Go on, you know the rest, you know you do!

Actually I think apologies are in order to Edwin Starr and Motown, as the original recording had a clear and unambiguous message. I am not at all sure the same can be said for Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), the bodies intended to replace the current Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). Although, perhaps I am being harsh on the Coalition Government as they appear to have a reasonably clear vision of where they intend to get to, if not how to get there.

Which brings us to the theme of this blog post.  The intractable uncertainty over the new structures being developed to support business and meet the varying and diverse needs of different regions. The government wants to spend less money, more effectively and to do that with reference to local priorities – all laudable aims.

Here is how it seems to work. The old RDAs you have come to know and (possibly) hate will be abolished as soon as practicable and be replaced by locally proposed organisations based on alignments of interest. This could be at local authority level –county, unitary authority, borough or any combination thereof, or on partnerships that don’t necessarily align with existing geographies – it is up to the proposers how they seek to structure themselves. I can see good arguments for this – take the case of SEEDA.  At even the most superficial level, I am not sure what unifies the Medway Towns and North Oxfordshire in geography, demographics, industrial structure or need. There is a case that ‘local’ requirements should drive support – similar in a way to the structures in place in Germany. Interestingly, the Government has asked that LEPs feature both public and private sector representation, with a private (not public) sector chair person.

The government wants proposals for LEPs by 6^th September. Why the 6^th September? Simples! They have to put the numbers and ideas in the big policy crunching machine to produce a credible plan that can go to the Treasury and be approved in time for the Comprehensive Spending Review announcements on 20^th October. There is a great phrase used in US Government circles – ‘process is policy’ – rarely do you get to see it so clearly in the UK but everything is being driven by the budget reduction timetable. 

Indeed, to use another US phrase – ‘follow the money!’. So, where is the money? Answer: in the ‘Regional Growth Fund’ which is being consulted on as I write with a closing date of – you guessed it, 6^thSeptember. What is it? Well we don’t quite know yet, but it looks like it will be a bid led fund for LEPs and potentially others groups to replace the RDAs and their funding streams but with a focus on projects that can demonstrably create private sector jobs.

We have a mechanism – LEPs. We have money – the Regional Growth Fund. Put them together and you might just have a means of achieving the objectives set down by the coalition. The danger is as always that we get the “same old, same old” just packaged differently. In which case Mr Starr and that Detroit record label will have been spot on.

At VentureNavigator we very much agree with and support a more localised version of business support, so at this stage we are very optimistic! Let us know via the comments box what you think…

Amongst other things Neil Gregory worked in Higher Education for 19 years, specialising in revenue generation and commercialisation of research. He has been Director of Business and Enterprise at the London School of Economics and is a Senior Industrial Fellow at the Institute of Manufacturing at Cambridge University. He is also a qualified Chartered Secretary.

Neil is currently Business Development Director of VentureNavigator where he is promoting a focussed, local approach to business support.

 1. VentureNavigator – www.venturenavigator.co.uk 

VentureNavigator offers two things that no other business networks offer: firstly, high-quality, edited content (much of it directly provided by the UK’s top universities); secondly, a series of assessments on specific business topics (e.g. investment), to help entrepreneurs improve their skills. It’s also has active Q&A forums and a new locally-focused groups feature.

2. LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com

If you aren’t using LinkedIn you are missing out on the largest business network in the world (by a mile). Engaging in LinkedIn Groups is a great way to meet partners and customers, and the Status Update and Newsfeed provide a highly effective means of sharing and receiving news.

 3. Viadeo – www.viadeo.com

Viadeo started out in France but now has 30 million members globally. Its traffic is also growing faster than any other business network, so it’s one to watch. Like Xing, it aims to offer a more focused service than LinkedIn and urges member to subscribe to benefit.

 4. Xing – www.xing.com

Xing is more focused on start-ups and independent businesses than LinkedIn. Based in Germany it’s also more European, so if you’re an international startup this might be the place for you. Ning has 9 million users and charges ($9.95 per month) for premium services, such as executive search.

5. Partnerup – www.partnerup.com

Partnerup is a popular US-based site that aims to encourage professionals to connect with entrepreneurs and start-ups.  The forums are extremely active and a great place to ask non-UK specific questions.

6. Entrepreneur Connect – http://econnect.entrepreneur.com/

Started by the people behind Entrepreneur Magazine, it’s another US-focused site, but does allow you to create a blog which will get views, since it’s promoted within the site (and posts appear on the homepage).

