings, be able to interact and engage, be able to collaborate, be able to understand new tools and how they can help you to be able to communicate with your customers and your peers. That has accelerated so much in the last few years. There are some of the top lines if that helps.
Nico: One of the key things that we see in the market is how businesses are pivoting to understand the employee experience, right? Because if you go back in time, the shift to remote work was very messy. There was a very steep learning curve, steep on adapting to managing new tools and stuff like that. Then working from home was very diverse for different people. Think about the flat that has a bunch of housemates all dialling into calls at the same time gets very loud or people home-schooling the kids. It was very, very challenging.
We’ve seen an increase of 250 per cent in meetings. There were no breaks between meetings. So, there is a lot of fatigue. It took a toll on, I would say, physical and mental wellbeing. This is something that as we open back up, we see the paradox of ‘I want to keep the flexibility that I gained through the pandemic, but I want to have more in-contact collaboration with my colleagues’, which is real paradox. And we’re trying to figure out, well, ‘How do we do this?’ What we see now is that people are rethinking the, ‘Where do I work? And how do I work?’ They have a new ‘worth it’ equation, right? It’s something that they are thinking about whether I need to stay or not in this company to fulfil my dreams, even. In fact, 41 per cent of UK employees are thinking about changing their employers soon. It’s something that is very tangible. We see it in the market: there is a great reshuffle there and the war for talent is heating up.
Tiffany: I’m just responding to that really, Nico. One of the things that that we’re noticing as well, certainly in that, waking up to ‘who am I and what do I want to do it for’, organisations looking at how different parts of their teams in demographics are responding to the hybrid challenge. So you have, perhaps, older, more established employees who are actually very well self-directed, but actually, perhaps a little bit more resistant to come into the office, unless it’s in professional services, your accountancy and your lawyers are all brilliantly back in the office, but actually, then you have a younger audience that perhaps are really keen to come into the office, because that’s part of the social life that they have, and actually learning on-site and perhaps aren’t as well directed at home. So, there’s just another nuance and flavour that we know organisations are dealing with.
Nico: Absolutely. One of the things that we usually talk to business owners about is rethinking the business and approaching three angles, I would say, on the people side is prioritising on these wellbeing efforts, being at the centre of the hybrid strategy, providing the flexibility for people to choose when to work, how to work and from where, of course, with the ground rules based on the type of business that they have. Then the leaders having that role as a model of those behaviours that they need to bring if they want to create a culture of hybrid work.
The second would be about the places on thinking about the human interaction being so critical still for having great culture and then how they have responsibility to create this combination of physical and virtual, but rethinking the role of the office space place, right? There is no reason to go to the office, like you need to make it worthwhile. ‘Why would I waste time commuting, there is nothing for me’, right? There is no one-size-fits-all, going back to what we were talking about, being the person who might want to go to the office to find peace and quiet from the housemates or the person who might stay at home to find peace and quiet because they have a great setup of a home office.
Finally, the processes – how do you use tools as an enabler? The tools are not going to create the culture. That’s very clear, right? It’s culture-first with tools as an enabler. Then defining those policies and procedures for asynchronous communication and collaboration, not only synchronous. It’s interesting, because there is a perception of ‘If I’m not in a meeting, I’m not working.’ It’s very tricky, right? Flexibility doesn’t have to be equal to ‘always on’ working. We need to create that clarity with employees. This is very clear.
Finally, on security, right, you need to make sure that you have a zero-trust approach to cybersecurity, because it’s getting tougher.
Tiffany: Yeah, really interesting to hear your points, Nico. So, essentially, one of the things that I do help organisations and clients deliver is help them with more agile working. So perhaps in a pre-hybrid world, if you like, then you had people working perhaps in silos, even in small businesses. The marketing team might stick together, and the design team might stick together and sequentially pass projects to each other.