 7. eCademy – www.ecademy.com

One of the early UK-based business networks, ecademy is still a highly effective place to find and meet useful business connections. On the down-side it regularly urges users to upgrade to subscriber level and lacks many of the interconnectivity that makes LinkedIn so useful (and viral).

 8. Ryze – www.ryze.com

A once-popular US-based business network, Ryze is still a player but looks on a downward spiral. Some of the best features – e.g. “who viewed my profile” and “who’s online” are subscriber only.

9. Doostang – www.doostang.com

Listed here for its value (to those who can join) and the  factor of including a not-for-profit, closed business network, Doostang aims to help graduates find jobs and opportunities. You need an invitation to join, but once you’re in, apparently it’s excellent.

10. Plaxo – www.plaxo.com

Plaxo started out as a connected address book, and it’s still an excellent place to aggregate all your contacts into one, safely stored, virtual address book. The service encourages your contacts to maintain their own contact details (so you don’t have to). They’ve also started integrating social networking features – though these aren’t why you’d use the service.

 This guest post was written by social media consultant, Luke Brynley-Jones. Luke is hosting Social Media Advertising in London on 20^th September.

Do you use another network? Let us know about it via the comments box…

If you’re aged 16-30 and have been running your own business for more than 3 months but less than 18 months, this high-profile annual competition could see you walk away with a £10,000 cash injection plus support from a top PR agency.

Deadline for entries - 5pm on 6th September 2010!

So, if you think you’ve got what it takes to be the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2010 visit the Shell Live Wire Site to enter!

• Cutting National Insurance Contributions for employers by raising the threshold by £21 per week from April 2011
• An increase in VAT from 17.5% to 20% from 4th January 2011; the flat rate scheme will be adjusted accordingly
• A reduction in the main rate of corporation tax to 24% over four years
• A reduction in the small profits (Small Business) rate of corporation tax to 20% from April 2011
• An increase in the personal allowance for basic rate taxpayers under 65 of £1,000 from April 2011
• A £200m increase in the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) fund for small businesses finding it difficult to access finance from conventional sources
• Reductions in capital allowances
• An increase in capital gains tax to 28% for higher rate taxpayers, with a rise in the Entrepreneurs’ Relief lifetime limit from £2m to £5m.
• With the exception of businesses in the London, The East and South East of England, exemption of new businesses from paying National Insurance Contributions on their first ten employees, up to an allowance of £5,000.  

Forthcoming measures will include: 

• A review of small business taxation
• A consultation to review tax on intellectual property, research and development tax credits and the proposals by the Dyson review promoting research and innovation

For retailers there are no further duty increases in alcohol, tobacco and fuel duties. Current zero-rated goods, including food, books and children’s clothes, remain unaffected. There were concerns that HMRC’s Time to Pay scheme might be scraped, however businesses will still be able to defer and spread their tax and VAT liabilities in certain circumstances.

The Budget documents are available on the HM Treasury website.

Here are 5 things you should know about how PR has changed and why that’s good news for start-ups with limited budgets:

1. PR is not about ‘he who shouts loudest and most often’

It’s about what you say and to who. Scampering around, waving you arms, trying to attract attention by sending out streams of poorly targeted, promotional press releases (sometimes referred to as Push PR), rarely gets taken seriously and can do more harm than good.  Clever use of the web, blogs and social media to publish useful and relevant information can involve you in conversations that are already taking place about your industry or market. In this way you receive attention on merit and become an integral part of the market your business operates in.  This is referred to as Pull PR.

2. You become the Media

The Media is no longer the preserve of a select group of journalists and publications. Thanks to blogs and micro-blogs like Twitter, the media is now  made up of anyone commenting on your industry and could even be YOU.

In several high-profile cases, members of the public have broken stories using Twitter (Examples: Mumbai attack, UK Earthquake) before the journalists could publish a word.  Today people pay attention to whoever they consider to be clued-up insiders. Most industries have bloggers and commentators  who are not professional journalists, but are seen as ‘thought leaders’ (Murray Newlandsis someone I often read and a great example of this). You can interact with these commentators via their blogs or setup shop as a commentator yourself. By ‘becoming the media’, using blogs and social media to publish your own news and comments, you can become an influencer in your field. 

Why does this work?  It might seem obvious but the media reports on the media, both professional and amateur. If you write something useful, there is a good chance someone else will use it. If you need an example, look at how many other blogs I’ve referenced in this article.

3. Journalists are easier to contact  

Professional journalists have been quick to grasp that the web, and in particular social media is often the source of the freshest, most relevant information.  They monitor industry blogs for information, use Google for research, update Twitter accounts (check out this excellent list of UK jounalists on twitter) and maintain Linkedin profiles. Many of them write blogs, either for their employers or for their own reasons. Because of this, you can comment  and communicate directly with them on their articles.  A word of warning : don’t think this new era of access means you can spam them with anything. Remember PR has changed, so useful, relevant information is appreciated. Scampering and hand waving is likely to beignored  at best and most likely met with disdain.

4. Press Releases help you get found on Google

Whilst you shouldn’t robotically email dozens of mundane press releases to a huge list of tenuously relevant journalists and publications , issuing press releases is still a valid activity. Search engines like Google love press releases. Google even have their own site for them: news.Google.com  You can write a release about anything relevant: new customers or products, solutions for problems, events you are running. Best of all, you don’t need a PR company to issue a press release. Use a service like www.prlog.com or www.pressbox.co.uk and preferably several at once. Many of these are free and they will all get a release on news.Google.com as well as plenty of other sites that syndicate news. This does wonders for your search optimisation. For more insight in to how this works take a look at this Guide to SEO through Press Releases.

5. You can research and measure results like never before.

Good PR involves listening and planning before communicating. Previously the listening part could cost a packet in research, polls and analyst reports, and the planning was fraught with gaps in knowledge. Now it’s much easier to get answers. For example, you can use Facebook or Linkedin to gather information or publish a survey or poll for relatively little cost. Free tools like ubervu and socialmention can be employed to monitor ‘buzz’ about your company on social networks. If you are able to research and monitor, you can use the same methods to find out very quickly if your PR is having an impact.

A final point

It’s free! You might have noticed that all through the points above I’m talking about free social media tools, free monitoring tools, free press release services. Adopting ‘new PR’ will probably cost you nothing except your time. Don’t underestimate the commitment in terms of time, but once you get into the habit of tweeting, writing blog posts and issuing releases it can take less than 30minutes a day.

Don’t forget, you can use the comments box to tell us about the techniques and tools you use to get your PR message out…

The iPhone, Facebook, and Google’s mobile operating system, Android, have been instrumental in developing a completely new business niche – the application, or ‘app’ for brevity.

Whilst these applications are often simple games or utilities, the growing popularity of social networks and the rapid uptake of mobile technology have helped some apps become household names. Farmville, for example, the domain of armchair farmers and their bovine friends, is a champion cash cow, commanding the attentions of over 80m people.

Of course, not everybody likes tending digital chickens, and the constant barrage of requests to play or use applications can be frustrating, especially if for example you are an accountant advertising accountancy services.

Facebook has taken steps to reduce the negative impact of applications by giving each game or quiz its own separate profile page, but anybody with a few hundred friends can still expect to be greeted with daily news about somebody’s escapades as a badly drawn mobster. Whilst Facebook certainly hasn’t lost many members to this ongoing plague of applications, the network’s impressive array of services can still be disorientating for inexperienced web users and therefore may not be the ideal medium for a small business user.

The decline of MySpace in the mid-noughties was widely attributed to its overloaded profiles, which could contain everything from flashing banners and music players, to poorly edited HTML code, making pages unusable. The current trend among emerging social networks is therefore, to strip away the fat, and make things simpler. The micro-blogging site, Twitter, is arguably the most popular of these new, more streamlined websites. Simplicity ultimately is going to be crucial in determining the success and uptake of a social media tool by business users, an accountant does not have much time to learn how something works, if you want proof try finding an accountant who is willing to take on new accounting software.

Twitter manifests itself as a simple message board, albeit one with 75m active members. The service revolves around the exchange of ideas, thoughts, and the fineries of everyday life in short 140-character ‘tweets.’ The website started out as an SMS-to-web service, with the less than original moniker, Status, before gaining its present branding in mid-2006. Since then, Twitter has become a favourite of small businesses, celebrities, and people who prefer to keep their relationship status private.

So how can a small business utilise twitter? Until recently, businesses on Twitter were offered precious little in the way of developer tools, and advertising was limited to what can be done with twenty words or so, but in April, the website announced plans to incorporate targeted advertisements. These ‘promoted tweets’ will appear when users search for a relevant topic, in much the same way as Google associates a search for ‘accountants’ with accounting practices offering their services. Twitter’s marketing plans are embryonic, however, and the company has yet to unveil its pricing scheme. It could potentially mean that a small business owner saying they are staying up late doing a VAT return on twitter receives an twitter advert suggesting an accountant or tax specialist in their area.