Whereas actually, what we’ve seen during hybrid working is being able to help them work in more the method, I guess, in a more agile way that was developed for software development sprints, if you like. A stand-up morning meeting, which is very easily enabled by great technology to be able to pull everyone together for a quick 20-minute morning meeting is actually probably easier to do digitally. Whether there are people in the room and outside of the room in a hybrid way than it would be together everyone if they were all in-person and on the premises in one place. So certainly using collaborative software, to be able to really change the way in which organisations work in a more agile and collaborative fashion. And, of course, baked into great tools, is collaboration software, such as whiteboarding – being able to click meeting notes in situ, and being able, when someone’s speaking, to be able to comment on that, or to be able to understand how what you’re saying is landing in real time that people wouldn’t perhaps interrupt you in an in-person meeting, but can easily chat within the tools themselves.
So, we’re looking at collaborative documentation and co-creating things together whereby you might actually do something collaboratively, asynchronously as Nico was saying, in different times, and then come together to be able to discuss that. That’s the way in which I’m using these technologies to be able to help people work more productively, I guess.
Anna: Yeah, and there are solutions that can work for different types of employees. Employees that are typically a bit quieter, might find it easier to speak up in a written format, rather than in-person where they might feel a little bit drowned out.
Nico: Yeah, this is one of the main concerns that small businesses have today – and they come to Microsoft for that very reason. In fact, one of the things that we see that when people moved, or businesses moved from the all in-person to all-remote, they went to any type of technology they could find to make it work and survive. And that was something that was very inspiring to see, I would say at the time.
Then very quickly, business leaders realise that, oh, there’s a lot of benefits from this digitisation. We’ve seen retail shops doing kerbside pickup with click and collect orders. We’ve seen fitness trainers doing streaming of their classes, we’ve seen therapists doing video conferencing with their patients, we’ve even seen dentists taking check-ups and screening online, which is fantastic.
However, very quickly, the cost can start to add up. Going back to what Tiffany was saying, if you think about it, you have document collaboration, you have file storage in the cloud, you have chat and video collaboration, you have forms and surveys for your customers, you have process automation, you have cybersecurity, everything adds up. Then you end up paying like £60 per user per month. It’s just not sustainable for many businesses.
This is where they come to Microsoft because we do have that hero product in Microsoft 365 Business Premium, tailored for small and medium business at just £16.60 per month. Very quickly, you save all of that cost. You can operate and have all of that to have a gold standard of technology that supports that growth that you want and keeps you with that edge and the benefits of the cloud, or even you don’t drag behind if you adopt technology, right? Because that’s another thing – competitive advantage – using technology as a competitive advantage of not falling behind. This is key for business.
Tiffany: Well, absolutely, I mean, I’m a good believer, of course, that there’s great many benefits in reach and time savings with virtual and hybrid working as opposed to in-person. But of course, there are challenges. And one of the things that that I spot quite often is that clients and people that I’m working with and collaborating with have different stages of digital maturity, you know, some are more experienced than others. Therefore, you want to ensure that when you’re working within a collaborative environment, that everyone feels that they have the tools and can use the tools in the right way to be able to do that meeting, that job, that virtual conference, whatever it might be, you don’t want anyone to feel silly. Not everyone likes to be able to ask those open questions when they’re perhaps with people they don’t know. It’s really identifying that.
One of the things that that you can do to help with that, of course, is onboarding. So making sure that everyone’s aware of the tools that they have in their hands, and not dumping them straight into a live event or a live conference, but bringing them into a perhaps a safe area and getting them used to it, assuming that no one has used it at all before, perhaps, and reminding people at the start of either a meeting or an event of the facilities that we’ll be using. So that it’s actually setting that good ground, I think, before you meet or use a piece of technology. That’s setting out, I guess, the rules of engagement: how we’re going to use this, how we’re going to work together today and making that really clear for everyone.
Of course, it’s very difficult sometimes to see nonverbal cues, or they’re more limited perhaps in virtual or hybrid ways of being able to understand, perhaps, body language or looking at the things that aren’t perhaps said. We know, of course, aside from the things that you said, I know that people suffer from digital fatigue, because they’re online so much more of their day than they were before.
Nico: I think one of the things that we’ve done over the past few years is iterate on product development. Because we realise that the products that we had when we entered the pandemic, were potentially not ideal for what we needed during or after the pandemic, right? So, a lot of iteration in terms of adding the ability to raise your hand or going to break rooms and stuff like that was really enriching. As Tiffany said, that digital fatigue was a critical problem we needed to address and a couple of little things that we added into the products were the ability to set up by default meeting a bit shorter. So, if you usually set an hour, it will cut 15 minutes in the end, or if it is a 30-minute, you can cut five. Also, during the meeting, you get a five-minute warning when you’re about to close. So, you wrap up and you give people time, right? We’ve seen studies looking at the brain’s activity on how five-minute breaks in between meetings can really help you with your cognitive activity to reset. So that is really good.
Going back to the nonverbal cues. This is something that, for me, is really important. I love presenting and one of the things that I found very hard remotely is how do I bring myself and my gestures, my hands, into the presentation? We added things like Cameo into PowerPoint in Teams. So, you can embed yourself as part of the content. So you are at the front and you’re pointing to the slides and you feel like a news presenter and that brings like breaks through that or even if we look more into the future, mesh into Microsoft Teams is our Metaverse immersive reality where you can use an avatar instead of your camera. So, if you cannot turn on your video, your avatar can move and do the gestures that you cannot do. Because we’re in an awkward space. Those types of little things will help us as we embrace them more and more. Then how do we break the differences between being in the room and being remote? So, if you think about it, if you’re in the room, you might miss that chat or the reaction that you had when we were remote. So, coming in with your phone as a companion and having that through the Teams mobile app. Very easy to access from that. Or how do you get a better understanding of who’s talking or the transcription if you’re remote? So, we have now intelligent cameras that capture who’s talking and you have speaker recognition, those type of things really, really help.
Finally, going back to the way you work, and measuring it, is like fitness. If you measure you can improve. So we have Viva Insights, a module within Teams that helps you understand your patterns of work, how many extra hours you’re working, how much time or focus time you have for yourself, and it gives you practical tips to follow up on things that you committed to, block yourself some focused time to connect with your managers or your direct reports, if you haven’t connected for a while, all of those things and as a leader they can give you practical insights into how the organisation is working. So, you can proactively reach out to them with that coaching to help them cope or prevent burnout.
Nico: Yeah, this is a top of mind for most small and medium sized businesses. In fact, 65 per cent of SMBs have been suffering attacks in the last year in the UK. And we’ve seen a 300 per cent increase in cyberattacks. So, when you think about all of these, it can be a bit scary. So, we need to make sure that we help small businesses protect and focus on what they want to focus on if their business and in addition to the multi-factor authentication and to the phishing and ransomware protection that we had in email, we’ve now introduced Microsoft Defender for Business. It is an enterprise-grade device protection for PCs, iOS, Android devices, etc. This is different to the traditional thinking of the anti-virus which is what most business owners have, and they think as protection on cybersecurity.
But I usually think of the antivirus being similar to installing a door in your house. It’s a must-have, it’s a very basic thing and without it, it would be a problem and it’s very obvious. But that is not enough now because if you think about it, even without a key, you could unlock that door. Think about the last time you called the locksmith. Having Microsoft Defender for Business is like having a reinforced door with multiple locks and giving the specific key to only individuals that need access to it. And then you have also a building manager going around your house checking for those doors and windows in case there is broken glass and replacing those. Then you have a CCTV monitoring system that is checking everything that is happening, and you have security staff on call that as soon as the alert happens, they come take the burglar out and bring it to the authorities. This is what we have with Microsoft Defender for Business is moving from prevention-only to prevention, detection and automatic remediation. So, businesses now can be like, ‘No, it’s safe’ and mitigating most of those things that happen and we know of because we have all the signals around the world.
And this is in a very cost-effective way because it is already included in the product that I mentioned before, Microsoft 365 Business Premium. Or if you don’t have that, and you want to purchase separately, it will only cost £2.30 per user per month. So, it is a really affordable option to having everything that they would have with multiple solutions from other vendors.