Twitter’s use of ‘hashtags’ is unique amongst social networks. A hashtag is any word,series of words, that is preceded by the hash (#) symbol – #elephant, #startup, or #happybirthday. Hashtags appear in user searches, allowing businesses to tailor their tweets to their target audience; or at least, to anybody who happens to be searching for information on a similar subject. So, for example, a search for #business will return all tweets that have been tagged #business.

Despite its relatively simple interface, Twitter is currently the eleventh most popular site on the internet, above Amazon, Google UK, and that crumbling social network, MySpace. Twitter’s owners are trying to turn the site into a more profitable creature, and so marketing opportunities for tweeting companies are expected to improve substantially over the coming months. So now is the time to start connecting with other businesses and consumers to promote your small business services on twitter.

Nick Braithwaite is the marketing manager for Find-UK-Accountant.co.uk for Accountancy services in the UK.

Don’t forget, you can share your thoughts on this article in the comments box…

The book includes profiles of 60 companies being run successfully on a  ’5 to 9′ basis. Pop over to the site to find out more about the book and keep an eye out on Friday to win a copy via thier lifestyle blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed.

Myth: “Hey all entrepreneurs are zany risk takers, living in the fast lane, addicted to the adrenalin of the deal” Well, that’s what they say in the papers, on all those programmes on telly and in every profile of the latest 23 year old billionaire. However, like most of telly and quite a bit of what you read in the papers, it is not reality, it isn’t true. Listen very carefully: Real entrepreneurs (who by and large have between 10 and 30 years experience of a particular industry and deep specialist knowledge) absolutely hate risk. You should hate risk too. Do everything you can to de-risk your business, everything you can to nudge up your chances of success by 0.01%, because it all adds up.

Free money? No! Surely not, it can’t exist! Can it?

You bet it does. The economy is in a hole, big firms are laying off people, and the government is about to as well. If you set up a business, then you employ yourself. That’s one off the dole figures.  You pay tax and you might well employ other people – even more off the dole figures.  As a result Her Majesty’s Government is very keen on supporting entrepreneurs and giving them money. Don’t believe me? Just Google “grants, small business” and see what you get.  Stunning isn’t it. Grants for expansion, grants for training, grants for modernisation, grants for new boilers (grants for old boilers!).

There are schemes for all sorts of business, in all sorts of places. Don’t take my word, spend a couple of hours online and check – look at your local Regional Development Agency, Local Authority, Enterprise Agency. Think laterally. The government wants to give you money. Even the taxman does – take a look at R&D tax relief as an example.

Let me give you some more examples – they are local to me in the East of England but there will be similar, in fact probably better, examples nearer to you.  Fact: the further you go from London and the South East the more money there is available.

• £20,000 to see whether your idea has commercial potential? Try this scheme to test the commercial viability of a business idea
• £50,000 – £125,000 loan to match an Angel investment?
• £10,000 to modernise your business
• £1000 assistance with leadership and management training and support for the wage costs of employees being trained.

These are just a few examples and if you are a member of particular groups – over 50, under 24, have a disability, live in a particular area of the country…whatever…there will be more schemes targeted to you.

A few hours in front of your computer with a web browser and a phone line can give you a great many opportunities for free money and access to a lot of people who are paid to help you. Indeed, their performance indicators will be based on helping you.

No amount of grants or government schemes can substitute for a good product well executed into a ready market place,but in the words of that big supermarket – “every little helps!”. Looking in detail at the grants available to you regionally and nationally can make a big difference to your business, it can help you de-risk it significantly and as I said at the beginning, removing risk is the name of the game.

If you know of other opportunities or maybe you have experience of accessing these types of support (good or bad) then let us know via the comments box.

Amongst other things Neil Gregory worked in Higher Education for 19 years, specialising in revenue generation and commercialisation of research. He has been Director of Business and Enterprise at the London School of Economics and is a Senior Industrial Fellow at the Institute of Manufacturing at Cambridge University. He is also a qualified Chartered Secretary.

Neil is currently Business Development Director of VentureNavigator where he is practising what he preaches – being Ultralight (and ultra-tight). He’s also quite good a filling in forms for free money…