Tiffany: Absolutely. Nico, I love your analogy that you mentioned, particularly cybersecurity can seem such a heavy subject for people who are trying to navigate it, but to equate it to how you manage your house, I think it’s a great way of being able to do so some of the way that I am. What I advise smaller businesses is actually looking at how is cybersecurity affected when you’re out of the office, not just in the office. In the office, there are brilliant tools, as Nico was just explaining, to be able to help organisations, but not everyone thinks about the cybersecurity when they’re working remotely, whether that’s from home or within a café.
Some of the really common things that are really easy to identify is if you can get a separate router, a separate WiFi from the house or WiFi that your children might be on. It’s because they’re probably not as cyber-conscious as you necessarily and therefore they may compromise their devices on your WiFi that you’re using and that might compromise your devices, right? So just be aware of that. You’re also you’re going to benefit from better bandwidth if they’re not on the on the same WiFi as yourself.
If you’re recycling your devices, make sure that they’re securely wiped, including household devices that are shared by other people within your household. Make sure those devices are wiped clearly, if you’re recycling those.
Know that smart devices can listen. You might disable them or not have them in the room that you’re working in, particularly.
Some really tangible things that we can all do with no fuss at all:
Anna: That’s amazing. And there’s so many things that every small business can apply to how they offer is great stuff. That’s it from me, unless there’s anything either of you would like to add.
Nico and Tiffany: It was great to meet you today. Great to have you, thanks so much. Yeah, it was amazing. It was great to be here. Thank you.
You can find out more about Microsoft Teams at aka.ms/hybridsmb. You can also go to smallbusiness.co.uk to learn more about hybrid working and cybersecurity. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts, on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lowercase and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.
Small business owners are busy. You cannot afford to waste your time on tasks that generate low ROI for your business. Technology has now advanced to a stage where you can automate several tasks. Best of all, small businesses can now leverage the platforms that once solely applied to enterprises.
You must digitally transform your small business, and the first step is to use technological solutions in important business functions. Here are four areas where technology will save you time and help you focus your energy on tasks that boost profits.
How often have you sent PDFs of contracts repeatedly over email to your suppliers and customers? How often have you lost track of these important documents? The typical small business owner stores digital copies of contracts on their computer and struggles to retrieve important information.
Automating several aspects of contract management has its advantages. You can sign contracts faster, manage your contract repository easily and retrieve important contact information when you need it. If a full-blown solution doesn’t appeal to you, use a signature maker to digitally store your signature. You can insert this signature in all of your contracts quickly and securely.
A robust contract management platform will help you organise your contracts across several attributes. Thanks to templated contracts, you can organise documents according to deal size, payout terms and profitability. These metrics will help you pursue better clients and let go of ones that do not serve your goals anymore.
Financial projection platforms used to apply only to enterprises due to their complexity. However, modern platforms scale to businesses of all sizes, and you must leverage the power of financial analytics in your business.
For instance, a good financial management platform will help you project cashflow and working capital levels. You can model different business scenarios, figure out when you need funding and negotiate better prices with your suppliers as a result. There are different degrees to which you can use a financial projection platform.
The most sophisticated ones centralise your expense management and financial information onto a single dashboard. If these features are overkill, you can always opt for lower levels of automation, such as automating invoice creation and delivery. You can create payment collection workflows that deliver reminders to customers before due dates.
Some platforms even alert you to potential supplier discounts if you pay early. Thus, automation might seem expensive at first, but you’ll save money in the long run.
Remote work is here to stay, and you must account for it in your business. Many small business owners think small and hire just local candidates. If you’re living in an area that lacks people with the skills you need, this approach can leave you in a tough spot.
Instead, cast your net as wide as possible and embrace remote work. Naturally, not every position will lend itself well to remote work but look as widely as possible when recruiting for roles that are remote-friendly. For instance, bookkeeping services can be executed remotely, as can marketing functions.
To power these roles, you need an HR platform that supports remote employees. A cloud-based platform will simplify onboarding and payroll management. These systems will also handle compliance and tax issues that make your life much easier.
Again, these platforms look complex on the outside, but they pay for themselves in the long run. Ultimately, they help you recruit the best candidate possible, irrespective of their location.
Every business is online these days, and cybersecurity is a business pillar, not an add-on. Your systems store a ton of sensitive supplier, financial and customer data. A data breach caused by a malicious attack will put you in violation of several data privacy laws. Not only could you face damage, but your brand image will also suffer.
Cybersecurity platforms scale to almost every business these days. While the industry’s jargon and technology might seem intimidating, most platforms do a great job of onboarding customers and helping them automate basic tasks.
The good news is that as a small business owner, you don’t need highly sophisticated resources. A cloud-based platform will help you automate routine checks and deliver security alerts when there’s a problem. You can lean on the security services the platform offers and correct any issue that exists.
Often, these platforms include a systems audit as a part of their offering. You can have an expert look at your systems and validate them for security. The result is a robust security posture that keeps your data safe and your business protected always.
Small business owners must embrace technology to remain competitive in the market. Thanks to technology scaling to offer solutions to every business, it has never been easier to leverage automation to simplify common business tasks and boost profits.
Starting a business is the moment when all your planning, marketing and financial management skills will be put to the test. You’re bound to come across some obstacles and challenges during your first year in business, so now’s the time to improve your problem-solving mindset and decision making under pressure. That way, you can plan solutions and react with agility when things don’t go as expected.
This guide will walk you through how to plan for your first year in business, so you can successfully navigate the ups and downs of the early stages. You’ll learn how to:
Getting to grips with all these components should help you build a robust plan for your first year and put your business in good stead for a successful second year.
Small Business Pro is the ideal tool for you when you’re starting your business. It will help with the heavy lifting of managing customers, taking payments, insurance, finance and HR, plus you’ll get a host of personal wellbeing benefits.
You can find out more about Small Business Pro here.
A brand is your company’s public persona and personality. From how it looks and feels to the tone of voice you use, you want customers to recognise your brand and have it stand out from the crowd. There are some fab tips on this here.
Your brand doesn’t have to be perfect during your first year in business when you’re testing things out and on a tight budget. However, there are plenty of free tools online (we like Canva) that will help you create great imagery and keep the visual side of your business consistent.
Your positioning statement should explain your brand’s position in the market. It doesn’t need to be customer facing or appear anywhere on your website, but it should act as a guiding star for you in creating your brand.
This is a helpful template:
We offer [product or service] for [target market or audience] to [value proposition]. Unlike [competitors or alternatives], we [unique selling points or key differentiators].
A logo is a core part of your brand’s identity. It represents the face of your company and will appear on every channel for your business, from your website favicon to social media platforms.
Your logo should be recognisable, unique and scalable to work in all applications. Consider having an icon that can be used both together with and separately from your logo.
Next, choose your colour palette. The palette should be notably different from that of your competitors and be a sensible representation of your business. It’s important to choose colours based on what’s best suited to your brand, rather than personal preferences.
Coolors is a useful tool that generates complementary colour palettes, allowing you to cycle through countless colours until you land on a combination that works.
Finally, determine your typography and the fonts you are going to use on your website. Keep it simple and accessible – pick two and ensure they are usable across different browsers and websites.
Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman are among the safest choices for body text, but Google Fonts has several good options if you want something more creative for headers.
Your brand’s tone of voice will shape your marketing messaging and communication with customers.
It should represent your brand’s personality and values, and be consistent across your website, email, social media posts and more.
While it helps to develop a tone of voice that comes fairly naturally to you (especially if you’re a one-person marketing team during your first year in business) think about the impression you want your business to give.
Do you need to sound authoritative so customers will trust your expertise? Are you getting a younger audience excited about a lifestyle product?
Nailing the right tone of voice will help you attract your target audience and get them interested in your business.
Whether your business is entirely online, or your website will just act as a signpost, it’s essential that your website is user friendly, easy to navigate and informative.
Think of your website as your shop window. It’s usually the first impression you’ll make with a customer, so it should lay out your unique selling point (USP) and services or products clearly and be aligned with your brand.
If you aren’t digitally savvy, you can hire an expert to help you build a website. However, if you take this route, be sure to keep it simple. Website development can be a major cash drain so it’s best to stick with a minimum viable product while you’re in your first year of business – you can add extras in your second or third year.
>See also: What’s the best website builder for my small business?
Alternatively, if you’re happy to try creating something yourself, Squarespace is a popular website builder. You can choose a website template and drag and drop text or image blocks where you need them. There are also robust ecommerce functionalities if you’re selling online.
Building a website yourself will take time, but it’s a significantly cheaper option than bringing in a freelancer or agency for something bespoke.
The next step is to ensure that your website is easy to find in search engines.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps to improve your visibility on search result pages, so that customers can find you when they search for similar products or services.
Here are several ways to improve SEO on your new website and boost your online presence.
Use tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush for insights into how people find and interact with your website. You can use this information to determine site architecture, address gaps in the user journey or get ideas for marketing content.
Determine keywords that customers are using to search for similar products or services and use them throughout your website. Great places for keywords include page titles, meta descriptions and header tags. This helps search engines establish what each page on your website contains and the kind of terms it should rank for.
Create opportunities for internal linking and link to other relevant pages on your site. This helps both users and search engines navigate through your site and highlights the most high-value pages.
Updating your site regularly will help your search ranking, but there’s only so much you can add to product or service pages. That’s where a blog comes in. A blog gives you a stream of new content to post, packed with the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Plus, a well-written blog is an effective way to start building a reputation as a thought leader in your industry.
Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your domain. By getting other websites to link to yours, you can boost the authority and search visibility of your site. Seek out partner companies or similar brands within your industry you can secure backlinks with.
If you’re selling a product or service through your website, you might want to employ a dedicated ecommerce solution. Research the best shopping and payment systems that allow customers to check out quickly and process payments securely.
You can choose between an integrated ecommerce system, such as Shopify, or a third-party site, like Etsy or Amazon. If you set up your own ecommerce shop, payment processing can be done via platforms like WorldPay, Zettle and Stripe.
Whether you’ve got big ambitions to operate in the global market or are looking to create a niche in a local market, it’s important that you understand it fully before you get started. This includes looking at your customers and competitors, as well as considering the geographical reach of your business in your first year.
Launching into a national or global market comes with more challenges and higher risk. It’s a good idea to set out a strategy to succeed in local markets first, so you have a blueprint for expansion and growth later down the line.
Test your business plan on a local market before you even consider rolling it out nationally or beyond. Select a geographical area that’s easy to manage – a place where you can build close working relationships, keep your travel costs low and be on the ground with your product or service and your customers.
This mitigates your risk and reduces the chance of loss. It also gives you the chance to reflect, pivot, learn and develop, which is what the first year of business is all about. You can then apply those lessons if you launch in bigger markets later on.
A report from Enterprise Nation and GS1 UK, found 75 per cent of small firms see global trade as a viable route to expansion.
Who is your target audience? What are their needs and desires? What are the limiting factors that prevent them from engaging with your services or purchasing your products?
Speak with your early customers, send out surveys and collect feedback wherever you can. Many founders go into their first year of business with a clear idea of a product or service, only to find out the market is looking for something completely different.
Market research is crucial to building a business that has longevity. Make it part of your business plan to regularly collect feedback in your first six months and be prepared to tweak your vision if it’s not hitting the mark.
Researching competitors is a key step in planning for your first year in business. It’s essential you know what sets you apart; that will define how you position and market your product or service.
You’ll be able to get a good sense of their brand and positioning from their online presence. Customer reviews are also a useful source of information when it comes to identifying weaknesses that your business could build on.
Starting life as a simple fruit and veg stall in Lewes near Brighton, Bill’s grew into a shop and restaurant which became the benchmark for local grocers.
Bill’s reputation spread by word of mouth, which paved the way for national expansion. Now, Bill’s signature restaurants can be found in London, Reading, Bristol, Cambridge and more.
It was starting local that gave Bill Collison the opportunity to build his business slowly and identify the USP that would make his restaurants successful at scale.
When you start a business, there are always more additional and ad-hoc costs than you expect. As a result, most new founders will try to bootstrap the business for the first few years. This involves using existing resources like personal savings, their own equipment and home space to get the business off the ground.
When you’re planning for your first year in business, it’s a good idea to overestimate how much cash you’ll need. There are standard set-up costs like registering your business and getting insurance, but you also might need to pay for other things like:
Even if you’ve saved a sizable sum to start your business, cash can disappear quickly if you aren’t careful. Be ruthless about what you really need now and push nice-to-haves into the future when your business is bringing in more revenue.
It’s worth speaking to other early-stage business owners in your sector or area to find out how they budgeted for their first year and any unexpected costs you should anticipate.
This leads neatly onto cash flow management.
Managing your cash flow is essential to ensuring your business is sustainable in its first year. You can keep your cash flow stable by ensuring that clients and customers pay their invoices on time, only spending cash that’s available and making sure that funds are used efficiently.
Here are three key things you can do to keep your business afloat and keep money coming in and going out:
Break down your anticipated income and outgoings for the year by week and month in a cash flow forecast. This will allow you to plan your spending for times when you have extra cash and to cut back when you don’t, ensuring you’re not losing money.
Stay on top of invoicing and chasing payments to ensure money is coming in on time. Send out invoices well ahead of deadlines if possible and use your cash flow forecast to signpost key moments for generating income.
Use cash flow forecasts and data to inform decisions across your first year of business. These decisions might include bringing plans forward because you’re generating more revenue than you expected or cutting back on spending during a dip in demand.
If you’re new to finance and struggling to get your head around the numbers, it might be worth hiring an accountant who can also act as an adviser. It’s a business expense, but you can learn the ropes quickly and find out exactly what you should be looking at each month.
Keeping a tight grip on spending in your first year will help you to work efficiently and think carefully about where you invest your cash. This is a good habit to get into, because it forces you to regularly analyse what’s working and what isn’t.
Here are some easy, cost-saving ideas for your first year in business:
If your business is online or doesn’t require office space or a commercial premises, you can save costs by running your business from home.
If you do work from home, and you are self-employed, make sure you claim back your costs as a business expense. These costs include portions of your utility bills, like the electricity used to power your computer, and your internet and telephone use. Learn more about the guidelines from HMRC on business expenses and tax relief here.
If you do need to rent an office to run your business, there are several different options from empty spaces that you furnish yourself to fully serviced offices.
Coworking spaces have also become increasingly popular in the last few years and provide flexibility if you only need a desk a few days a week.
Depending on your industry and what type of business you have, you may be eligible for tax allowances or other funding support in your first year of business. Understanding the support that’s on offer can help you save cash as you head into your second year.
Ensure you are charging expenses against your business appropriately. Look into capital allowances to help with the cost of purchasing business equipment, like computers, cars, tools or furniture.
There are also relief schemes that reduce your company tax bill, such as R&D relief, and investment schemes that offer tax relief to encourage investment. Read more about how to make the most of tax reliefs here, and see how to find and apply for small business grants here.
>See also: 150 UK small business grants to apply for right now – UPDATED
Innocent Drinks was founded in 1999 by a group of friends, who started out selling smoothies at a festival and stock to local shops. They didn’t invest in an office in their first year as most of their sales took place at trade shows or by going directly to customers.
It wasn’t until their second year in operation that they even had an office (albeit a very small one). It became necessary after the business grew in scale and they began to hire staff.
Read more about their journey on the Innocent website.
Even if you have a brick-and-mortar business, a digital presence is key to getting found and building a customer base.
Most customers will head to the internet before they make a purchase, whether it’s to compare prices or read reviews from past shoppers. So, it’s essential that you optimise your online presence for maximum engagement, loyalty and conversion. Here’s how.
Social media is an essential tool for reaching your audience and showcasing your brand, products and services. It instils trust and builds credibility, which are key milestones on the customer journey.
While you’re running the business alone – or with a small team – it’s best to choose one or two platforms to focus on so you don’t spread yourself too thin. A good way to plan your time is to take a 40/30/30 split: spend 40 per cent of time posting, 30 per cent engaging with followers and 30 per cent growing your network by following other users.
Building an email list allows you to engage current and potential customers on a regular basis. You can keep them up to date on new products from your business and encourage sales by offering exclusive discounts.
It’s worth adding a form to capture email addresses to your website from day one. You don’t have to send out a newsletter right away, but that way you’ll have a list of engaged customers when you are ready to do so. To do this, you must make sure you are GDPR compliant.
A successful business depends on having the right people on board. While the first year is all about testing your idea and keeping a tight grip on costs, it’s also crucial to get the talent and skills on board when you need them. If you don’t, you can miss out on opportunities and end up stagnating.
Freelancers and contractors are a good option if you need high-quality talent on a flexible basis. But top people often come with a hefty day rate and will only work in their specialist areas, like sales or marketing.
Most brand-new businesses have an all-hands-on-deck mentality and need people who can dip into lots of different tasks, from customer service to product packing. That’s where your first hire comes in.
Recruitment is an investment and you want to ensure that once you find the right person, you can secure and keep them. Here are some tips for hiring your first employee. Or you could seek help from a HR professional. You can find an adviser here.
There are lots of ways to reach the right candidates, so don’t pin all your hopes on one website. Post on job sites like Indeed or Jobbio, as well as sector-specific job boards, as well as LinkedIn. Speak to people in your industry to seek out word-of-mouth recommendations too.
Interviews should provide you with an overview of a candidate’s skills and experience, as well as a glimpse into who they are as a person.
The best interviews will test people’s skills and ask them to demonstrate what they can do. They will also give you both a chance to understand whether you make a good fit professionally and personally.
When you’re short on time, it’s wise to schedule a series of 15-minute, first-round interviews over the phone or via Zoom. That way, you can easily qualify people and move the best candidates through to the second stage of in-person interviews.
When you’ve run a new business single-handedly for so long, it’s exciting to speak to people who can bring a range of skills to the table.
However, it’s vital to focus on the skills you really need. It’s brilliant if a candidate can bring video editing skills into the business, but if you’re hiring a customer service manager then make sure your new employee ticks those boxes first.
Hiring isn’t just about what a candidate can bring into your business – it’s also about what you can offer them.
Having a competitive and attractive offer will attract the best candidates. In addition to a generous salary, consider the other elements that make you a great employer and be sure to put them on show.
From your stance on flexible working to staff benefits and growth opportunities, give candidates plenty of incentives to choose your offer over any others.
At some point in your first year of business, you have to start looking ahead to year two. This may already be part of your robust plan, but now you’ve got a year under your belt. So, it’s a good time to take stock and plan.
At this stage, you should be confident that you’ve got a product or service that there’s clear demand for. You’ll have some successes under your belt – and, undoubtedly, mistakes you’ve learnt from – and a good idea about where you want to take the business next. For example, it might be developing a new product range or expanding into another city.
If you’ve received funding or investment for your business, check the terms to see if any of it is dependent on the achievement of goals in your first year or beyond.
If so, these goals need to be built into your business plan. If it looks like you won’t achieve them, you need to build a contingency plan and speak to investors.
If you’ve kept a close eye on your business finances, you should have an idea of areas for growth and areas of weakness. Your second year in business is the perfect time to start building on those growth areas and cutting out anything that isn’t working.
Think about why those areas have flourished: are you providing a niche service that no one else is offering? Has a popular trend helped draw attention to your business? How is demand likely to change the following year?
Asking these questions will give you direction for the second year. Ensure your plans are grounded in data as much as possible so there’s a clear reasoning behind new goals.
The extra costs don’t stop coming in year one. If your second-year plans include renting an office, hiring more staff or expanding your business into new markets, they will incur additional costs.
Ensure you have funding plans for any new activity. If you do plan to think about getting investment, deciding how much to ask for is important. There are some good tips here. There are lots of ways to raise investment and funding, this is a good place to start looking for support.
There you have it: a guide to getting through your first year in business with a plan of action in place. If you’ve come this far, you should now know how to:
Now you have a platform from which to jump into a successful second year.
Take time to reflect on everything you’ve learnt and achieved over your first year – and good luck for the second.
Emma Jones CBE is founder and CEO of Enterprise Nation